Věroslav Němec

* 1952

  • "There was a vacancy in the editorial office, a pedagogical position of Ivan Medek, and after a few days, a week or two, this young boy appeared as editor. Such a strange guy. When he was doing the tests that were supposed to be done there, we found out that he was not very gifted by God, and we did not know how he got there. And then I was talking to him one afternoon when the place was empty, and it turned out he was a guy who was in a National Security Corps band or something. So, he asked if I was happy there, and I said: 'Well, you know, the money...' and he said: 'Well, join us, the National Security Corps, you will make some serious money there.' Then I once offered him tickets to the Smetanova síň for a concert – and he said: 'Smetanova síň? Where is it? I do not really know.’ I think he was put there to see what it looked like and if there was another underground, if there was anyone else who might be inconvenience. He disappeared again within a fortnight or three weeks, but he was obviously deployed there just for that. I have to tell you, it was unpleasant."

  • "The political pressure was not particularly great, I told you that I published Klement Slavický without the slightest problem. Nobody even asked if it should or should not be. Simply Slavický's etudes were published. Although I have to say, I did have a problem once, once. It must have been in the mid-80s, I published a book called Klavírní prvouka by Ludmila Šimková, and there were folk songs in the simplest arrangement for piano for children. And there were texts, we did not pay much attention then, so there were lyrics of, let's say, religious songs. And nobody thought that it could bother anyone, but it bothered someone. A comrade from Brno spoke up. Her letter began with the words: 'I am the daughter of a weaver' and how she was offended by this publication, that there were angels, that there was God, that there was even a devil and a parish priest. And she demanded that the editor, that is me, be exemplarily punished. And so they called me to the director's office, and the director, the artistic deputies, and the economic deputies looked at it, and to their credit, I must say that the director said: 'Well, after all these are folk songs, what does this woman want us to do.' So, it was not even heroic, it just went through."

  • "We listened to the Voice of America dutifully, we even found out only from it that Ivan Medek was there. Who would we have found out from, right? So, we listened to it quite dutifully. And we listened to it on the 17th of November in 1989. By then we were already showered, getting ready to go to bed, and we turned on the radio – and now Ivan Medek was reporting what was happening in Prague. Of course, we were wide-eyed, because we lived across the bridge from the National Theatre, and we heard some shouting, some noise, so my wife and I got up, got dressed, went to Národní třída, and we got there, apparently after the cops raged there, so there were shoes lying around, hats lying around, scarves lying around in the street. It was horrible and we were staring at it and then we said we are actually stupid, what are we doing there when we have kids at home, right, if we got knocked off there, so we went back home again. In the meantime, we saw the red berets coming and we did not know what they were, we were just very naive, very stupid in every way. And then we were enjoying it all, and I know Ivan Medek, either on the seventeenth or the eighteenth, was saying on the radio: 'Well, the Communists came to power in February 1948, and on the seventeenth of November, 1989, they are finished too.' And I thought he was exaggerating, and he was not."

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    Praha, 25.06.2018

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    duration: 01:54:53
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I was not put in a situation where I had to make a dramatic decision

Profile photo, 1982
Profile photo, 1982
photo: archiv pamětníka

Věroslav Němec is a music editor, musicologist, publicist and pianist. He was born on 16 October 1952 in Ostroměř in the Podkrkonoší region. He graduated from the conservatory in Prague, majoring in clarinet and piano, in 1978. He then studied music education and Czech language at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. In 1975 he married and for many years he and his wife Jitka performed as a piano duo. In the same year he became editor of the publishing house Editio Supraphon. He was brought there by editor Ivan Medek. Věroslav lives in Prague, where he also lived through the events surrounding the burning of Jan Palach, the signing of Charter 77 and the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Since 2000 he has been the editor-in-chief of the music publishing house Amos Editio. He collaborates with the magazine Harmonie, which has published more than five hundred of his texts dedicated to piano interpretation. In 2012, the publishing house under his leadership was awarded the prestigious Czech Music Council Award.