Zdeněk Liška

Zdeněk Liška (1922–1983) has the reputation of a musician who dedicated all his talent in the service of cinematic art. Liška graduated from the Prague Conservatoire and immediately took up an offer from the film studios in Zlín, where he devoted himself to the creation of music for advertisements and short films. He quickly mastered the specific craft of composing for the screen and built up a permanent collaborative link with film-makers Hermína Týrlová and Karel Zeman. He gained prominence for his feature-film compositions in the 1950s, when he also started working with film-makers of his own generation, František Vláčil, Karel Kachyňa, or Vladimír Sís. During the 1960s he became perhaps the most sought-after Czech film composer, and he composed music to many of the key works of the period, special mention might be made of Liška’s congenial complementation of the visual poetics of František Vláčil, serving as his “court” composer for the films Holubice (The Dove), Ďáblova past (The Devil’s Trap), Marketa Lazarová, Údolí včel (Valley of the Bees), and Adelheid. In the 1970s he upheld and further augmented his domestic supremacy and extended his repertoire with a large number of television works. In the closing of his career in 1983, Liška’s oeuvre comprised more than 140 feature films, supplemented with an enormous amount of music for shorts, animated films, or theatre. It is thus no wonder that the whole post-war period of Czech film music is sometimes termed “the era of Zdeněk Liška”. (Jan Cernicek)