He managed to write the music for the film on the Zlín-Prague train, and Bernstein recommended it to the Iranian emperor. The World of Tomas Koloc
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03/20/2022
Photo: Courtesy of Czech Television
Description: Zdeněk Liška
On Wednesday, March 16, we commemorated the centenary of the birth of the greatest Czech and one of the world’s greatest film composers, a prominent figure in the Czechoslovak new film wave, Zdeněk Liška (1922-1983). In Czech art, in terms of genre universality, creative breadth and frequency of work, it can only be compared to two artists, screenplay Jaroslav Dietl and director Otakar Vávra. However, with the fact that, unlike the work of these two, Liškovo is just waking up to his second, international life.
The publisher of his soundtracks, Finders Finders´ Recorders, compared Liška to the head of music through his composers, four new composers: Italian film sound engineer Ennie Morcon, Bond writer, Englishman John John Barry and one of Jošek Chiobor’s Day.
In 1944, Liška graduated from the Prague Conservatory in the field of composition and conducting, worked briefly as a conductor of the Amateur Philharmonic in Slaný, and shortly after his liberation Zlín. There he met his ingenious connection with Karel Zeman, who lost his composer after the death of the same multi-genre EF Burian and who, as the founder of the film genre combining fiction and animated film, demanded the same experimental music from Liška’s talent as his films.
Their first combined film, The Invention of Destruction (1958), became the best-selling Czechoslovak film of all time and for others, Baron Prášil (1961), where the director’s concept in one passage called instead of speaking the musical voices of individual characters, Liška created a period when electronic music did not yet exist by inventing how to combine instrumental chords into disharmonious sounds, interspersed with technical beating-type sounds rulers on a bench or creaking of a file on a sheet metal.
He then used the same method to compose cosmic sounds into Polák’s film Ikaria XB1 (1963, by the way, the world’s first film set in space), which later became recognized source of inspiration Clark and Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. However, Liška’s fame from Moravia penetrated into his native Bohemia, where he made him a court composer, especially the directorial duo Kadár-Klos. A composer whom both directors knew that if the film took place in a church (Tam na konečné, 1957), the composer would compose for him the original church music of the fugue and the pub sniper, when it took place in court, in addition to the unjust (Defendant, 1964) , the music will be based on a score written for the clatter of typewriters (which, by the way, is the same symbol of the time on which i Vaclav Havel in the same year he founded his typewritten graphic collection Anticodes).
Thanks to the collaboration with Kadár and Klos, the film composer (who was known to focus on the rhythm of the scene, unlike the mood of the film, which composers usually focus on, unlike the piano, his main instrument is the editing on which he plays recording of the film until I discover their most hidden rhythms, and for which the younger but also seasoned directors had the Fox cut the film according to its music, and not the other way around) in his forty-five he became the author of two soundtracks released in the USA Shop on the bark1965, and Desire Called Anada, 1969) thanks to the fact that the first of them won an Oscar for the best non-English speaking film of 1966.
Thanks to the fact that after the emigration of Ján Kadár he also wrote music for his first American film Levine’s angel (1970), Leonard Bernstein fell in love with his music, and when he was approached by the Iranian Empress at the same time to compose music for the pompous 3000th celebrations of the founding of the city of Persepole, he referred the Empress to Zdeněk Liška, who fulfilled perfectly with the use of emperor Reza Pahlav selected historical Persian musical instruments.
Jiří Stivín, whom Liška chose for this purpose as a wind instrument soloist, then recalled how his solos arose. Although the custodians of the Iranian Museum lent the unique instruments to Liška and Stivín on the spot, they could not take them home, so they left with their sounds in their heads when they returned to the workshop, where they made instruments of the same colors. Jiří Stivín then said that he played the most majestic solo of the entire imperial celebration with an instrument that was made of a tube from a flush toilet.
The personality of Zdeněk Liška, who, despite lucrative offers to write music for concert halls, wrote music for eight feature films and a number of short films a year, did not write a note other than “under the pictures”, and who liked Mozart’s method of writing scores in the night express from Zlín to Prague (where the operator of the dining car, herself as a tipped by Liška, included delicacies, then went straight from the station to the Film Symphony Orchestra to record the score despite the resistance of the conductor and symphony orchestra, to which he once entrusted instruments such as clicking pens and recorded the score only with the choir) became one of the magical magic of Prague in the 50s and 70s.
