Vladimír Popelka

* 1932

  • "It was a sad affair because it was a revenge against Marta Kubišová, who on some occasion had welcomed Alexander Dubček personally, and State Security prepared a photo montage of Marta Kubišová as a pornography. They glued her head to some body. Even though the original from which the photomontage had been made was found, it was used as evidence in court, the court asserted its own opinion. And Martha got the worst of it, and the Golden Kids were over. Of course, without Martha, there was no point."

  • "I don't know if Harry Macourek was sitting on the jury at the time, or he was opportunistically already Karel Macourek. I don't know, that's how the names changed. He invited me, asked me what [music] I was playing, what [instrument] I was playing. The competition took place around the time I was playing in the Pardubice Big Band. So he invited me to Prague to the recording studios. He gave me a tour of the building at 12 Vinohradská Street. And the only thing I didn't understand was when he said, 'You have to realize that money is lying everywhere on the road. You just have to know how to pick it up.' This way he was saying how to make a living in this music. I didn't understand it then. But now I know what it's like."

  • "Imagine that they measured our heads at that time, this dimension and that dimension, whether we were eligible for Germanization. And all the school teaching corresponded to that. Some subjects were bilingual, after all, even the public environment was fundamentally bilingual. German was the first language everywhere. I benefited from that. Because years later, when the war ended, I burned all the German textbooks in the garden, but the German that had been poured into [our heads] stayed there, so then when we started going to Germany in the seventies, I dusted it off. Very quickly and it worked."

  • "But after the war there was another thing, a great danger. Every one of us, even me at thirteen, had my own revolver. The Soviet army had emptied many railway carriages full of ammunition, ranging from pistols and rifles, to anti-aircraft missiles near the city cemeteries near the crematorium. And covered it with a fine layer of sand. We boys figured it out, so I would carry home machine gun belts, anti-aircraft missiles, artillery shells. When we couldn't pry it open, the warhead, imagine us ripping a shell like that open with a chisel. Fortunately, it was brass, so it didn't spark. But not all of us were so lucky. Two classmates, one had his fingers blown off, he was a future doctor, so he couldn't think about practising surgery. And the other had his whole forearm blown off. Then he was walking around with a black prosthetic with a hook so he could use that prosthetic arm to carry objects."

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    Hradec Králové, 29.04.2022

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Scouting meant more than belief in God for Vladimír Popelka after the war

A group of scouts was entrusted with guarding German prisoners of war while filling in craters after the bombing of Pardubice airport - Vladimír Popelka, Pardubice, April 1946
A group of scouts was entrusted with guarding German prisoners of war while filling in craters after the bombing of Pardubice airport - Vladimír Popelka, Pardubice, April 1946
zdroj: Witness´s archive

The composer and conductor Vladimír Popelka was born on 22 January 1932 in Pardubice. From early childhood he began to show a talent for music. His musical beginnings were in the East Bohemian ensembles and orchestras of Jan Syrový. After graduating from secondary school he chose to study at the Faculty of Chemical Technology in Pardubice. He devoted himself intensively to music at the same time. He first tried his music arranging skills in Viktor Matěna‘s brass band in Pardubičky. In the post-war years, besides music, scouting also filled his life considerably. In 1949 he became a part of the Melody Club of Oskar Kmoníček in Pardubice. From 1952 onwards, he played the clarinet in the Regional Symphony Orchestra and other East Bohemian ensembles. From 1956 he studied composition privately with Zdeněk Hůla, professor at the Prague Conservatory. In the same year, Vladimír Popelka married Zdenka Hasmanová at the Old Town Hall in Prague. Thirteen years later the couple had a daughter Radka. In 1960, the witness took over the orchestra management from Oskar Kmoníček and began active recording at the Czechoslovak Radio in Hradec Králové. After meeting the bandmaster Mirko Foret, he moved to Brno in 1962. There he became the music editor of Czechoslovak Radio. His colleague in Foret‘s band was the then starting musician Felix Slováček. In 1968, Vladimír Popelka was brought by his friend Bohuslav Ondráček to the Golden Kids band, and in Prague he also worked as a music director for Supraphon publishing company, was a long-time conductor of TOČR (Czechoslovak Radio Dance Orchestra), and after the death of Josef Vobruba in 1982 he became the chief conductor of this dance radio orchestra. In the following years he actively collaborated as a music arranger and composer with leading performers in the field of jazz, swing and pop music. In 2019 he published his own biography, My Life with Music. At the time of the recording in 2022, he was living in Pardubice and partly in Prague.