František Kocžwara

František Kocžwara, also known as Franz Kotzwara or Francis Kotzwara, was a Bohemian instrumentalist and composer whose career unfolded mainly in England during the second half of the eighteenth century. He is generally placed as born in Prague around 1750 and as having died in London on 2 September 1791. His name today merits attention less for the breadth of his output than for one particular piece, The Battle of Prague, which enjoyed a notable circulation in its time.

Sources describe him as an itinerant musician. His works were published in London from around 1775, including collections of trio sonatas and string quartets, and some title pages of the period place him in Bath. Towards the end of the 1780s he was in Ireland, and back in London he took part in the Concert of Ancient Music and in the Handel commemoration of May 1791. At the time of his death he was playing the double bass at the King's Theatre. According to Pohl, Gallini is said to have summoned him from Ireland in 1790, but the theatre was under renovation that year and did not reopen until 26 March 1791, so this detail is doubtful. Fétis claimed to have known him as a child in Mons, although the date he proposes (1792) is mistaken.

Kocžwara's best-known piece, The Battle of Prague, evokes an episode of 1757, but was published around 1788 in Dublin. It achieved extraordinary success, with numerous reprints in London, the United States and on the Continent, and became a staple of the domestic piano repertoire. Its appearance shortly before the political upheavals in Europe made it a model for many later works on Napoleonic battles. By contrast, The Siege of Quebec, attributed to his name, is in fact an arrangement by W. B. de Krifft that draws on material by Kocžwara.

According to Parke, he was skilled at imitating other styles and even sold forgeries of works by popular Continental composers such as Haydn and Pleyel to certain publishers. His own music, light and melodious in character, was aimed above all at amateurs. The numbering of his opus works also presents gaps that are difficult to explain.

His legacy is therefore twofold. On the one hand, a modest output but one well received in the British domestic market; on the other, a programmatic work that influenced early nineteenth-century battle music. Accounts written after his death, however, focused mainly on the scandalous circumstances of that death: an accident during an experiment in a disreputable house, for which his accomplice Susan Hill was tried at the Old Bailey and acquitted.