Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | C | Czech Music

Zdenek Kosler let's do it properly first and only then be slavs.

Article Excerpt
Ten years ago, when the conductor Zdenek Kosler died on the 2nd of July 1995, at the age of only sixty-seven, it was hard to avoid the feeling that fate had been unjust. We had prematurely lost a conductor who had always been a guarantee of artistic precision, love of music, extraordinary perseverance and an enviable breadth of repertoire. In the turbulent situation of the nineties, and indeed today, he might still have been a fixed point and guardian of the highest standards in music. Ten years is long enough for someone to be almost forgotten, but not long enough for someone to be rediscovered with a sense of surprise. Not that people fail to recall him at all, and with gratitude, but the scale and reach of his life work is known to few.

"I was saved from the career of a child prodigy by Vaclav Talich", said Zdenek Kosler, born on the 25th of March 1928, when looking back at the beginnings of his musical life. Some of his abilities--mainly his memory and perfect pitch--did indeed seem miraculous. He could conduct from memory any famous or less well-known work, including dozens of operas. Sometimes journalists would ask him whether it wasn't an unnecessary strain learning everything by heart. He would always answer that knowing a work by heart made his work much easier ...

Opera in Prague, Olomouc and Ostrava

Thanks to the wise decision of his parents--his father was a member of the National Theatre Orchestra--he was first given a general education, and not merely in the humanities. He graduated from modern gymnasium in 1947 and went from there to the Academy of Performing Arts. He joined the National Theatre (opera) in 1948, while still studying at the Academy, as an opera co-repetitor, but his first experiences with the baton came soon. First of all with the Barber of Seville, then soon after that Smetana's The Bartered Bride and immediately thereafter The Secret. The latter is Smetana's second opera after the "bride" and it was the opera Kosler conducted most often, which is itself worthy of remark. In view of the great quantity of ensembles and choral...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!