Anton Foerster (20/12/1837 - 17/06/1926), a naturalised Slovenian composer of Czech descent and a key figure of the Slovenian national revival, Anton Foerster (1837–1926) made a profound impression on the Slovenian musical landscape as one the most prominent Romantic composers. A church musician, theoretician, organist, composer, editor and teacher, whose artistic output displays a marked duality of sacred and secular works, Foerster made an important contribution to Slovenian cultural heritage in the second half of the nineteenth century. One of his greatest musical gifts to the Slovenian nation was Gorenjski slavček (The Upper-Carniolan Nightingale), the first true Slovenian national opera, which, displaying significant influences of folk songs, reveals the wider context of the social and political tendencies of the time, which cultivated a consciously national operatic idiom, known as national operas. These works expressed the emancipatory endeavours of individual peoples to establish sovereign national states. Besides being a national composer as an embodiment and channel for the Slovenian people’s secular musical style, Foerster is also an important representative of the ecclesiastical (German) Caecilian movement in Slovenia.