Petr Kotík – Part 2
The minimalist composer and conductor Petr Kotík has led the S.E.M Ensemble since soon after he arrived in the United States at the very end of the 1960s. In this, the second of two editions of the Arts dedicated to the Prague-born musician, he explains why he considers his hometown a musical “garbage heap” and lauds Ostrava, the city where he established an institute and festival dedicated to new music.
But first Petr Kotík has a story about how he got permission to put Václav Havel’s Letters to Olga to music. He had already written the piece when he came to communist Czechoslovakia with New York art dealer Paula Cooper and her husband Jack MacCray.
“Jack MacCray is the head of a very distinguished publishing house, Henry Holt – in fact, Henry Holt was his grandfather. They planned to do a paperback edition of Letters to Olga and he was very happy that I knew Havel and could arrange a meeting with Havel, because he wanted to see if Havel would write a new introduction to the paperback edition.
“That was the reason for me to contact Havel. We knew each other from the ‘60s, quite well. We visited Havel a few times and in fact he agreed to do that introduction.
“That was January 1989, and I was thinking surely the secret police are watching, and I should brace myself for quite an examination at the border. But nobody really bothered me at the border, so I already knew that the regime was probably falling apart.
“And I used that opportunity to talk to Havel about the project [Kotík’s own]. He was very pleased and of course gave me permission to use the text. But it was more or less ex post.”
Petr Kotík left Prague in 1969, frustrated at the problems of trying to run his own ensemble in a communist state. Nearly four decades later, the composer and conductor is disparaging to say the least about the Czech capital’s musical culture. In fact, he says when it comes to music the city is a “garbage heap”.
“Look at Prague’s architecture. You won’t find such richly appointed houses anywhere in the whole world, I would say. There must have been money since the mid 19th century, especially at the end of the 19th century.
“There must have been money pouring out of the walls. You can see how these burghers, the citizens…how did they build those buildings? It reflects the enormous wealth that was there.
“When Smetana performed Má vlast it was in some dance hall, on Žofín. The most depressing thing about Prague and the Czech environment is that it doesn’t bother anyone, it doesn’t bother anyone. People are not walking around being ashamed of the fact that they could not build a decent concert hall. We’re talking about 2008 – there are not even plans to do it.
“‘It’s alright, we’ll perform in the dance hall at Obecní Dům, that’s OK, that’s enough.’ The pieces Smetana wrote had to be reinstrumented because it’s impossible to do it the way he did it, and he did it for practical reasons. He was not sure whether the bassoon player would show up for the performance, so the bassoon parts are doubled in cello.
“And we’re talking about a time after Wagner wrote pieces with bassette horn, contra bass, solos…And Sachs made all these new instruments, and Berlioz had a 150-piece orchestra like nothing, anywhere he would come.
“In Prague it took 16 years to perform [Janáček’s] Jenůfa, Její pastorkyňa [Her Stepdaughter] – 16 years! Every Czech musician should wake up and be ashamed of himself to be a Czech musician. Imagine Stravinsky waiting 16 years for the Rite of Spring – it would not be Stravinsky. Janáček was effectively prevented by the Prague garbage heap from joining the pantheon of composers of the early 20th century.”
Despite his low opinion of the Czech capital, Petr Kotík has performed several times at the Prague Spring festival. It was there in the mid 1990s that he received an invitation to take his S.E.M. Ensemble orchestra to Prague Castle. That led to a whole festival of music of extended duration at the Castle, featuring among others, the Janáček Philharmonic orchestra from the industrial north Moravian city of Ostrava. That in turn led to an association with the city which culminated with the creation in 1999 of the Ostrava Centre for New Music, which is focused on work with orchestras and puts on the Ostrava Days institute and festival every two years. Kotík explains his attachment to both the city and its people.
“The city is ugly, so it reminds me of America. In America you have to understand the poetry of ugliness. Then you like it here. If you don’t get it, you hate it. It’s not like in Prague, where on very corner some antiquity bothers you. In Ostrava you are left alone, like here [New York] you are left alone, you can breath, there is space.
“People talk to you. I have never yet met a person in Ostrava who would talk badly behind somebody else’s back. Imagine, this is the Czech Republic, I’m not talking about some fantasy or the United States or England – no, Ostrava.
“Especially at the beginning it would have been so easy to just stop it. I’m not saying that everybody likes it there – not at all!
“But it has also been somehow possible to find some kind of intellectual and cultural bridge to all these places that in the end we get the support we need. And people are constructive.
“The director of the conservatory was the composer [Milan] Báchorek – a distinguished Czech composer, not some no-one. He gave us the whole school. He was co-operative any way we needed co-operation, although he knew from the beginning there was absolutely no chance that we would ever perform his music.
“I don’t think this would be possible in Prague, in my experience. Maybe I am wrong – and I would be so happy to be proven wrong.”
