What does your traffic light research mean to you?
It’s a twenty-five-year-old hobby that will probably never end. I delve into the history of the theater, listen to everything related to it, go to performances, collect what I can.
It started with me browsing second-hand shops and buying records. Hundreds of plates. I was discovering a whole new world for myself, each time I was anxiously waiting to see what would happen next.
I gradually read books and everything I could about the theater, later I started making the first larger websites for Semafor. They still exist, but they are technically very outdated. In short, I fell in love with the theater.
An album of his songs will commemorate one hundred years since the birth of Jiří Šlitra
You are a little over forty years old, and we are talking about music that started in the fifties and sixties. What attracted you?
It’s my dad’s fault. Sometime in 1987, when the Communists apparently accidentally re-released the film The Beatles Day, he took me to see it. I was listening to what they played on the radio until then, which made him a bit unhappy. On the way to the cinema, he told me that if I liked the songs from the film, he had them recorded and could re-record them for me on one of my tapes.
I’ll never forget how we sat down in the cinema, the movie started with that familiar banging of the instruments while the Beatles ran away from the female fans. It was like someone punched a hole in my head. I was stunned, and at that moment I began to experience the same Beatlemania as those thirteen-year-old girls in the sixties. With each song, I poked at my dad and asked him if he had it recorded too.
I still love the Beatles to this day. Thanks to them, I started to discover the music of the sixties, from where it was already a step to the semaphore sound.
Photo: Supraphon archive
Jiří Šlitr, one of the most prominent personalities of Czechoslovak post-war culture.
When was your first visit to Semafor?
Not until a few years after I fell for him, actually. It never occurred to me before that I could ever go there. I watched it through the eyes of the sixties and was completely unaware that Semafor was still alive.
It was only the floods in 2002 that completely destroyed it in Prague’s Karlín. It started to be written about and only then did I realize that I could go to it. So in 2002 I visited it for the first time. And since then I have seen almost all the plays he had or has in his repertoire.
Jiří Šlitr, about whom you wrote a book, was born on February 15, 1924 in Zálesní Lhota near Jilemnice. You were born in Jilemnice. Is it related to your research?
That’s more of a coincidence, but nice. My mom is from the Giant Mountains. I was born in a maternity hospital in Jilemnice, but my roots are in the small village of Jestřabí in the Giant Mountains, about ten kilometers away. Then I grew up in Prague.
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Jiří Šlitr was somewhat similar. He spent the first few years of his childhood in Zálesní Lhota, but mainly in Dolní Branná, but in the 1938s, when the borders began to be redone, he and his family fled from there to the Orlické Mountains. He grew up there, after the war he went to study in Prague and stayed there.
What is fascinating about his personality for you?
She is extremely interesting for many reasons, both artistically and humanly, including how mysterious she is. I first delved again into the memories of all his contemporaries and discovered the surprising thing that nobody actually knew Šlitra very well.
Everyone has two or three funny stories that they experienced with him, everyone will say how hardworking he was, that whenever there was a piano in the room, he would sit next to it and entertain the company, also that he was kind, intelligent and well-traveled, but there somewhere everyone’s memories end. It was as if almost no one could get further, there was an imaginary wall behind which he did not let anyone. Actor Jiří Sehnal said that Šlitr had a knot in his soul.
Photo: Supraphon archive
Jiří Šlitr (left) with his artistic partner Jiří Suchý.
What did you find behind that wall?
In my opinion, Šlitr had four faces. We all know one, the comedian and musician with a stone face and a bowler hat who played at Semafor. Another face is Šlitr in the theater collective, a friend of those with whom he worked professionally, but a friend in the sense of relationships that do not go beyond the work environment.
Only those closest to him knew the third, Šlitra’s family, Jiří Suchý, Miroslav Horníček or his life’s love and partner Sylva Daníčková.
And then there was the fourth Slither, a man whom no one knew, but who occupied the same space in his soul as the three previous ones. Maybe bigger. A closed loner. He said he loves solitude and it’s the only place he feels free. That’s why he returned to it whenever he could.
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It is related to the fact that he also had a number of secrets. There are, for example, children that no one knew about. Neither his family nor Jiří Suchý. He did not reveal his inner wishes to anyone. When he succeeded, he didn’t brag, when something bothered him, he didn’t confide. He generally didn’t talk much, he experienced everything only within himself, he was simply mysterious.
He is usually said to have had one child, a daughter, Dominica. How many children do you know?
I think we will only know the exact number at some point in the future. His daughter Dominika is actually well-known today, manages the estate, accepts awards for her father and the like. But it has been about five years since an article was published in a newspaper about the fact that Šlitr had not only her, but also a son, Peter.
I read it then and thought it was some kind of nonsense. Of course, there are more people who are more in-depth with Šliter and Semafor, and we mostly know each other. We thought that we would probably already know such a fundamental thing. Moreover, the article was not published in a serious press, it was a weekly TV program. In short, I put it out of my mind.
Photo: Supraphon archive
Jiří Šlitr (right) with Miroslav Horníček at a ball in the Prague Repro.
While writing the book Doctor Klavír, I thought to myself that I should check this information after all. I contacted the editor who wrote the article, and she not only convinced me that it was true, but also introduced me to the man. Or more precisely, she connected us and we made a meeting.
