When he kicked me out of medical studies, the party profiler said: Remember that a sewer will always be a sewer, even if they poured perfume into it
Stáhnout obrázek
Composer PhDr. Leon Juřica was born on 2 May 1935 in Orlová. His mother Božena Juřicová, née Valicová, was highly educated for her times. His father František Juřica (1904-1995) was a miner, later a gatekeeper and courtyard manager at Evžen Mine. Already as a child Leon had an affinity for music; after the war he also joined an Orel (meaning Eagle, a Catholic sports movement) Scout troop. His father could not accept the political development after the Communist coup in February 1948, and so he established an illegal four-man committee of the People‘s Party. However, the committee members were arrested in 1958. With his father convicted, Leon was expelled from his studies of medicine at the Faculty of Medicine in Olomouc. He then tried his hand at several menial jobs, such as that of a coke oven worker at Karolina Coke Plant, a worker at metalworks cooperative in Rychvald, or an absentee catcher at Antonín Zápotocký Mine in Lazy. He later found employment as an archivist at Czechoslovak Radio‘s Ostrava branch and gradually started cooperating with the radio‘s music department. He completed a distance course in musicology in Brno. He then began teaching at Janáček Conservatoire in Ostrava. His most famous works are his children‘s operas and compositions, he also wrote a melodrama based on the last letter of Milada Horáková. His opera Žáby (Frogs), which lasts two minutes, earned him a place in the Guinness Book of Records. Leon Juřica cooperated with Ostrava University, he was the chairman of the Ostrava branch of the Association of Music Artists, and a professor emeritus of Janáček Conservatoire in Ostrava. PhDr. Leon Juřica died on 31 August 2014 in Orlová.
