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Zbynek Vostrak: (10th June 1920-4th August 1985).

Article Excerpt
Twenty years ago (in 1985), the composer Zbynek Vostrak died at the age of 65. His death was not reported in the press, and none of his works appeared on concert or theatre programmes at the time. Vostrak had been among those artists who had fallen into disfavour with the ruling regime, which had almost managed to consign his work to gradual oblivion. Nonetheless, the name of Zbynek Vostrak continued to sound a chord in the mind of the Czech musical public in two different contexts. For older people his name was associated with the operas and ballets he had written in the 1950s, which had brought him considerable success. For those with a knowledge of the Czech musical avant garde of the 1960s, on the other hand, Zbynek Vostrak was and remains one of the pioneers and most distinctive composers of New Music in this country. His change of direction from traditional music to the avant garde in 1960 was unique and remarkable for its radicalism. At the beginning of the 1970s, the indignation that musicians of this kind provoked in the conservative and pedestrian environment of official culture turned into active repression. Vostrak's exclusion from the Union of Composers and the banning of Musica Viva Pragensis, the group that he directed and for which he composed, meant that his music was not performed in the period of "normalisation" (the return of a rigid Stalinist regime), and he was unable to pursue a career as conductor or public composer. The private work that he wrote in isolation in the 1970s and 1980s is therefore little known. Many of the pieces of his last period were only performed in the 1990s, long after his death.

Zbynek Vostrak was born on the 10th of June 1920 into the family of an architect. He attended general middle school and at the same time, as an able pianist, he got to know a broad musical literature through piano arrangements. He studied composition only privately with Rudolf Karel until 1943, when Karel was arrested by the Gestapo. For Vostrak, his teacher was a great musical and moral model, who influenced his entire first period as a composer. After the war Vostrak reconstructed and instrumented Karel's opera Tri vlasy deda Vseveda [The Three Hairs of Grandad Know-All], which Karel had sketched on pieces of toilet paper in prison in Pankrac and before his death in the concentration camp in Terezin. The opera was staged in the National Theatre at the beginning of 1948, the young composer's first important collaboration with a major opera company. In the same year he capitalised on the experience it brought him in his own opera Rohovin ctverrohy [The Four-Cornered Hat] based on a farce by the 19th-century Czech playwright Vaclav Kliment Klicpera. When it was produced at the Olomouc theatre the young composer found himself working with artists of the stature of opera director Ferdinand Pujman, the composer Isa Krejci (in the role of conductor) and the painter Jan Zrzavy (stage designer). The success of the Hat launched a thirteen-year period in which Vostrak devoted himself almost exclusively to writing operas and ballets. In all he wrote a total of four operas and three ballets, some of which have orchestral suites of the same name. The frequent production of these works on Prague and regional stages testifies to their popularity at the time. (For example, the ballet Viktorka was put on 56 times after its first production in the National Theatre in Prague!)

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