Bust of Emil Hlobil from Vyšehrad Cemetery

Emil Hlobil (11 October 1901 – 25 January 1987) was a Czech composer and music professor based in Prague.

Biography

Hlobil was born in Veselí nad Lužnicí, but lived most of his life in Prague. Between 1924 and 1930 he studied at the Prague Conservatory under Josef Suk and Jaroslav Křička, and taught music and composition at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts.^[1] He also taught at the Prague Conservatory (1941–58) before moving to the Academy. He married Czech painter Marie-Hlobilová Mrkvičková, and after World War II they bought a cottage in the Krkonoše mountains as a summer home.^[2] Hlobil died in Prague in 1987.

Music

Hlobil composed in the Romantic tradition of the Nineteenth Century, almost untouched by modern trends,^[3] which was possibly a reflection of the politics of the time and place.^[4] A review by Gramaphone in 1961 described him as follows:

Emil Hlobil, 60-year-old professor of composition at the Prague Conservatoire, has the most original creative imagination of our twelve composers, I would say. In his Quartet for harpsichord and string trio (1944) [sic], he uses a fairly simple diatonic idiom, but shows a Janacek-like boldness in his apparently inconsequential changing of the subject, his close working-out of a few motives, and his ability to create fascinating textures. Although his self-made technique is not nearly as successful as Janacek's—his material does not stand up to so much repetition, and he sometimes falls into empty naïveté (codetta of first movement and much of the finale), this refreshingly imaginative work makes one want to hear more recent examples from his long list of compositions.^[5]

Hlobil's works include operas, symphonies, concertos and string quartets in the Czech Impressionist tradition of Suk and Vítězslav Novák.

Selected works

Notable students

• Milan Kymlička
• Luboš Fišer
• Ladislav Kubík
• Otomar Kvěch
• Ivana Loudová
• Zuzana Růžičková
• Viktor Kalabis
• Jindřich Feld
• Jan Hammer^[6]

References