Břetislav Přech

"As I told you, I really had a crisis in my third year, when suddenly the harder stuff came and I had to deal with it. But I had a weird story there. There was a fellow who was about a year above us and he got a C in violin. And he went to Professor Macháček, who was one of the best professors there. And his dad came to see his son in the end of the first semester to check on him and said, 'You got a C! And his own father withdrew him from the school because he didn't have a good grade, and he wanted him to learn something else, not just to be good, to be excellent. So I remembered that too, and I found out that if I'm going to study something, I have to study it. But believe me, it's choosing a profession is - you may be experiencing it yourself now - he person until he's really grown up, and that's sometimes well past the age of twenty, he doesn't really have a kind of a sense of what he wants. There are exceptions, sometimes there are kids who know what they want and they do it, but here it's mostly a question of luckily meeting the right teacher. They say when you're in the right place at the right time, when you're at the crossroads, and if you're lucky enough to get a great teacher, professor, or it doesn't have to be just professors, it can be in the shop, like a master carpenter, it's a matter of whether they'll also instill in you that love of wanting to do it."

"I would also like to say that I was also lucky that my professor who taught me orchestral playing was Mr. Antonín Devátý. He was an excellent conductor and composer, an elderly gentleman, the father of the famous actress Ivanka Devátá. And so we liked him very much because he was an experienced man and he passed on a lot of wise things to us."

"I guess I was very lucky that my dad, who used to play violin in the village and used to go to a local carpenter who taught him a little bit, wanted me to continue playing, so he wanted me to continue. But that meant enrolling in a music school where you had to take a test, a so-called talent test, where the teacher tests you to see if you can sing, if you can hear well, if you have rhythm. And if the kid passes that, he's accepted. And because at that village music school there was only violin and piano, there were no other subjects and instruments, so I just started on violin. And that was only in the third grade. But I was very lucky, because at the village school, there was a teacher who had a beautiful name, his name was Kazimir Koblitz, and of course I'll tell you more about him, because the story is almost unbelievable."