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Vladimir Lebl: 6th February 1928 Prague-8th June 1987 Prague.

Article Excerpt
Vladimir Lebl was one of the most important of the Czech musicologists of the generation that started careers after the Second World War. He was an expert on 20th-century music and in the sixties one of the key figures in the birth of New Music in the former Czechoslovakia. He headed various authorial teams that in the seventies and eighties published comprehensive treatments of the history of Czech music. With the exception of the first few years immediately after he had completed his studies, he did not teach and therefore created no school. His most striking characteristic was his capacity to pose questions, to probe assertions and assumptions that had been repeated hundreds of times and to see hidden relationships and emergent trends. Throughout his life he worked behind the iron curtain and the door to international communication opened a little only for a few years of his career. He died of a heart attack at fifty-nine, suddenly but not unexpectedly, since he was already seriously ill as a result of long years of heavy smoking. This meant that his life and work remained confined to the Czech environment.

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I.

Vladimir Lebl passed his school-leaving examinations in 1946 at scientifically orientated high school and began studies at the Medical Faculty of Charles University in Prague. He played the piano in student bar groups and in the 1948/49 season he was pianist for the Prague Theatre of Satire [Divadlo satiry]. After six terms he abandoned medicine and in 1949 changed over to the Philosophical Faculty (studying musicology and ethnography), graduating in 1953 with a dissertation entitled Five Chapters about Leos Janacek. For the next four years he worked at the university as a junior lecturer in the Department of Music History, and produced his doctoral thesis Vitezslav Novak (1870-1949); he was then to keep returning to Novak in smaller or lengthier texts throughout his life. In 1955 he wrote his first contribution to the magazine Hudebni rozhledy [Musical Outlooks], published by the then Union of Czechoslovak Composers; it was about entertainment music.

In the mid-fifties a Ministry of Culture service and information centre for theatre was built up and 1957 established as the Theatre Institute. It had a library, bibliographical service and several research officers. Vladimir Lebl became head of the music theatre department and drew up its programme. The tasks of the institute included monitoring the day-to-day life of Prague and provincial opera stages and reviews, and from 1959 Lebl started to write about modern operas and opera repertory programming in the magazine Divadlo [Theatre]. In 1960 he published his first opera review in Literarni noviny [Journal for Literature]. 1959 saw the formation of conductor Libor Pesek's Komorni harmonie [Chamber Harmony Ensemble], which found an "in-house" composer in Lebl's friend Jan Klusak; Lebl was soon diversifying his themes in Literarni noviny with concert reviews and columns dealing with sociological questions of concert life. (This is the period in which Lebl wrote his one published piece of music--for Ivo Havel's satirical comedy Od koreni...

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