Anna Hostomská
Anna Hostomská (6 August 1907 – 28 March 1995) was a Czech radio editor, writer and translator who worked for more than thirty years in the music department of Czechoslovak Radio. She was best known as a populariser of opera and as the author of Opera: průvodce operní tvorbou (Opera: A Guide to Operatic Works), a reference book that ran to ten editions in her lifetime and a heavily revised eleventh in 2018.
Life and career
Hostomská was born in Tábor and grew up in Pelhřimov, where her father, a judge, had been posted in 1910; the family was musical, and there is a memorial plaque to it on Pelhřimov's square Masarykovo náměstí. She studied French language and literature at the University of Lyon in 1927–1928 and worked as a Czech correspondent for the Liberec chamber of commerce, then joined the Radiojournal in Prague in 1929 as secretary of its music department. She became an editor of the Prague station's music programmes in 1938, and in the same period began studying musicology and sociology at Charles University, a course cut short by the German closure of the Czech universities in 1939; she returned to it after the war but, with her radio workload, never completed her doctorate.
From 1945 to 1950 she was in charge of mixed and entertainment programming, and from 1952 she devoted herself almost entirely to popularising classical music, with explanatory talks in series such as Co máte nejraději ("What You Like Best") and Hudba, kterou mám rád ("The Music I Like"). She is credited with bringing the entertainer to the microphone in 1946, and she wrote and presented programmes with him for five years. She retired from the radio in 1962 but continued as an external contributor; her last broadcast series was Modlitby v operách ("Prayers in Operas"), and from 1960 she also prepared programmes for the Prague theatre Divadlo hudby and gave lecture-recitals for adults and children.
Hostomská translated opera and operetta libretti from Polish, Russian, German and Italian, including Netopýr, Ball im Savoy and song lyrics for Mam'zelle Nitouche, and published widely in music journals and the daily press. She was married to the musicologist .
Books
Her most successful book was Opera: průvodce operní tvorbou, first published in 1955 and reprinted with revisions nine times by 1999; a new edition by Hostomská and a team of contributors appeared in 2018. She also published Příběhy, pověsti a pohádky paní Hudby (1959), stories about music for children, Kouzelný svět: vyprávění o světové opeře (1960) and Labyrint hudby, ráj srdce (1967).