In the case of other dimensions of their films (such as Jiří Krejčík) toughly controlled the film crew, entrusted the finished film to Liška, saying that they did not even ask for control screenings, authors and directors who knew they were bad, asked Liška to increase their middle performance by an order, and Jiří Sequens, director of the series Sinful People of the City of Prague and The Thirty Cases of Major Zeman, made a fuss with Liška when Liška unprecedentedly provided each of their 43 parts with different music as a separate film.
Fox, on the one hand, resembled an alchemist:
– When they betrayed a promise with the author František Pavlíček and director František Vláčil, given to the wife of the murdered Vladislav Vančura, that the film Markéta Lazarová (1967) will be filmed as a fair ballad, but a drama was created in which one fell into the Middle Ages thanks to the music that Liška conceived as a combination of primitive pagan songs, Romanesque chants and concrete sounds.
– When Fox Juraji Herz right at the beginning of the film corpse burner (1968) asked the question: “Do you want music for horror or music, that is, the sweet music of heaven that underlines the deviantity of the story?” Herz chose the latter, and thus one of the greatest films in world cinema : “God will punish you!” And during the making of this film about the occupation came the second occupation, the film itself was banned, for the main character Chramostovou Even Director Herze It was really the last film for many years to come, for the cinematographer Milotuwho lost his eye during normalization, the very last…).
– When the young Jan Švankmajer dared to ask Liška for the first song for his film, after in a row combined and animated films that they have created together, and after the film Don Shayn (1969), where Švankmajer had the music written in advance and the film “turned” to it, after Liška’s death Švankmajer no longer wanted anyone and still makes films without music…
On the other hand, the composer-pragmatist did not choose his work at all, so at the time when Andersen-Kachyň Small sea fairiesy (1976) made a musical event, the soundtrack of which was again published in the West, he also became the author television newspaper jingles Czechoslovak television. (Which is not the slightest charge from the author of this article; after all, Lišek’s colleagues, such as Zdeněk Pololáník or Otmar Mácha, who at the time of writing the composition for the most regime works, such as Gottwald or Okres na severu, were also creating spiritual songs for Catholic canons and It did not bother them or their clients from the top clergy.) It must be said that Liška’s compositions (except perhaps for the aforementioned Televizní noviny or jingle Thirty cases of Major Zeman) never became parodied repellents, but on the contrary, even in the case of regime works, they somehow dulled the edge of the story.
At the end of his life, the composer, who, as is sometimes the case, had a new family, moved from Zlín closer to Prague to the “satellite”, for example. such as the war Signum laudis (1980) did not manifest itself at all. When the unfortunate directors wanted him to name their successor, he named Petr Hapka.
The once published British publisher Andy Vote on the reason for the birth of the phenomenon Zdeněk Liška said:
“The reason was the incredible cooperation and artistic freedom of Czechoslovak film in the 1960s, which had no period elsewhere in Eastern Europe or the West. I do not like when it is said that the Czech new wave after Prague Spring extinct. She didn’t disappear, she turned into something else, wonderful in a way. With more restrictions, she simply had to speak in a different way. The fox was then like a real fox, who entered this stable and naturally began to dominate. 20th Century Fox = 20th Century Fox. With such a universal creator as Liška, one cross-sectional album cannot be released, but there should be at least 15 of them. “
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As its publisher, he is the main one who deserved it and he deserves it, as does the postmodern music maker Jára Tarnovski, who created the track from. Fox compositions to Jan Schmidt’s prehistoric films based on novels by Eduard Štorch or one of the most acclaimed creators of animated film today, American brothers Stephen and Timothy Quay, who consider “Prague art by Kafka, Janáček, Rilke and Švankmajer” as their source of inspiration, and two of their most acclaimed, Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer (1984) and The Phantom Museum (2003) recorded the music of the greatest Czech film composer, thanks to which in 2012, during their exhibition of their work at the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York, they symbolically began the second life of Zdeněk Liška.
The stain on the joy of this fact is typically Czech disrespect to the family silver of our national culture. The frustration or non-existence of Czech archives (the author has already experienced as a researcher when he found out what the archive of CT scripts looks like or the canceled FAMU archive is falling) and the complexity of our copyright law, thanks to the Quay brothers. they are selected by a wide base of friends and co-workers.
Entered by: Tomáš Koloc