Artuš Rektorys

* 1935

  • "It was Wednesday and the Anglo-Americans bombed Prague, nobody knows why, it was said that they mistook it for Dresden, that the Vltava River, like the Elbe in Dresden, was similar. So they dropped it on Prague, then there was another air raid, but it wasn't on Vinohrady, but this one was directly on Vinohrady and the Old Town, there was the Emmaus Monastery hit, Palacký Bridge, and this strip up through Vinohrady. My father was with his colleague from the bank, they were walking and talking politics in Žofín and suddenly this bombing raid came. There, during that air raid, they just hit the corner by the Jirásek Bridge, where the Dancing House stands today, right next to Havel's house. I was at home in Vinohrady, we had to go home from school, and as soon as the siren sounded we stood against the strongest wall in the house in the hallway, and fortunately our house was out, but across the street in Vocelova Street the whole house fell down with people."

  • "I first started working with Ota Ševčík on the comedy Charley's Aunt, when Ota asked me if I would write music and a song for it. Tomáš Šolc, who had been here for many years in the drama, interpreted it in an excellent way, and since Ševčík was hopefully satisfied with the result, he immediately... I mean, that Charley's Aunt was performed more than fifty times, which was a miracle, because at that time most of the dramas were performed twenty times by subscription and it went into the archive, and Charley's Aunt was performed in the Little Theatre, in the Grand Theatre, it was just a big bang, a tribute to Mr. Šolc and others, Mr. Pavlovský was there, it was a very cheerful performance that the Pilsen people went to. Then the next one was A Glass of Water by Eugène Sriba, that was also a hit, and it was played a lot. And I think the biggest opportunity I got was in Dostoevsky's The Idiot, not because of the title, as if it belonged to me, maybe it did, I don't know. But the fact is that Ota and I invented the fact that there was an Orthodox church service, I was here in Bezrucova Street, as the church is, it's an Orthodox church, the only Baroque church in Pilsen actually. So I visited the Pope there and he gave me the materials and I processed them. It was a privilege to be able to do these things. It went so far that I wrote thirty-five incidental music for Ota's dramas."

  • "The year forty-eight came, we lost our apartment, our car, and the house in Vinohrady, which was built by my great-grandfather, who built it more or less as a family home, even though it was a three-story apartment building, so the whole family occupied it. My mother's brother was a doctor and he had an office, a waiting room and an apartment on the first floor, and we lived on the second floor, and upstairs were the offices of the Association of Forensic Experts. Nowadays it looks like there are six lots because the apartments are split in half. And our apartment met perhaps the worst, that they divided it so that the back two rooms there were tenanted, normally on a decree, so they walked through our apartment to their apartment, there they made a kitchen out of one room where they cooked. My parents were just class enemies."

  • "From my father's side, my grandfather was also a bank manager and had music history as a hobby. He used to meet the great musicians of the time, he even told me that he used to sit in the adjacent box at the National Theatre as Fibich sat, because he knew all these people, he knew Suk, he knew Ostrčil. Ostrčil even intervened in our family by teaching my father at the business academy, because he was originally a professor of mathematics, and then he gave it up and moved to the National Theatre as head of the opera."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Plzeň, 07.09.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 47:56
    media recorded in project Příběhy regionu - PLZ REG ED
  • 2

    Plzeň, 03.10.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 19:17
    media recorded in project Příběhy regionu - PLZ REG ED
  • 3

    Plzeň, 07.12.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 29:41
    media recorded in project Příběhy regionu - PLZ REG ED
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

Quality repertoire was made in Pilsen even in difficult times

Artuš Rektorys in 1959, photo by Věra Caltová
Artuš Rektorys in 1959, photo by Věra Caltová
photo: Archive of the witness

The composer Rektorys Artuš was born on 29 April 1935 in Prague. His grandfather and the bearer of the same name was the author of monographs on Czech singers and the editor-in-chief of the music magazine Smetana. Artur Rektorys studied composition and piano and horn at the Prague Conservatory. From 1958 he was a member of the orchestra of the J. K. Tyl Theatre in Pilsen, but he also worked in the Pilsen Radio Orchestra and collaborated with a number of local musical and theatre ensembles, including the Pilsen horn ensemble Musica venatoria Pilsensis and the drama group of Jana Klatovská and Jiří Chmelař. Since 1974 he has worked at the Pilsen Conservatory. He is the author of many chamber and vocal compositions, his music has accompanied dozens of radio plays and fairy tales as well as dramas. He has composed incidental music for thirty-five productions, mainly directed by Ota Ševčík. He was still a mainstay of the theatre’s archive at the time of the filming in 2024.