Kalabis Profile

Viktor Kalabis lived through a particularly unfortunate period in Czech history. He was in his mid-teens when his country was invaded by Germany at the beginning of the Second World War and, after the liberation, he and his compatriots experienced only three years of political autonomy before the establishment of the socialist state imposed another kind of tyranny on them. Although there had been a gradual relaxation of state control of the arts in the intervening years, it was only with the fall of Communism in 1989 – when the composer was already in his mid-60s – that creative artists in Czechoslovakia could definitively enjoy the kind of freedom their counterparts in West Europe took for granted.

Kalabis and his wife, the harpsichordist Zuzana Ruzickova, always refused to join the Communist Party – a bold decision which was clearly no help to their early careers. The composer did, however, get a toe-hold in Prague Radio in 1953, by way of the children’s music department, and exercised a benign influence there until, in 1970, he retired to devote himself entirely to composition. By then he had a considerable reputation as composer, his music being of such obvious quality that it had survived Stalinist attacks on “hard harmonies learned at the feet of western modernists” and “disconsolate mournful tones which are decidedly unhealthy and nihilistic.”

The fact is that none of Kalabis’s music is “nihilistic.” While it was never timid party-line stuff, even at the politically most difficult times, it has always been accessible without being trivial. That much is clear from such thoughtful, finely wrought works as the five symphonies, eight concertos and seven string quartets which are among the most impressive examples of a creativity applied to every musical genre except opera. His style, broadly neo-classical in orientation, is comparable to that of his much-admired    compatriot Bohuslav Martinu in its well crafted detail, its rhythmic drive and the light and air circulating in often complex instrumental textures. Bartók and Stravinsky were also important influences on his music from an early stage. His sound, however, is distinctively his own. Best known outside the Czech Republic for the Harpsichord Concerto written for Ruzickova in 1975, Kalabis distinguished himself above all perhaps in the Five Romantic Love Songs inspired by poems by Rainer Maria Rilke and completed a year earlier.

Gerald Larner