"What mattered was that we were supposed to write for the people, not some intellectual things. Just your duty was to write for the people and to express our time, maybe some problem, but otherwise it was all given. And so it was by itself all terribly stupid, because in music... And so one of the men there, the so-called professors, wrote some Red Symphony, which last about an hour and it was all 'three dots'. And so generally the contemporary creation that took place then, it was all terribly affected by this."
"I played basketball in school, we had this great gym there. And so in the afternoon I went, sometime close to the evening, I went home. And I went with a teacher, he lived somewhere around there, we just went together with that gym teacher. But they threw us out on Republic Square, and so we had to go over those Příkopy, and now I look out, and there is some sort of protest going on at Můstek, some sort of manifestation, and so on. Later we were walking there and they did not let us in there anymore, and so I had to go around and go home. It was that: 'I just came from Hrad,' and so I... You know, we know that we already knew about it, we were very aware in school then."
"We were in this sort of house, where the people were quite disciplined. Lots of people in Prague did not do it properly. It was annoying, because towards the end the air raids were more and more common. They flew over Prague, there were always the sirens, it was twelve at night and we had to go to the cellar and back. And so it happened, that there was another one two hours later. And so we went... Only father was at work, mother was at school, despite teaching not going on anymore in February 1945, we only got homework. She was down in that Michla at school, me and my sister were home alone and out of curiosity, there were some men there, probably seniors, and so they went to watch in the courtyard. Now it was very obvious, that the planes were so low. And so we stared out at that yard and now these horrible blows came also from Podolí and from Smíchov, and so we went into the house and it fell directly in front of us on that depot. If that bomber pressed it a fraction of a second earlier, when you take into account the speed of that plane, then it would have fallen directly on our house. And so there glass everywhere of course, blown out windows. And then my mother, poor dear, when down there she saw, there was nothing there in Michla and they only heard, that something was happening at Pankrác, how she had to struggle against that slope, because the trams stopped going. She flew home, and we were alright."
“What happened was that during the premiere, some journalist was talking to the conductor and asking him questions. And Helmut Franz was so kind to tell him what I had said about the matter as the author. This journalist Koch from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote about it and expressed his amazement that an author from a socialist country can have so bourgeois opinions. And my benefactors from Germany sent me the article by post! I still remember that I was lying in bed with flu, and I opened the newspaper and I got sweat all over my body! I realized that this could turn into a pretty mess. Fortunately our embassy was not yet in Germany at that time, there was only the so-called Military Administration, which had its seat in West Berlin. Who of those guys would have read the culture column? So nothing eventually happened, but their editors – well, they were all leftists, to put it simply.”
“I don’t remember if I went to work. It was a shock. I did not get into some skirmish, but I remember the shooting. From up here in Doubková Street you could see the projectiles flying over Prague. I don’t know why they used the lightning bullets. They were also shooting at the building next to the hospital in Charles Square, where there was the orthopaedic and the paediatric ward. The building was damaged by the shots. From up here we could see the bullets flying. I was afraid for my wife, because the crazy woman left the kids in our summer house and she hitchhiked from Telč to Prague. And then she went back the same way, because there was no public transportation, not even trains.”
“Our parents had already furnished the basement so that people would be even able to sleep there. There was a stove and things like that. In the evening a tank appeared in the bend in the hill. Sunday was still quite calm, but the tank was ominously standing there, and we thus quickly began building a barricade here. The guys built it from tram cars, they brought them from all over and they derailed the tram cars and filled them with pavement blocks. It was nearly impossible to move them. That was the point. On Monday the Germans started shooting at the place, and then they arrived from Benešov, that’s where the SS school was. They were young guys, they came up to Pankrác, and they committed many atrocities there – somewhere in Na Zelené Lišce they threw a grenade into a basement where there were many people inside, and it even killed a pregnant woman there. I was only thirteen, but this is something that I already remember. In Jizerka, they were taking people out of the houses and forcing them to stand in front of their tanks.”
Marek Kopelent was born April 28, 1932 in Prague in the family of lawyer JUDr. František Kopelent. His mother was a French teacher, and Marek and his sister thus attended French kindergarten, elementary school as well as grammar school. Marek’s extraordinary talent for music was discovered when he was a little boy and his parents supported him. At first he studied piano with their family friend JUDr. Kubáně and later he went on to study at the Academy of Performing Arts under professor Řídký. After completing his studies he began working as a music editor in the SNKLHU publishing house in 1955. From the late 1950s he intensely focused on the so-called new music. Together with friends he formed the Prague Society of New Music and in 1961 he was one of the co-founders of the ensemble Musica Viva Pragensis which was actively presenting this music genre to the public. Their musical compositions began to be accepted at international festivals. In 1969 Marek won a one-year scholarship (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst) in West Berlin. The situation in Czechoslovakia has radically changed during his absence. The new music was not included among the supported trends in music and its composers faced various restrictions. In 1971 he was fired from the publishing house and he had hard time looking for another job. The ensemble Musica Viva Pragensis became banned. Marek Kopelent was expelled from the Union of Czech Composers and his work was officially not allowed to be performed. Kopelent’s compositions could thus be performed only abroad. In 1976 he got a job as an accompanist in the music school in Radotín, where he worked until 1991. Then he became employed as a professor of composition at the Music Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts. In 2012 the president awarded him with the Medal of Merit.
