Vitulka Kaprálová

Vitulka Kaprálová, also referred to as Vitulka and Kaprálová, is a young composer and conductor whose story reaches the reader indirectly, through Hana’s gossip and letters and Liesel’s later recollections. Her relationships and career unfold at a distance, but the successive reports of her travels, public achievement, death, and remembered music give her a distinct place in the novel: she becomes both a figure of artistic possibility and one of the past’s losses carried into wartime exile.

Identity and Introduction

Kaprálová first enters the narrative as the subject of an anecdote Hana shares while she and Viktor wait for Liesel and the other dinner guests. Hana has recently encountered her in a café in Montparnasse and presents her as a lively subject of Paris gossip. The first report concerns her relationship with the composer Bohuslav Martinů: people say they are lovers. Because this information comes through Hana’s casual conversation, Kaprálová is initially known less through direct action than through the social stories told about her.

The novel’s repeated use of her diminutive name, Vitulka, places her within the personal and conversational world of the Landauers and their friends. Yet the details Hana supplies quickly exceed the scale of ordinary gossip. Kaprálová is a musician with an emerging public career, moving among cities and artistic circles at a moment when political events are about to make travel and safety increasingly uncertain.

Career and Travels

Liesel later tells Viktor that Kaprálová is the composer whose work is to be performed at a recital. Hana has obtained tickets, and the performance will be a premiere of one of Kaprálová’s works, described vaguely as variations. The announcement makes her a presence in the couple’s plans and establishes that her music is receiving public performance, even as Viktor responds with reluctance about attending.

Hana’s later account gives a more expansive, though still hearsay-laden, picture of Kaprálová’s career and movements. She says Kaprálová met an engineering student named Kopec from Prague and travelled to Italy and the south of France, leaving Martinů behind. After returning, she resumed her relationship with him. She then set off for London with Martinů to attend a music congress. There, in the company of figures including Hindemith, Britten, Bartók, and Aaron Copland, she opened the congress with the Military Sinfonietta, a work she had conducted in Prague the previous winter. Hana’s account presents a striking contrast between the young woman at the centre of romantic gossip and the conductor commanding an international musical stage.

The same story emphasizes how little of Kaprálová’s life reaches Liesel as verified fact. Hana attributes her information to a Parisian acquaintance and relays further details about the congress through Kaprál himself. The novel therefore gives her career a lively, social dimension while keeping it mediated: Kaprálová is seen through the voices and networks of people who report on her, rather than through an extended scene from her own perspective.

Marriage, Flight, and Death

In a wartime letter, Hana reports that Kaprálová has ended her relationship with Martinů and married Jiří Mucha, the son of Alfons Mucha. Hana describes the marriage as a rebound, but the letter’s more consequential news is that Kaprálová became ill and was in hospital as German forces approached Paris. Her husband got her out of the city, and they fled south, probably to Montpellier. Kaprálová died in hospital two days after the fall of Paris. Hana does not know the cause; she speculates that it may have been an ectopic pregnancy, but the novel does not establish this as fact.

Liesel’s response shifts the report from personal news to an awareness of cumulative loss. Kaprálová’s death means that another part of the past has disappeared, and Liesel sets the death of the young beside the deaths of the old. From the safety of Switzerland, with bright sunlight on the lake outside, she sees herself as stranded on an island while lives and places are being destroyed around her. The letter thus places Kaprálová’s death within the larger wartime catastrophe without claiming that the two women shared the same fate or circumstances.

Memory, Home, and Narrative Significance

Kaprálová’s name returns when Liesel and Viktor’s train passes through Montpellier during their flight. Liesel recognizes the station as the place where Vitulka died and recalls Hana’s letter about her marriage to Mucha’s son. She wonders whether Mucha, like the Landauers, had hoped to get his wife to Spain. The passing place joins Kaprálová’s final journey to the refugees’ present route, but the text keeps the connection tentative: it is an imagined parallel, not proof that the two journeys followed the same plan.

For Liesel, the coincidence becomes a thread across a hostile continent, linking the confined intimacy of the train compartment to home and to earlier years. Her memory travels back through different lives to the Glass Room, where Němec surrendered the piano and Vitulka sat at the keyboard to play. The recollection culminates in a question about the piece, identified as Ravel’s Ondine. Viktor says he does not remember; Liesel insists that he does. The music is not simply a biographical detail but a surviving point of contact between the exiles’ present and the vanished world they left behind. Kaprálová’s brief remembered performance, like the Montpellier station, makes the past momentarily accessible while underscoring that it cannot be recovered in full.