In the first post war year, my older colleague from the student quartet and I came from Kroměříž to Brno very briefly: he was trying for admission to the conservatory and I quietly envied him. Back then, the conservatory was already housed in its current building, a former German Teachers Institute; Ferda left me waiting in front of it and went in for information with some papers. After a while, he appeared in the company of a dignified-looking man in glasses, to whom he was saying something vehemently; without them noticing me, like peripatetic philosophers they headed towards Lužánky and disappeared around the corner. Ferda returned just in time when I was already determined to go to catch a train back to Kroměříž. He looked a little distracted.
"Where have you been for so long, and why do you have a stupid look?" I asked.
"That was Professor Theodor Schaefer," he said illogically. "He will be my harmony teacher."
"And what did he want?"
"He told me about the circle of fifths and missed five trams, he lives somewhere in Řečkovice."
"You can read everything about the circle of fifths in every manual in ten minutes..."
"Yeah, but all the context..."
That was the context that the professor wanted to at least indicate to his future student; that the thing called harmony is not just a few rules about connecting chords spinning in a circle of fifths, but instead it is a magic intersection of physical laws and exact mathematics and aesthetics, creative imagination and mysterious storylines in the individual human core, in a nutshell reflecting also the development of musical thinking over the last thousand years.
I started to see the professor personally about a year later in harmony lessons at the conservatory. Let it be said that at first he did not seem to me like the aforementioned thinker, but rather as a teacher-pedant. He began by teaching us to write notes – not as balls on sticks, but as part of notation that must be able to provide a sounding idea, no matter how complex at first glance. The rules of this writing seemed unimaginably complicated and mainly unnecessary to us – especially when their disregard was punished by bad marks. I only appreciated them later when in the Philharmonic we had to handle piles of amateurishly copied new pieces from the Czech Music Fund: the more energy needed to be exerted by a musician on decrypting a part, the less energy they have left for the actual performance.
However, each harmony assignment meant working late into the night twice a week. I once complained to the conductor Zbyněk Mrkos when he was somewhat stretching out the evening rehearsal of the Moravian Chamber Orchestra.
"Give it to me, we'll take care of it in one sitting!"
He sat down at the piano and within ten minutes he had composed a very nice song over the given bass; I barely had time to write the chords. At home, when copying it into the neat workbook, I had some doubts but Zbyněk taught harmony in a parallel class after all, so what. Two classes later, Schaefer was giving us back the corrected assignments and he stopped next to me.
"Mr. Beneš," he said with some regret. "I was hoping I would be able to give you a B, but now..." There was a big fat D on it.
In later years, he made his classification system even more elaborate. Bohuš Zoubek, who later became the first horn and finally an excellent director of the Philharmonic, who attended Schaefer's harmony a year after me, tells that during the first meeting the professor informed them about his classification principles: A is deserved by the best works in Czechoslovakia, B by the best at the conservatory and C by the best in the class. In an effort to capture additional classification as fairly as possible, the professor assigned a certain number of points to each misconduct depending on its severity; the final mark was formed by their sum. He, Zoubek, reached a twenty-two as his personal best – and that was still far behind his winning colleague, Bochořák, with his seventy-seven...
As testimony of the personality of Theodor Schaefer, these funny stories would be of no significance, without their counterparts, i.e. the actual results achieved by Schaefer as a teacher. In his classes, since the beginning, I have been able to notice that what – in accordance with the textbook – he lectures, is part of a complex and very thoughtful perspective on music, art and human history in general; this was reflected by the occasional extempore that he would make every now and then, remarks striking with their logical consistency. He seemed to me to be an apostle of mental discipline and iron logic – and I admit that I was curious about his own work.
And I then got to it in the Philharmonic. It impressed me in particular because it managed to avoid the shallows of the then obligatory socialist realism and defend the requirement of demanding intellectual and shaped structures; Schaefer always knew not only what he wrote, but also how he wrote it and why he wrote it like that. He answered the provocative questions of players during recording (why do I have a decrescendo here while others are swelling?) patiently, precisely and mainly convincingly. We therefore recorded mainly the Diathema for Viola and Orchestra, with solos very sensitively applying the sound-sensitive but expressively inimitable instrument – and the Rhapsodic Story inspired by the flyby of the moon by a Soviet probe, a work of the hitherto unknown "space experience". However, the most beautiful experience came later with the recording of the Third Quartet: this extensive composition from the war years is an intimate testimony suitable for a chamber piece and it confirmed to me that with all his iron creative discipline and pedagogical rigour that the professor is, of all the people I have ever met – one of the kindest that ever walked the world.
My initial experience, which I did not understand then, should have told me that: he randomly gave a private hour-long lesson on their extracurricular secrets to an unknown young man who might become one of his students in harmony classes. Many things could perhaps be told about his dedication by his students from the composition class at the Conservatory and JAMU (Pavel Blatný, Jan Duchaň, Ctirad Kohoutek, Alois Piňos, Zdeněk Pololáník, Zdeněk Zouhar) if they are still alive – they represented a generation which, also thanks to their teacher, then came to the attention as the Brno School claiming at the years of regulated creation to belong again to international developments.
Theodor Schaefer was born in Telč on 23 January 1904 and died in Brno on 19 March 1969; 110 years have passed this year since his birth.
