Jaroslav Krček

“I started working on it, I had those one hundred Crowns for it, and I invited the Prague Madrigal Singers and other singers and for thirteen months we were creating my electro-acoustic opera. I hired two technicians from Supraphon for that. I had free access to everything I needed – for instance, we were using the hallway in the Rudolfinum. From today’s perspective, it was impossible, but at that time it was indeed possible. We gave it a shape – Herzog was observing it. Now I think that it was a plunge into darkness, there was a courage which I don’t have today. I jumped into it and Herzog translated it into French. It was like narrative in verse, and I had the actor Lukavský narrate it. We became friends during this work, and it was wonderful friendship. Herzog thus translated it and sent it to Geneva for a competition and we won it. Everybody here was jealous of me, but there were already posters all over Prague that we would stage it on the staircase of the National Theatre as a quadraphonic program. As the first quadraphonic piece in Czechoslovakia! Eventually it became banned, but not by the communists, but by a fearful editor from the radio whose name was Hlaváč. He was scared because it was based on Biblical themes, and the work was thus never performed.”

“A German solder showed up there and he saw that a bicycle has been left there; he got on the bicycle and wanted to ride away. He apparently wanted to save his life. But he was caught by our neighbours, by the people from the street where we lived. He was beaten, they tore his uniform and handed him over to policemen. I felt sorry for him. When I became an adult, I realised that it was not fair and not correct. When we were five-year-old kids, we even used to play with these soldiers, because they had their training ground there and from time to time they would even give something to us. From my child’s perspective they were thus not enemies. He was a man, a human being. Honestly, who knows who the soldier with the bike was? Perhaps he was a young man who deeply disagreed with what he was doing. He disagreed with the war. Perhaps he had been drafted, just as people are usually drafted into a war like this. And when there are two nations, or even the whole world, waging war against each other, who knows where there is the truth? It is not anywhere, basically. I simply felt so sorry for him; and on top of that, there was our neighbour there, and this woman was handing out pieces of his uniform as trophies. ‘Take it as a keepsake!’ I was proud of my grandpa Dvořák, because he refused to take it.”