Lenka Hlávková, director of the Institute of Musicology at the Charles University in Prague (CZ), died on 21 December 2023. Her death has shaken all of the musicological world. She was one of the victims of the shooting in the building of the Faculty of Arts, located in the center of the city. The crazy killer, whose name does not deserve a mention, in one moment killed fourteen people and wounded many more. Lenka was caught in the line of fire when she was walking from her office on the fourth floor toward the lower stories of the building where carol singing was about to start. Her funeral took place on 6 January 2024, at the church of St. Nicholas in Prague. It was the saddest and most moving ceremony one could imagine. Lenka left behind a husband, two teenage sons, parents, and many devoted friends, co-workers, and students.
I first met Lenka Hlávková (née Mráčková) in 1995. At that time she was then a student, while I was preparing to write my doctoral thesis. She became my closest friend: we did research together, directed projects, and organized conferences and other events. We are also co-authors of three articles. The proofs of the last one of them, devoted to Josquin’s mass L’ami Baudichon, arrived in our email inboxes on the day of her death. That day, 21 December, was also the day of my birthday, which from now on will be the anniversary of that tragic event.
Lenka was an extraordinary person, with a special gift of drawing people to her. She would engage with great commitment with most diverse projects, from large-scale international ones to local events that integrated the academic community. She was a highly regarded lecturer, and had a very personal, individual approach to each student. As director of the Institute of Musicology she campaigned for the discipline to be given appropriate status at the Faculty of Arts. Her openness and her dedicated efforts led to the creation of an important international center for research into early music in Prague. In 2017 she co-organized there the Annual Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference (MedRen 2017)—the largest meeting forum for researchers in the area of pre-1600 music.
Lenka Hlávková specialized in the history of music of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. She began by studying the most important collection of polyphony in the late medieval Bohemia—the Speciálník codex. Her interests then expanded to include other manuscripts and aspects of musical culture in Central Europe. She was the principal investigator in such projects as “Changing Identities in the Musical Culture of Central Europe in the Late Middle Ages,” “Sound Memories: The Musical Past in Late-Medieval and Early-Modern Europe,” and “Musical Interactions between the Low Countries and Central Europe, 1400–1650.” Recently she was working on the project “Old Myths, New Facts: Czech Lands in the Center of 15th-Century Music Developments.” She was deeply committed to collaborating with many centers in Europe: Warsaw, Zurich, Utrecht, Leuven, Munich, Saint-
Étienne, Vienna, etc., and she was a member of Academia Europaea. Her publications are well known to all those researching the music of the times of Du Fay and Josquin.
Our community has suffered an enormous loss. We are profoundly shocked and grieved. Only the thought that her work will be carried on gives us strength and a ray of hope.
Paweł Gancarczyk
(Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences)