A Joke on Us

[Geoffrey Chew]

On Fri, 29 Apr 2005, Benjamin Sher wrote:

> At a party Jan Masaryk was prevailed upon by the hostess to play the
> violin. He graciously accepted the invitation and played a Czech
> nursery song, to rapturous applause from all present. He left the
> party with a Czech friend, who wanted to know why on earth he had been
> asked to play the violin. Masaryk explained:
>
> "Oh, it's all very simple -- don't you see? They have mixed me up with
> my father; they mixed him up with Paderewski. And they mixed the piano
> up with the violin."

I'd love to know the date of that.  JM was, I think, being a little
over-modest and, maybe, maligning the hostess for playful effect. He was
apparently well-known for playing (I think piano, admittedly!) and singing
at musical evenings, and for improvising accompaniments to folk songs;
he'd been brought up to that by his mother, the American Charlotte
Garrigue Masarykova [whose Protestantism, I think, has something to do
with T.G. Masaryk's take on Cyril and Methodius and on the Hussites, by
the way, if we're to refer to another thread, quite apart from TGM's
arguments with Josef Pekar and Jaroslav Goll concerning the historiography
of the Czech nation]. In a highly improbable collaboration with that awful
Stalinist, the composer Vaclav Dobias, Jan Masaryk edited a collection of
Czech folk songs for voice and piano, published by the Czechoslovak
Ministry of Information in 1948; it was immediately withdrawn and
suppressed, republished in 1968 and then once more immediately withdrawn
and destroyed under normalization.  It was again republished in 1989; as
the third preface says, "the fate of these few songs resembles, not a
little, the history of the last few decades [in the Czech lands]".

 Prof. Geoffrey Chew
 Music Department, Royal Holloway, University of London
 Egham Hill, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, UK
 Internet: chew at sun.rhul.ac.uk

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