I wondered if we would know each other, after which Jiří Šlitr came. His son Petr is incredibly similar to him. And he is an extremely nice person who just didn’t follow his father’s path, he didn’t devote himself to any artistic field. He told me how his mother met Jiří Šliter.
It was at a time when Šlitr’s face was not yet so famous. He was just starting to play in Semafor, for which he had only composed songs until then. On a trip to Jindřichov Hradec, he met a girl Jana, spent the night with her and then left for Prague. Jana gave birth to a blond son in nine months, but since she was married, she simply let it flow.
But as it happens in life, everything finally broke. She divorced, was left alone with her son and did not say anything to Šlitra. He didn’t know about his son at all. Only in 1969, about four months before his death, a friend took her to Semafor and again introduced her to Šlitra, whom he knew. He didn’t recognize her after all these years and made a magical faux pas. He asked her out again. Only then did she explain to him that they were a bit further together.
Responsible. He tried to get involved in her life and fix things. But as I said, it was just before his death. Petr told me that he did not remember him much, after all, he was five years old when he met him. Naturally, he didn’t have many memories left, only a few letters and drawings.
Did you discover anything else of note?
Mr. Suchý let me into their correspondence. I think I’m even the first person he’s allowed. It would probably be worth publishing it one day, even if he doesn’t want to for understandable reasons, because there are things in those letters that were not intended for the public after all. Not that it’s shocking, but you usually write letters when you’re in a mood. You are angry with someone, so you take it out on them, you complain.
In a week, it will be washed away, the relationship will be purified and you will move on, but the momentary emotion will remain in that letter. When you publish it as a book, people start looking at the relationship of those people through the eyes of that one moment, which is terribly distorting. But as I say, that’s perfectly natural and there’s really nothing shocking about those letters.
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Much more important is that you get a glimpse behind the scenes of three interesting periods for Semafor. The first is 1958. Šlitr was in Brussels, Semafor did not exist yet, Suchý was founding the Theater Na zábradlí, and in those letters they discussed how they would like to do it. The idea of the future Semaphore is born in them.
The second relates to 1962, when Šlitr and Laterna magika were on tour in Poland and Austria. At that time, the communists took away the Semafor hall in Ve Smečkách Street, they wanted to weaken it by not allowing it to have a solid background. In the letters, the two men figure out what to do to make it work.
The third period is related to Šlitr’s stay in Montreal, Canada in 1967. At that time, Semafor went into a bit of a slump, and his followers even began to outgrow him in popularity. So they looked for a new way. Back then, and the important thing is that it was before the Prague Spring, Šlitr wrote that they had not done any politics so far, and that they could try a political cabaret.
Suchý also thought about it himself and was 100% in favor. In the end, the Last Stand performance was created, thanks to which Semafor once again gained wind in its sails.
Shlitr was never employed in it, he was always only an extern. Why?
There was a rational decision behind everything he did. He and Suchý were an inseparable working pair, they even had an agreement between themselves that none of them would work with another author. But the traffic light at that time could not be a private scene. According to the rules of the time, it had to be covered by an organization for which de facto people worked in it. It was the Enlightenment Talk of Prague 2.
Photo: Kryštof Gráf
Lukáš Berný wrote a book about Jiří Šlitra.
Šlitr thought that Suchý would be their director, but at the same time their employee. This carried the risk that the founders could dictate things to him. However, when Šlitr is not an employee, no one will be able to dictate to him and they will be harder to control as an author couple.
What role did women play in Šlitr’s life?
A big one, but at the same time it’s a topic he didn’t let anyone in on. So I can only speculate. I think that he was extraordinarily attracted to female beauty both artistically and humanly, and he returned to her whenever he could.
Vladimír Hrabánek, an actor and theater director, wrote with exaggeration in his book that any woman who did not climb a tree or jump into the Vltava in front of Šliter was in danger. But he was also very correct, a gentleman, so nothing was ever leaked to the public.
In any case, the female body was one of the main topics of his artistic interest. If in the early years he exhibited pictures from travels, cities, caricatures of personalities and ordinary people, etc., his last exhibition was focused on the female body and eroticism. He liked to paint girls.
Photo: Supraphon archive
Jiří Šlitr (left) and Jiří Suchý in the TV show Semaformates.
Šlitr died at the age of forty-five when he and his eighteen-year-old lover, Jitka Maxová, poisoned themselves with gas in his studio on Wenceslas Square in Prague on December 26, 1969. Have you discovered any new circumstances of their tragic demise?
This is a subject I’m a little afraid of. I don’t want anything tabloidy to flash through my examination of Šlitr’s life. My belief is that it really was an accident and that there was no third party behind it. It’s strange how from time to time there was always someone who felt the need to take it upon themselves. A completely different person each time.
Years later, for example, Jiří Suchý received an anonymous letter in which someone admitted that he was responsible for Šlitr’s death and that it had been weighing on him for decades. The girl’s father was an active StB agent, someone even saw a kind of political vendetta in it.
There are more such revelations, but in my opinion it is all nonsense. I feel more like a human desire to add some mystery to the tragedy.
Šlitr and Maxová died in a way that unfortunately happened to a lot of people. It was rare, but it happened. My mother’s first boyfriend also died like this. After all, the investigation did not prove anything else.
People started coming up with wild theories already then, the police even printed relatively detailed results of the investigation in the daily press under public pressure to calm her down a bit. I truly believe it was a tragic accident.
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2024-02-11 06:11:00
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