“You know, I’ll never forget the days of the Nazi occupation. In those days, I used to study at a Russian grammar school that was directly under their control. So when our professor entered the class room, he would perform the Nazi salute and say ‘Sieg Heil’ and we then had to hail him the same way as well. But we were a proper bunch of rascals and thus, once – I think it was in wintertime – somebody came up with the idea to put rulers up the sleeves of our coats and attach strings to them. Thus, when the professor entered the door and hailed, all the coats would hail as well. We thought it was enormously funny but later we were summoned to the headmaster and told that this offense was punishable by death. Fortunately, our professors were decent people and idn’t make a fuzz of it. They kept this for themselves.”
“After the revolution, the old director of the Prague Conservatory left and they were looking for a new one. They announced an open competition for the post and I submitted my application. About two days prior to the competition itself, an acquaintance of the mayor called my wife and told her that I was not selected. My wife was perplexed by this as the competition was only to be held on the next day. My wife didn’t tell me a word about it and I went to the competition. Well, the commission congratulated me en bloc, telling me that I’m the winner of the competition – they had picked me. By the way – some of the proposals that I presented to them haven’t been followed up on to this day by the school. So I felt very satisfied, happy for me winning the competition and being congratulated by everybody on the panel. However, by the next day, when I came to school, I learned that I didn’t win the competition after all. Indeed, Slávek Neumann was selected as the new director. I told them that I’d like to know the reason. I was informed that the commission was headed by a deputy by the name of Pátý, who used to be a chartist and a friends of professor Feld. Feld (also my class mate) told him that I had been a KGB agent so senior that it was impossible to find me in the list of agents as my name simply wasn’t stated there. So by word of mouth, once more, because of my background, I didn’t win that competition.” (Note of the editor: J. F. is kept file on under registration Nr. 00952 and 11309 volume A at www.ustrcr.cz.)
“It was tough – it was plain business to these musicians. They were clearly not interested in some education. So I had to come up with an interesting course. We would start the course by going for a beer. I took them to a pub where we would discuss this and that and finally, they grasped that something good might come out of it for them. At first, the lessons were taking place in a pub with beers on the table, but they’d get their certificate of having completed the course. Thus they had a proper degree attesting to them having educated themselves. I kept perfecting this all the time until it evolved into a complex series of courses that later gave birth to the Jaroslav Ježek Conservatory.”
Vadim Petrov was born on May 24, 1932, into a family of a doctor of Russian extraction living in Prague. His mother was a singer and thus the little boy naturally developed an interest in music at a very early age. He began by learning to play the violin and later had piano classes with Music Professor Berta Kabeláčová. He privately studied music composing, his teacher being Miloslav Kabeláč, while attending a Russian grammar school in Prague. Later on, after he was admitted to the Music academy in 1951, he went to classes of Professor J. Řídký. While attending the academy, he began to work with Josef Bezdíček from the Czechoslovak Broadcast. He would compose music for his literary and drama broadcasts. Despite this, he was unable to find a proper job after his graduation at the AMU in 1956. He shortly even had to work as an assistant mason and finally was employed at the department of popular entertainment of the Municipal center of education in Prague. His work consisted in the further education of musicians through various courses. Later on, a stand-alone music instructional facility was created, the so-called “People’s Music School” or People’s Conservatory (today called the “Conservatory of Jaroslav Ježek”) that was headed by Vadim Petrov. However, the arrival of the occupation forces in August 1968 brought an end to what was a successfully developing career at the head of the people’s conservatory. More importantly though, it also ushered in a ban on any work for the radio, TV or film making. With the help of his friends, he was able to find a job as a teacher at what is today the J. Deyl Conservatory for Visually Impaired Students. In 1976, he got the opportunity to teach at the Prague Conservatory. In the second half of the 1970s, he would again compose music for the radio and TV broadcast and also for film productions. In 1992, he retired. He is well known most prominently as the author of bed-time stories and fairytales for children. Among his works are, for example, 25 episodes of the Krteček cartoon (Zdeněk Miler), Krkonošské pohádky fairytales, Pohádky o cvrčkovi fairytales, the Přátelé Zeleného údolí series and other productions. He composed music for dozens of TV series, movies, fairytales, radio programs and plays.
