Jan Novák: Musica poetica Latina : od nesmrtelnosti jazyka k nesmrtelnosti hudby?

An immortality of the production of the Moravian composer Jan Novák (1921–1984) should have been provided by the connection to the Latin language and literature. Novák not only set in music verses of Latin humanists and classics, but he also translated into Latin, composed poetry and he was also the author of the paper Musica poetica Latina. There is perhaps no precedent for such a writing in the twentieth century. It is a practical guide for setting Latin texts in music, including the theory of metrical poetry, classical Latin pronunciation, etc. In my paper I have tried to compare the Novák's attempt with two disproportionately more famous writings on the topic: Horatio's De Arte Poetica and Musica Poetica by Joachim Burmeister.