Karel Ančerl (11 April 1908 – 3 July 1973) was a Czechoslovakconductor and composer, renowned especially for his performances of contemporary music and for his interpretations of music by Czech composers.
Ančerl was born into a prosperous Jewish family in the village of
Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942 and then sent to Auschwitz
in 1944. Unlike his wife and young son, Ančerl survived Auschwitz.
As a conductor, Ančerl helped foster a distinctly Czech orchestral sound, both within the Czech Philharmonic and elsewhere. Highly regarded also as a studio artist, Ančerl made a wide range of recordings on the Supraphon label, including repertoire by various Czech composers (remastered in the Karel Ančerl Gold Edition).
Life
He was born into a prosperous Jewish family in the village of
southern Bohemia, where his father Leopold was a large-scale producer of liquors and spirits. After graduating from the gymnasium in Prague (1918–24) he studied composition and conducting at the Prague Conservatory between 1925 and 1929,[1] along with chamber music, violin and percussion. In 1931 he participated as assistant conductor at the Munich premiere of Alois Hába's quarter-tone opera Mother. Ančerl also studied conducting under Hermann Scherchen in Strasbourg and with Václav Talich in Prague.[1] Between 1931 and 1933, he conducted the orchestra of the avant-garde theatre Osvobozené divadlo in Prague, where he brought about a marked improvement in playing standards.[2] From 1933 to 1939, he conducted for the Czechoslovak radio, but his career as a conductor was interrupted by World War II
.
He was sent with his family to the
Theresienstadt concentration camp (Terezín) on 12 November 1942. There, he became the leader of the large Terezín String Orchestra and started to organize cultural and music life in the ghetto.[3] His final performance was for the propaganda film Theresienstadt, directed, under coercion of the camp commandant Karl Rahm, by Kurt Gerron to fool the Red Cross. The film showed Ančerl conducting a work by Pavel Haas on a wooden pavilion, with flowerpots hiding the fact that many of the orchestra were barefoot. The film also featured Martin Roman's big band, the Ghetto Swingers. As soon as the film was over, Gerron, Ančerl, Haas, Roman and all those who had participated in the film were herded into cattle trucks for the final transport to Auschwitz
on 15 October 1944. Ančerl managed to survive Auschwitz, but his wife Valy and son Jan (born in Terezín) were murdered in the gas chambers.
to play with a distinctive Czech sound. Ancerl's work on the podium brought out the indigenous characteristics of repertoire to which that would apply, and always displayed a flexibly molded and incredibly minute attention to detail. Also remarkable was an innate classical sense to his work in Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms. There was a grace to Ancerl's music-making, and a spiritually-infused lyricism absorbed by a love of life and of nature - sample his discs of Martinu's Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, or Mahler's Ninth on Supraphon - that was a clear stand-out. He himself may have attributed some of this to the horrors he witnessed or experienced during the war - certainly a few others have.
Ančerl remains highly regarded as a recording artist. His broad range of recordings for the Czech
has issued some radio recordings made during the late 1940s, when Ančerl returned to Prague.
Memorial plaque to Ančerl unveiled on 6 September 1998 on the building of the municipal office in his native Tučapy, Tábor District
References
"Život v hudbě". Životopisy (in Czech). Retrieved 25 August 2007.
Bedřich Smetana: My Country. DVD sleeve note. Praha: Supraphon, 2008. SU 7015-9
Holzknecht, Václav: Jaroslav Ježek a Osvobozené divadlo. Praha: ARSCI, 2007.
