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Waiting for Stravinsky to go out to the pharmacy.

Article Excerpt
Antonin Matzner (born in 1944 in Plzen) is the author of more than ten books on film, jazz, popular and classical music, he has been popularising jazz on the radio for many years, and for the last decade he has also been repertory director of the Prague Spring Festival. He has been involved in the production of more than 150 musical recordings. After 1989 he could have become a minister or diplomat, but he says he would not have enjoyed it. He experienced the vital musical developments of the 1960s, the grey of the seventies under what was known as "normalisation", the events of the Velvet Revolution and the years after it--about all this he knows much more than many, but as yet he has no urge to write his memoirs ...

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Your family was in stationery, so how did you come to music?

My father was trained as a retailer, but he was also a fan of music, a self-made expert and a great Wagnerian. He often went to the Dresden Opera with my mother, visited Bayreuth and was always telling me about Wagner. You have to understand that during my childhood Wagner wasn't played at all in this country--I first heard it performed in 1957 in Pilsen. It was Lohengrin, and the first ever Wagner performance after the war. For me it was therefore "narrated music," just like Mahler; Karel Ancerl and Vaclav Neumann did a great thing when they started to present Mahler in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s.

My father had converted to the Church of the Czech Brethren and we were brought up in it. It was in the church choir that I started my own musical career. My pastor Jiri Pumr had an unbelievable collection of records, for example the Brandenburg Concertos with Sviatoslav Richter on the Melodiya Label or the complete records of the St. Thomas Choir. Here and there I would make a little music too, since I played in the Sunday school on the harmonium and organ. My brother and I also had subscription tickets at the theatre and we both had piano lessons. I won't say anything about the results ... The basic problem was that I displayed a stronger character than my teachers and I never learned anything properly from them.

But people say you are an excellent pianist ...

Me and the pianist and future conductor Vaclav Zahradnik were in our way like Siamese twins, and we got up a sort of performance piece, a parody of the Internationale, and we called it the Hydrocentrale. It consisted of Vasek playing the melody and me sitting down with my back to the keyboard. Maybe that's how the reputation you mention started--the piece was pretty polished.

Nonetheless, I also played the piano professionally, in bars and with a pop group.

Does that mean that you were just as interested in popular and jazz music as in classical music from the start? Or did you priorities change over time?

My generation played Jezek's albums in our childhood; they were very popular. I tried to persuade my teacher to let me do Jaroslav Jezek, but I didn't succeed, because they didn't want anything to do with it. Jazz attracted me for the same reasons as Schoenberg, for example: it was forbidden fruit. And music like that fascinated me. Even before I went off to do my military service friends used to come to my place to listen--I already had quite a decent sound library on tape, for example including Stockhausen's Gesang der Junglinge or Eimert's electronic studies ...

Where did you get hold of these recordings? In the Late Fifties and Early Sixties ...

It varied. Berlin wasn't yet divided by the wall, and so for instance the relatives of schoolmates were working there and could get to the western section. I remember someone bringing the Modern Jazz Quartet. We kept on playing it until the grooves were worn out, learning the solos. Then all you could hear was shrum, shrum ... I found another source in the Divadlo hudby (Theatre of Music). I'm surprised that the director of Supraphon Jaroslav Seda was prepared to lend me a complete set of recordings of pieces by Anton Webern when I was only sixteen years old. Me and my friends were always meeting up, and listened to thousands of hours of music. It...

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