Born in Kromeříž, Moravia, on 28th May 1883, Talich had the classic Czech musical background: his father was a ‘cantor’ who started him on the violin at five. Aged eight, he heard Dvořák perform the Dumky Trio with Ferdinand Lachner and Hanuš Wihan. His violin tutors at the Prague Conservatory (1897-1903) were the best, Jan Marák and Otakar Sevčík. He met his hero Dvořák who, ever thrifty, advised Talich to smoke cheroots rather than cigars to conserve his money. In Berlin he played under Arthur Nikisch and was inspired to conduct but suffered the first of many health crises. He worked in Odessa, Tbilisi, Prague, Ljubljana and Pilsen as both orchestral and opera conductor, taking a year off in 1910 to study in Leipzig (with Reger, Sitt and Nikisch) as well as Milan. He first conducted the Czech Philharmonic in 1917. Wherever he was, he usually organized a string quartet – he said he learnt more from rehearsing as guest viola with the legendary Bohemian Quartet than from any other activity. He became friendly with the ensemble’s second violinist, the composer Josef Suk, and was preparing the CPO for the première of Suk’s symphonic poem Ripening in 1918 when the manager burst in to say that the Czechs had now achieved their dream of a republic, named Czechoslovakia. ‘That’s all very well,’ Talich typically replied, ‘but we have to rehearse.’ By 1919 he was chief conductor but the
orchestra, founded in 1896 by Dvořák and conducted in its early years by his pupil Oskar Nedbal, was not in the best of order. Talich built it up with endless rehearsing and by 1922 was confident enough to take the CPO on a tour of Italy. He loved Britain, which he first visited in 1923 as a guest conductor: he conducted the Scottish Orchestra a good deal (1925-27) and he gave the London première of Holst’s Egdon Heath in 1928. He also headed the Konsertföreningen Orchestra in Stockholm (1927-34), in fact he gave 254 concerts in Sweden, leading to a breakdown in his health. He recovered and from 1935 was in charge of the National Theatre in Prague, in addition to his post with the CPO, but began to delegate some of the touring work with the orchestra to the younger Rafael Kubelík and George Szell.
When Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Germans, Talich was placed in an impossible position. Although he had given up the CPO in 1941, Josef Goebbels made him ‘an offer he couldn’t refuse’, ordering him to tour Germany with the orchestra. Talich insisted on taking Má Vlast, banned by the German authorities in Czechoslovakia, and the visit was so successful that this music, almost sacred to Czechs, was again permitted in Prague. Even so, in 1945 Talich was accused of collaboration. He walked thirty kilometres in twelve hours from his home in Beroun to Prague, in the hope of conducting Libuše to mark the end of the war, only to be barred from his own opera house. His chief accuser, the critic Zdeneˇk Nejedlý, hated Talich because he felt that the Dvořák faction in Czech music had unfairly supplanted the Smetana faction. Although Talich was a magnificent conductor of Smetana’s music, including the operas, he was identified with the‘Dvořák wing’ because of his closeness to Suk and Viteˇslav Novák. He was absolved of all charges and returned to the National Theatre, also making his last foreign trip, to Stockholm, in 1946; but he was still prevented from working with the CPO, so formed his own Czech Chamber Orchestra. When the Communist take-over came in 1948, he was accused yet again and found that his enemy Nejedlý had even more political power than before. Dismissed from the National Theatre, he had to disband his chamber orchestra and, like Nedbal in the 1920s, was exiled to Bratislava, where he built up the Slovak Philharmonic (1949-52). Meanwhile the Communist government in Prague, though making it difficult for him to conduct the CPO in public, allowed him to record with the orchestra, as he was the only conductor in the country with an international reputation (Kubelík had fled in 1948). By the mid-1950s the pressure was off Talich but he was a broken man. He last conducted the CPO in concert in 1954 and in the studio the following year. He died at Beroun on 16th March 1961.
