Had he not died in 1983, yesterday would have been the 86th birthday of the great Zdeněk Liška, unarguably the greatest of all Czech film-score composers, and someone who for my money ranks alongside the likes of Bernard Herrmann and Ennio Morricone for his instantly recognisable blend of tireless innovation (both musically and sonically) and utter appropriateness to the task in hand.
Partly because he wrote almost exclusively for Czech film and theatre, and partly because the current copyright holder refuses to let his music be used in any context other than the original one (as the Quay Brothers found out the hard way when they initially edited their 2003 film The Phantom Museum to extracts from Liška’s back catalogue but found that this version was legally unreleasable), he’s nowhere near as well known as he should be, though Jan Švankmajer fans will certainly be familiar with his work: after they first worked together on the film Johanes doktor Faust (1958) and at the Laterna Magika theatre in the early 1960s, Liška scored the vast majority of Švankmajer’s films from 1966’s Punch and Judy (Rakvičkárna) to 1979’s The Castle of Otranto (Otrantský zámek).
These films alone provide a terrific showcase of Liška’s range, from the creaky theatre barrel-organ of Punch and Judy and Don Juan (Don Šajn, 1969), the percussive piano triplets that give The Flat (Byt, 1968) a sense of propulsive urgency, the eight-part dance suite that does at least as much as Švankmajer’s associative editing to bring the long-dead animal exhibits of Historia Naturae, Suita (1967) to uncanny life, the mournful jazz-tinged Jacques Prévert setting that replaced the original banned soundtrack of The Ossuary (Kostnice, 1970), the wordless vocal line with a hint of the nursery rhyme in Jabberwocky (Zvahlav aneb Šatičky Slaměného Huberta, 1971) and the brass fanfares of Leonardo’s Diary (Leonardův deník) and The Castle of Otranto. If you have the recent BFI edition of his complete shorts, there’s an option on disc one to play just the Liška-scored films – in fact, the whole “themed programmes” idea developed from this single ambition.
But Švankmajer’s work formed a tiny part of Liška’s hugely prolific output, and I’m very conscious that I’ve only just scratched the surface. Two of his more accessible scores are the gorgeous, swooning opulence of Juraj Herz’ The Cremator (Spalovač mrtvol, 1968) with its incense-tinged a cappella accompaniment to the ecstatic ramblings of the film’s demented protagonist, and the even more extraordinary score for František Vláčil’s masterpiece Marketa Lazarová, which sounds like an unholy collision between Leoš Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass, medieval plainchant and the sonic innovations of American eccentric Harry Partch (like Partch, Liška built his own instruments when conventional ones failed to match the sounds in his head). And for Jindřich Polák’s sci-fi opus Icarus XB-1 (Ikarie XB-1, aka Voyage to the End of the Universe) he proved himself just as adept when it came to electronics, his score here having more than a hint of Juan Garcia Esquivel’s then-contemporaneous space-age bachelor pad albums.
But, as his IMDB filmography reveals, there’s much, much more, and one of the perennial pleasures of exploring 1960s and 1970s Czech cinema comes from the almost immediate realisation, usually well before the onscreen credit confirms it, that another Liška revelation is in prospect. And given the current inaccessibility of many of the titles, it’s a wellspring I’m unlikely to exhaust any time soon.
(Sadly, there’s very little information available online (or indeed elsewhere) about Liška in English, but a reasonably hefty Czech-language biography can be found here. Sadly, my own Czech has atrophied to the point where it doesn’t stretch much beyond ‘Happy Birthday’, the title of this post).