Jiřička & Ježek: Fratricide, or Wenceslaus and Boleslaus

The text of Karel Hynek Mácha’s dramatic poem Fratricide, or Wenceslaus and Boleslaus was never published during the poet’s life. In fact, considering its length and incomplete and fragmentary nature, it would have been impossible to publish it at all. The radioart composition Fratricide is the first performance ever of Mácha’s text. If anything, it offers a rough outline of the fragmentary situations, monologues, dialogues, and descriptions contained in the play, divided into a classical play in five acts.

Martin Ježek & Stará Boleslav.JPG

Just as Fratricide is a sketch of the poet’s “mood” – with clear influences of Shakespeare and Byron – the radioart composition is saturated with a mood created by an orchestral and piano performance of works by Romantic composers.

Martin Ježek and I decided to fill in the blank spots in Mácha’s story (which retells, with extreme poetic license, the well-known legend of St. Wenceslaus) using a diverse range of sounds, specifically recordings taken from the Czech Radio archives, interviews with the inhabitants of Stará Boleslav recorded after mass on a dreary Sunday morning and at a nearby supermarket, Vláčil-esque flourishes, and pre-existing radio plays. The fragmentary play and the legend – neither of which is not unlike myth – can take it all. Those blank spots are of fundamental importance, for Mácha uses them to hide historical events from us, thus opening up possibilities for our own interpretations. Using silence, emptiness, and stillness, he stimulates the imagination, which is capable of seeing what is perhaps an all too banal historical fact in a different, far more dramatic light. We have consciously chosen to leave the text unabridged. Not one line has been left out. In fact, there was no need to, since Mácha wrote so few lines – just as befits a Romantic poet with a love for old ruins, fragments of the past.

lukáš jiřička

Lukáš Jiřička