Artuš Rektorys

"I first started working with Ota Ševčík on the comedy Charley's Aunt, when Ota asked me if I would write music and a song for it. Tomáš Šolc, who had been here for many years in the drama, interpreted it in an excellent way, and since Ševčík was hopefully satisfied with the result, he immediately... I mean, that Charley's Aunt was performed more than fifty times, which was a miracle, because at that time most of the dramas were performed twenty times by subscription and it went into the archive, and Charley's Aunt was performed in the Little Theatre, in the Grand Theatre, it was just a big bang, a tribute to Mr. Šolc and others, Mr. Pavlovský was there, it was a very cheerful performance that the Pilsen people went to. Then the next one was A Glass of Water by Eugène Sriba, that was also a hit, and it was played a lot. And I think the biggest opportunity I got was in Dostoevsky's The Idiot, not because of the title, as if it belonged to me, maybe it did, I don't know. But the fact is that Ota and I invented the fact that there was an Orthodox church service, I was here in Bezrucova Street, as the church is, it's an Orthodox church, the only Baroque church in Pilsen actually. So I visited the Pope there and he gave me the materials and I processed them. It was a privilege to be able to do these things. It went so far that I wrote thirty-five incidental music for Ota's dramas."

"The year forty-eight came, we lost our apartment, our car, and the house in Vinohrady, which was built by my great-grandfather, who built it more or less as a family home, even though it was a three-story apartment building, so the whole family occupied it. My mother's brother was a doctor and he had an office, a waiting room and an apartment on the first floor, and we lived on the second floor, and upstairs were the offices of the Association of Forensic Experts. Nowadays it looks like there are six lots because the apartments are split in half. And our apartment met perhaps the worst, that they divided it so that the back two rooms there were tenanted, normally on a decree, so they walked through our apartment to their apartment, there they made a kitchen out of one room where they cooked. My parents were just class enemies."

"From my father's side, my grandfather was also a bank manager and had music history as a hobby. He used to meet the great musicians of the time, he even told me that he used to sit in the adjacent box at the National Theatre as Fibich sat, because he knew all these people, he knew Suk, he knew Ostrčil. Ostrčil even intervened in our family by teaching my father at the business academy, because he was originally a professor of mathematics, and then he gave it up and moved to the National Theatre as head of the opera."