Bankers, medical doctors, teachers, priests, musicians, all Czechs, kind gentlefolk who show us brotherly love

An overview of Czech-Slovenian contacts reveals an immensely rich history of mutual enrichment of two closely collected Slavic nations. As early as in the late 18th century, contacts between the key figures in the emerging young Czech and Slovenian cultures in Slovenia were led by numerous Czech intellectuals who contributed significantly, in many areas, to the flourishing of social life there. Language similarity, the same legal framework, and in particular similar cultural-political endeavours or more or less identical national issues within the Habsburg Monarchy further intensified migrations from the Czech to the Slovenian lands with the onset of the constitutional period in the early 1860's during one of the most extensive migration flows in the area. The many Czech musicians working in Slovenia in the 19th and early 20th centuries actively co-created practically all areas of music culture in Slovenia during this period. Through their activities, they decisively influenced the creative, musical-reproductive, musical-pedagogical and musical-publicist areas, and strongly influenced the transition from a more or less musically inspired dilettantism to a gradual qualitative and quantitative rise of music culture in Slovenia. With regard to certain previous interpretations of the role of Czech musicians, it seems necessary to emphasize that their more or less unambiguous inclusion in the Slovenian camp, which can be found in some recent literature on music history, has no basis in reality. We must bear in mind that despite the emphasis on Austro-Slavic reciprocity, no unambiguous siding with one or the other camp could be observed among the large majority of Czech musicians. Their decisions about which music institutions they would cooperate with were not based on the national factor, but for the most part on entirely practical reasons mostly related to livelihood. In their case, the so-called spiritual migrations are not so much conditioned by national reasons as by external incentives, either as a reality of survival or simply a search for advantages following the ubi bene, ibi patria principle.