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It's not age that has turned my hair grey, but life ... The baritone ivan kusnjer looks back at a quarter century in the national theatre, in opera and in private life.

Article Excerpt
You have been with the National Theatre Opera since 1982. A quarter century of your relationship with the NT invites a little retrospective "stock-taking". What changes and perhaps even crises have there been in your "marriage" with the NT? After all, in a real marriage you would be celebrating your silver anniversary now, quite an achievement in the age of divorce. What keeps you faithful?

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I've gone a little grey overall all those years. It isn't the result of living with the National Theatre, but just life itself. Several times now young people have offered to give up their seats for me on the tram, and I tell them, "It's not age that's turned me grey, it's life."

Going right back to the start, the nicest period for any artist who steps on the stage of the National Theatre is the beginning, because the NT is the arch that spans the whole of Czech theatrical culture. That is my feeling about it. You always remember the director who engaged you; in my case it was Zdenek Kosler. Since those days the approach to work has changed a great deal. As directors come and go, your view of the opera house changes. Previously every production was worked out to the last detail, but today that's rather rare. Several times we haven't got together in ensemble rehearsal for a production of Marriage of Figaro, say, for a whole year, for example, and we've met up for the first time on stage. This isn't a good thing for a company supposed to be a guarantee of the highest quality. But I've never had any real urge to chicken out and leave the NT. Once, when Kosler was still there, I had an offer from Hamburg--and I thought about it very seriously. I stayed on after making an agreement that Kosler would let me go anywhere anytime I didn't have a part in a premiere coming up soon. And that's how things have generally worked since then.

You started your career at the NT under the old regime. Can you say what the differences were at the NT opera in the era of "building socialism" and if so, how in your experience it has changed since 1989? And how the changes after 1989 have impacted on the everyday and long-term work of the NT opera?

Back then the big problems were mainly about trips abroad. All kinds of official papers were needed, approval from Pragoconcert [state-driven monopoly artistic agency], the Ministry of Culture, the opera directors and heads. Today everything's a matter of simple negotiation--I make an agreement, I take leave, that's it and off I go. There are no delays. But even under the communists the NT was the roof of theatre culture in the Czech Lands, in every respect. Places were found for various ex-mistresses there and the party management had to be the most reliable kind, but the theatre remained at a very good professional level. Recruitment of talents / non-talents to the NT wasn't such a hasty matter either. Everyone had to do the rounds of the companies outside Prague and anyone who stuck it out had a chance of getting into the NT. I met many musicians who didn't have what it took. And when then discovered that, they always spat on the NT one way or another. But in every case I could sense their longing to get into the NT. It's the same today, even though today it's incomparably easier to up sticks, sling your knapsack on your shoulders and go abroad. If you don't like it here you can go somewhere else, try your luck and maybe come back as a famous singer. Why not? Let everyone have a go.

Did you in any way feel the restrictions, political pressures, and weight of censorship that suffocated freedom of expression especially in the period of normalisation? Or did the special position of the NT mean that it was spared the interference of a regime that otherwise tried to control everything, and especially the field of culture?

I had problems at the very beginning with taking up my study place at La Scala in Milan, for example, but they were partly just the result of envy, because I had won the study place immediately after joining the NT--I was 30. It took a year and a half to get through all the difficulties and red tape, and I had an incredible series of problems with accommodation and expenses. On the other hand, my experience back then was very good for me, because it means I have a much better sense of how to get things done today. Back then I sometimes banged my head against a brick wall, and I don't do that so much today, even though I still sometimes go crazy when someone pushes a lot of nonsense at me. Of course, subconsciously my generation drags that era behind it like a ball and chain. It's only the next generation that will...

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