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"E. F. Burian (11th June 1904-9th August 1959) was what you might call a 'total' artist. Composer, writer, actor, singer, theatre and film director, theoretician, politician, bon vivant, prisoner, communist in uniform. He was one of the first in Czech culture to pursue the idea of certain kind of gesamtkunstwerk, an approach that was later to be taken up in Laterna magica (Black Theatre), or Czech experimental film, for example. Burian's music is almost entirely forgotten in this country today, although it deserves to be valued in the context of the international avant garde between the wars. His purely musical output was vast (perhaps 200 opuses--several operas, a series of orchestral works, many chamber pieces, dozens of stage and film compositions).

Today it seems incredible that one man could have done so much, directing his theatre (which according to witnesses he hardly ever left), while yet managing to produce an enormous amount of work in pretty well every branch of art. Particularly after 1948 his output as a composer was remarkable, including a great quantity of new works, and the revision of a series of earlier works that he now cast in final form. Many of his works (for example his string quartets) he wrote in a strange solitude, despite the conventional view of Burian as a bullying politician--director.

Burian's pre-war music is characterised on the one hand by a kind of neo-primitivism and neo-folklorism foreshadowing the movement in Czech music in the 1950s, but on the other by admiration for jazz, the two strands often pit together in a weird hybrid that would most probably upset today's purist serious composers."

It is with these words that the conductor of the Agon Orchestra, Petr Kofron, introduced a concert that this year effectively re-ignited interest in the music of E. F. Butrian, who was born exactly a hundred years ago. In this number we bring you three articles--among them an essay by Kofron--, which will, we hope, give you at least a basic idea of how extraordinary E. F. Burian was.

"Once as a small girl I was going for a walk with my father when he said, 'Look, that's the singer Emil Burian coming in the opposite direction.' I had only been to the National Theatre once to see a fairytale and I had huge respect for anyone that acted or sang in the theatre. I stared admiringly at Emil Burian, but I couldn't help noticing the girl on one side of him and the boy on the other. The little boy in short trousers and cap made an indelible impression on my memory. To this day I can still summon up a vivid picture of him walking beside his father with his hands in his pockets. I couldn't have had any idea, of course, that this boy was one day going to play such an important part in my work."

This was how the later "Decko" ("D") Theatre actress Lola Skrbkova remembered her first encounter with her future director. It was not only Lola who could have had no inkling of what the young son of the great baritone would become. His famous father could have had no inkling either, although he must have known that his son might well have musical and theatrical talents. He would definitely not have predicted, for example, that Emil the younger, brought up to honour the great tradition of Czech music represented by the legacy of Smetana, would one day fall madly in love with jazz syncopation. On that summer day described by Lola Skrbkova, Emil may not have been very interested in being gawped at by worshippers of his father's art, but at 21, while still a pupil at the conservatory, he was already embarking on a major musical career himself as the National Theatre presented his opera Pred slunce vychodem [Before Sunrise]. He had even written the opera, based on Maeterlinck's play Aladdin and Palomid, two years before. "E. F." was everywhere something was happening in music, poetry and theatre. His name made his life easy and difficult at the same time. He knew the glamour and the pitfalls of fame from his home and family. He must have been aware of the envious voices that could not forgive his uncle Karel (even more celebrated than his brother Emil, younger by six years) his successes abroad, and must have understood the tragedy of this great tenor, often compared to Caruso, who lived out his life in serious illness and deprived of the stage. But anyone who is born with the theatre in their blood is condemned in advance.