10 - Reminiscences of a Friend and Colleague

Summary

It was in 1995 that I first met Sir Charles Mackerras. As a new student of musicology at Masaryk University I attended rehearsals of the Brno State Philharmonic, where Sir Charles was rehearsing Janáček's Glagolitic Mass. I loved Janáček's music and admired Mackerras as a conductor; I had all his recordings of Janáček and Martinů. In the small space of the Besední dům, where once upon a time Janáček himself had also conducted concerts, I preferred to hide myself away on the balcony. I followed the very intense rehearsal when the organist had problems with the new Wingfield version of the score and Sir Charles wasn't able to explain his entries to him. Mackerras carried on even during the break, working with the organist, but all in vain. At what was clearly an inappropriate moment after this futile battle, I ventured to emerge and ask if I could bring my CDs of his recordings for him to sign. And something very surprising happened. Sir Charles smiled at me, spoke to me in his excellent Czech (after that we always spoke Czech) and enquired which recordings pleased me and why I liked Janáček. I no longer know what I said to him, but the result was that he told me to bring whatever I wanted for signing and that during the rehearsals I should sit on the chair behind him so that I could hear better. When I then brought a whole pile of CDs he was somewhat thrown, but he signed all of them for me. And I went on to ask him if he would also sign my ‘klavírák’ of Jenůfa. He didn't know the term, so I explained that it was an informal word for a piano-vocal score; it was a word he liked very much, repeating it several times. After that he often used this word in Czech. The Glagolitic Mass concert was fascinating, but at the time it didn't occur to either of us that within a short while we would start working together on preparing new Janáček editions.