The story of the mythical Princess Libuše has been one of the cornerstones of the “old Czech tales” for more than a thousand years. Over the centuries, it has also inspired many artistic treatments. Libuše had already entered the opera stage at the end of the 17th century – after several performances in Italian during the Baroque era, she reappeared in the first quarter of the 19th century in German Romantic opera. During the 19th century, Czech artists gave the character of Libuše – at least in the Czech environment – a petrified form. The anthology of Libuše librettos gathers for the first time in its comprehensiveness all published and so far unpublished opera librettos and other texts from the 17th to the 20th century, mostly set to music. It includes works written in Italian (F. Parisetti, G. C. Corradi, A. Denzio) and German (E. von Lannoy, J. C. Bernard, J. L. Choulant, J. Bayer, J. Wenzig, L. Hartmann) with parallel Czech translations, as well as texts in Czech (J. K. Chmelenský, F. Patočka, J. J. Kolár, E. Špindler, E. Destinnová, J. Berg). The edition is accompanied by an introductory study in Czech and English.
