What's in a Prague street name

Originally published on Twitter on 6 September 2022.

Ježkova was built in 1896.

Until 1940, and again from 1945 to 1947, this was Nerudova, after Jan Neruda (1834-91), journalist, author, poet, and main figure of the Májovci, a group of Czech novelists and poets inspired by the works of Mácha, Havlíček and Erben.

From 1940 to 1945, the street was Voříškova, after Jan Václav Voříšek (1791-1825), a composer and pianist whose career took place in Vienna.

Jaroslav Ježek was born in 1906 and grew up on nearby-ish Všehrdova, now part of Rokycanova (https://whatsinapraguestreetname.com/2022/11/19/prague-3-day-19-rokycanova/).

Suffering from cataracts as an infant, he attended a school for the blind. In 1923, he was accepted to Prague Conservatory, where he studied composition.

This enabled him to get in touch with Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich, with whom he found a winning formula: his music, combined with Voskovec and Werich’s witty lyrics, was a huge success.

As part of this trio, Ježek became the composer and conductor of the Osvobozené divadlo (Prague Free Theatre), specialising in jazz.

The Theatre was closed down in 1938 after a series of anti-Nazi plays. Incredibly, we have footage of Werich and Voskovec on stage in that year, from the 1939 film Crisis: A Film of the Nazi Way (some parts have English subtitles):

With the Nazi occupation, all three artists fled to New York City. Ježek died there of chronic kidney disease on New Year’s Day 1942. He was 35.

In 1947, his remains were transferred to Czechoslovakia; he’s buried in the Olšany Cemetery.

The Jaroslav Ježek Conservatory, specialising in contemporary music, is in Prague 4: https://kjj.cz.

One of the trio’s most famous songs is Tmavomodrý svět (Dark-blue world), written in 1929 and used to great effect in Jan Svěřák’s film of the same name in 2001:

Tak, kam se poděl můj doposud dokonalý zrak?
Na všem leží neproniknutelně modrý mrak, tmavomodrý mrak.
Sám nevím ani, kudy jíti mám a kam,
A to, že na hlavě tmavomodrý klobouk mám, to je právě klam.

So, where did my hitherto perfect eyesight go?
Over everything lies an impenetrable blue cloud, a dark blue cloud.
I don’t even know where to go and where,
And the fact that I have a dark blue hat on my head is just an illusion.

A complete retrospective of the trio’s work is available: https://www.supraphonline.cz/album/227369-osvobozene-divadlo-i-vii-1929-1938.

And, for completists, how lovely that these two are next to each other in Hlubočepy (Prague 5).