Miroslav Němec

Miroslav Němec is a prominent pianist in Město whose performances bring musical authority and theatrical flair into the Glass Room. He appears both as a celebrated guest at the Landauer housewarming and as the featured performer at a charity recital for the Human Rights League. His affair with Hana Hanáková, meanwhile, makes him an object of gossip and gives his public musical image an intimate, more compromising counterpart.

Identity and Place in Město

At a dinner held by Liesel Landauer’s parents for the architect Rainer von Abt, Němec is introduced among the evening’s guests as a pianist. The conversation moves unevenly between Czech and German, with the gathering reflecting tensions around von Abt’s place in the city’s architectural world. Němec’s later performances place him within Město’s musical circles, alongside composers and musicians who live in the shadow of Leoš Janáček, his mentor.

His standing is not merely social. At the Landauer housewarming, the assembled guests include artists, architects, critics, writers, businessmen and industrialists, as well as the architects Fuchs and Wiesener, the cubist Filla, and composer Václav Kaprál. Němec’s performance is a central part of the gathering’s cultural program. At the later charity recital, a critic for Moravské Noviny will rank his playing among the foremost interpretations of the time, while Prager Tagblatt also reports on the event.

Performances in the Glass Room

At the housewarming, Viktor Landauer presents the Glass Room as a space of openness and introduces Němec as the evening’s unplanned performer. Němec remarks that the Bösendorfer has never been played before an audience, touching it with the confidence of an experienced musician. His playful comparison of the instrument to an untried maiden draws laughter, making his introduction part of the party’s performance as well as a prelude to the music.

He begins a work by Janáček hesitantly, seeming to listen for the instrument’s voice, then plays with increasing assurance. Janáček’s music connects the pianist to a mentor whose influence extends across the assembled musicians of Město. When the audience calls for an encore, Němec does not continue playing. Instead, he bows and hands the responsibility to the next generation by inviting Kaprál’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Vítězslava Kaprálová, to take his place. Her performance of Ravel’s “Ondine” shifts the room’s attention from Němec’s established authority to the promise of a young composer and pianist.

The charity recital gives his playing another setting and a different public meaning. Sixty-five tickets sell within days, and the chairs are arranged in arcs around the onyx wall, turning the room’s focus inward rather than toward its glass walls. Some guests come as much to see the house as to hear the music. After Viktor’s opening remarks for the Human Rights League, Němec enters dramatically, bowing to the applause and flipping his coattails as if he were appearing at the Stadt-Theater.

He opens with a Brahms intermezzo, played softly enough to soothe the audience after Viktor’s warning about oppression. He follows it with Janáček’s piano sonata From the Street, then, after an interval, a Schubert sonata. In the last performance, his crouched posture and forceful attack make him seem, in Hana’s whispered description to Liesel, like a vulture clawing notes from the piano. The contrast between the measured Brahms and the fierce Schubert displays both the range of his program and the stage presence that shapes how the listeners experience it.

Affair with Hana

Němec’s private relationship with Hana surfaces first as café gossip. When she tells Liesel whom she is seeing, she names him; Liesel reacts with disbelief. Hana answers that his wife often goes shopping in Vienna, leaving him with little to do but perform. The casual explanation frames the affair as something Hana is willing to discuss with her friend, even as Liesel’s response signals disapproval.

The relationship later becomes an explicit point of contention between Viktor and Liesel. Viktor says that he does not want his wife descending to Hana’s kind of vulgarity, condemning the affair as a moral example. The episode reveals more about Viktor’s judgment of Hana than about Němec himself: the pianist is invoked as the other party in a relationship that Viktor uses to police the boundary between respectable and disreputable behavior. At the recital, that private history shadows the performance. Hana is present, sitting solemnly at the back, while Němec’s wife, Milada Němcová, sits triumphantly in the front row.

Public Art and Political Indifference

The charity recital joins artistic achievement to a stated act of solidarity. Viktor tells the audience that citizens of their young democracy must look beyond their borders, warning that others are being oppressed now and that indifference could leave them oppressed in turn. Němec’s Brahms, Janáček and Schubert follow that speech, and the League’s chairman closes by describing the evening as both an artistic success and a demonstration of solidarity with oppressed peoples.

The Glass Room, however, remains indifferent to the politics enacted within it. Its balance and purity sit above the rough tides of the political years, while the recital temporarily turns the house into a venue where music, civic warning and public solidarity occupy the same space. Němec contributes the musical force of the occasion, but the contrast between his art and the approaching political danger is not resolved by performance: the building’s beauty cannot shield its inhabitants from the history gathering outside.