Vjera Katalinić: glazbeni izvori i jedinstvo europske kulture / Vjera Katalinić: Musical Sources and the Unity of European Culture

The generation to which Vjera Katalinic belongs is that of those born about ten years after the end of the Second World War. It is the generation of young people who grew up in Zagreb, who through no fault of their own were obliged to pay for the faults of the fascist Ante Pavelić. Up until 1990, one must remember, Croatia was under ‘special surveillance’. Any proposal for change coming from this republic kindled the fear of a nationalist reflux, the worst syndrome for the Federation of Yugoslavia. The article analyses the career of Katalinic from the 1980s to her jubilee in 2020, and emphasises the outcomes from the time of her charge as director of the Institute of Musicological Research at the Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1991. She gave a new impulse to musicology within the frame of Central and Mediterranean Europe, engaging young scholars with the aim to collect a big amount of materials and scores useful in establishing the role of music in Croatia - not only of Croatian music. The main topics of her activity - experienced through symposia, grants, researches promoted by EU and German Foundations - are the role of “Kleinmeister” in the age of Classicism, the path of dissemination of classical style in Central Europe, the origins of modern musical market at the end of the eighteenth century onwards, the styles of national opera in Croatia and abroad. To these subjects she added other areas of studies: music migrations from West to East and South Europe, and the opera as a means of self-representation during the nineteenth century.