Born in Brno, she studied with Jaroslav Kvapil in her home city before making her professional opera début at the Brno Opera in Vítězslav Novák's Lucerna.
The fictional location in San Manuel bueno, mártir was perhaps inspired by a real place, as suggested by the real life lake San Martín de Castañeda, in Sanabria, at the foot of the ruins of a convent to St. Bernard where to this day lives a legend of a submerged city (Valverde de Lucerna) sleeping at the bottom of the lake.