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Milan Skampa: encircled by music.

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To meet Milan Skampa, eighty years old and still radiating vitality, means to take a long trip (for the professor is talkative and has a tremendous stock of stories) back to times when morality was the sister of music and when despite ridiculously small fees musicians took their vocation very seriously. A yoga master and sportsman (if today more in spirit than in body), Skampa with his waggish smile may no longer practice long runs and a lack of mobility in the fingers of his left hand may have forced him to give up playing his beloved viola, but he is still actively involved in musical life both at home and abroad--as a sought-after pedagogue and member of internation competitions' juries. His name is associated above all with the Smetana Quartet, an ensemble that for decades was a peerless model of quartet interpretation. He spent thirty-three years in it.

You were born in the year that Leos Janasek died--and he is a composer that has played a central role in your life.

That's right, 1928. Some people have even claimed that I'm Janasek's son! (laughs)

If you had the chance to ask him something today, what would it be?

I would ask if I hadn't been interpreting him wrongly. He would probably give me a dressing down. He would say, "why on earth are you doing that?" in his brusque way ...

You come from a musical family. Could you tell us something about your family background?

My mother Antonie Moravcova wanted to be a music teacher from the age of eleven, to benefit her nation. And at sixteen she actually did start to teach the violin, because her family had fallen on very hard times. She taught wonderfully, and my brother Mirko followed in her footsteps. Our father was officially a meteorologist, but every evening when he came home from work he would play his Schumann in our one-room flat. I was encircled by music from a baby, with people playing in mother's music school from Monday morning to Saturday night. Even before I could walk I was scraping away on a twirling stick in my cot. At three and a half I asked Little Jesus (the Czech equivalent of Father Christmas) for a violin, and I got my wish. Only then as a four-year-old I crushed my finger in a sun chair and the resulting knob on my finger made it...