Word: talich
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...National Theater. At the concert's end, Czechs and Germans began applauding. After a while the Germans stopped; the Czechs went on clapping stolidly - not cheering, just beating their hands together as if they would never stop. The Germans looked baffled and angry. Finally, Conductor Vaclav Talich held up the score, kissed it and, with an expansive gesture, presented it to the audience. It was Smetana's Má Vlast (My Country}, a cycle of symphonic poems breathing Czech patriotism; its last section tells of a glorious Czech liberation...
...Germans did not dare arrest Talich for his act of defiance; he played all through the occupation and through Czechoslovakia's second liberation. Last week Talich, who made the Czech Phil harmonic Orchestra world-famous, was fired...
Conductor Talich's dismissal was a measure of public order as natural for a Communist as it would be for a New York cop to take a pistol out of a maniac's hands. Once in power, the Communist de fines crime as whatever may undermine him; he wants to stamp out "crime" be fore it has been committed. This kind of preventive policing is more concerned with thoughts, attitudes, feelings, than it is with overt acts...
...expanding power in the world today. It moves in wherever a society decays or falters or listens to fools, and destroys what is left. Patriots like Nikola Petkoff in Bulgaria are shot. Compromisers like Jan Masaryk are driven (by Communist hands or their own despair) through windows. Men like Talich, who can express what the people feel, are silenced. Beria's march will continue until the brains, the dollars, the power, and a reawakened moral force of the West stop...
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