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Article Excerpt
"The performance was an achievement of the first rank, the singers were
brilliant, and so for the most part was the orchestra. The premiere was a colossal even if not an unambiguous success. Berg had to take a bow at the end of the first act, which is a rare thing, and so surprised his opponents that they didn't recover until after the second act. The second performance (a subscription event) was quite different. Very calm, respectful success. After the third performance there was a big scandal, undoubtedly organised and provoked by the Czech gutter press against 'Berlin Jews' (?) and you have probably heard about that already. In a precisely calculated silence before the last scene of the second act--in front of the chorus of sleeping soldiers, there was whistling and laughing; that was a signal for stormy applause in protest! All hell broke out: whistling, shouting, yelling, continually interrupted by applause and isolated calls of 'excellent', people tried to speak, the curtain fell and Ostrcil remained heroically calm standing for perhaps ten minutes in front of the unmoving orchestra. Once he tried to continue, the curtain rose to thunderous applause, but then there was piercing whistling. In the end Ostrcil left the conductor's desk, people continued to shout pro and contra, and eventually the police cleared the theatre (instead of arresting the half-dozen guttersnipes who had stirred up the instincts of the 'old subscribers'!)."
The events surrounding the Czech premier of Alban Berg's opera Wozzeck in 1926 represented one of the biggest cultural scandals of the First Czechoslovak Republic. The seismograph of political tension registered the first more significant twitch of the needle into the dangerous part of the scale, the first tremors heralding the oncoming earthquake. The case is sufficiently well known. The cited description of the premiere, second and unfinished third performance comes from a letter written by the German-speaking Prague composer Viktor Ullmann to the conductor Heinrich Jalowetz, who was working in Germany at the time. Ullmann vividly described the atmosphere and above all expressed his respect for Otakar Ostrcil as conductor of the performance, head of the opera company at the National Theatre, and man. The "Wozzek Affair" was one of the key moments in Ostrcil's life.
Composer, Conductor, Head of the Opera, Autodidact
He was born into the family of a doctor on the 25th of February 1879 in the suburb of Prague that is today the city's Smichov district. The street, today known as Zborovska, has the Dietzenhofer Gardens on one side and the Jirasek Bridge runs into it. On the eve of what would have been Ostrcil's sixtieth birthday in 1939 a commemorative plaque designed by the artist Frantisek Kysela, who created the stage designs for his operas, was placed on his family house. At the end of the 18th century, a botanical garden had been established on the site where Ostrcil was born and lived part of his life, and until 1920 the gardens were named after the Emperor Ferdinand V. The Jirasek Bridge was completed in 1933. It so happened that this bridge, leading to the house with Ostrcil's commemorative plaque, was designed by the inter-war Czech architect Vlastimil Hofman, who also worked as a stage designer and like Kysela had collaborated with Ostrcil at the National Theatre.
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Ostrcil attended high school in Smichov and later in the Lesser Town, and then studied modern philology at Charles University. All three Ostrcil brothers--Antonin, Josef and Otakar--had had a music tutor at home, but none had ever thought of a professional career in music. Antonin later admitted, however, that from childhood Otakar's attitude to music had been quite different to that of his two brothers, who had accepted it just as a usual part of the life of a middle-class family. He wrote that "music wasn't just fun for our Otik; soon it completely took him over and he couldn't live without it. Already at high school he used to take music paper with him to school and would compose keenly, not just in free moments, but sometimes, I believe, during lessons in subjects that he found less attractive. Yet he was such an outstanding student and so popular with his teachers that he was never reprimanded for it."
Otakar was not, however, the kind of rebel prepared to desert his studies to devote himself to the muses out of love for music. It was as if he hardly belonged to the fin de siZcle generation that grew out of Romanticism and stormily sought "new directions" at the end of the century. At university he was a pupil of Jan Gebauer, author of the Historical Grammar of the Czech Language, and he attended the lectures of the aesthetician Otakar Hostinsky. It is also believed that he was influenced by the philosopher Tomas Masaryk, who was teaching at the university in just the years when Ostrcil was studying there.
Ostrcil tried amateur composition and had private lessons with Zdenek Fibich. For sixteen years he dutifully taught Czech and German at a commercial academy until in 1919 Karel Kovarovic appointed him repertoire director of the opera at the National Theatre and a year later made him his successor as head of the opera. Ostrcil headed the opera of the National Theatre for fifteen years and his was an era of bold, interesting repertoire, great signers and actors, and great performances. Kovarovic naturally knew that the professor from the commercial academy was no inexperienced novice conductor. Before he came to the National, for fourteen years Ostrcil had led the Orchestral Association, an exceptionally good amateur orchestra originally associated with the name of Vaclav Talich. For four years he had also been head of opera at the Vinohrady Theatre, a company that initially had great ambitions and aspired to be a counterweight to the National...
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