Jaroslav Krček

“I thus befriended this ensemble and its conductor (Helmut Rilling). At that time, after the Soviet invasion into Czechoslovakia (in November and part of December), he had a seven- week tour in the United States. As a friend, he offered me to play the timpani drums and he would take me with him on the tour if I wanted. I didn’t know how to play the timpani, and so I said yes. I was practicing by drumming on kitchen pots in my summer cabin. In October I went for a rehearsal, and that’s why I’m talking about it: when we crossed the border, I noticed that there was a strange-looking man with me in the train compartment. He was tall, lean, and he had an aquiline nose. This man somehow trusted me, and when the train crossed the border, he reached into his bag and pulled out the book which was called Seven Days in Prague. It was a perfect documentary book about what was happening in Prague during the seven days after the invasion by the Warsaw Pact armies. What happened and where. Who killed whom, who went where, how was the radio occupied. Great reading. I thus read the book, but unfortunately he didn’t give it to me. He told me that he was taking the books out of the country so that people learn what was happening in Prague. He had a full bag of them. It was a samizdat copy with photographs and related documents. There were inscriptions which appeared in Prague streets at that time, e.g. the pun ‘The Russians and ham – both are best eaten cold.’ It was a contemporary documentary about what was happening in Prague during the seven most critical days.”

“I started working on it, I had those one hundred Crowns for it, and I invited the Prague Madrigal Singers and other singers and for thirteen months we were creating my electro-acoustic opera. I hired two technicians from Supraphon for that. I had free access to everything I needed – for instance, we were using the hallway in the Rudolfinum. From today’s perspective, it was impossible, but at that time it was indeed possible. We gave it a shape – Herzog was observing it. Now I think that it was a plunge into darkness, there was a courage which I don’t have today. I jumped into it and Herzog translated it into French. It was like narrative in verse, and I had the actor Lukavský narrate it. We became friends during this work, and it was wonderful friendship. Herzog thus translated it and sent it to Geneva for a competition and we won it. Everybody here was jealous of me, but there were already posters all over Prague that we would stage it on the staircase of the National Theatre as a quadraphonic program. As the first quadraphonic piece in Czechoslovakia! Eventually it became banned, but not by the communists, but by a fearful editor from the radio whose name was Hlaváč. He was scared because it was based on Biblical themes, and the work was thus never performed.”