Ferdinand Havlík (17 June 1928 – 28 October 2013) was a

Czech Czech may refer to: * Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe ** Czech language ** Czechs, the people of the area ** Czech culture ** Czech cuisine * One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus *Czech (surnam ...

composer A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music. Etymology and def ...

, and

clarinet The clarinet is a Single-reed instrument, single-reed musical instrument in the woodwind family, with a nearly cylindrical bore (wind instruments), bore and a flared bell. Clarinets comprise a Family (musical instruments), family of instrume ...

player. In 1959, Havlík and actor

Jiří Suchý Jiří Suchý (born 1 October 1931) is a Czechs, Czech comedian, poet, lyricist, prolific songwriter and occasional film-maker and prose writer. Plenty of his songs have become extremely popular within several successive generations. Currently he ...

co-founded the Semafor musical theater in

Prague Prague ( ; ) is the capital and List of cities and towns in the Czech Republic, largest city of the Czech Republic and the historical capital of Bohemia. Prague, located on the Vltava River, has a population of about 1.4 million, while its P ...

. Havlík also became Semafor's head composer following the death of Jiří Šlitr in 1969. In addition to Semafor, he worked as a film composer and started a

swing band Swing music is a style of jazz that developed in the United States during the late 1920s and early 1930s. It became nationally popular from the mid-1930s. Swing bands usually featured soloists who would improvise on the melody over the arrangement ...

in the 1970s. Born in

Brno Brno ( , ; ) is a Statutory city (Czech Republic), city in the South Moravian Region of the Czech Republic. Located at the confluence of the Svitava (river), Svitava and Svratka (river), Svratka rivers, Brno has about 403,000 inhabitants, making ...

Czechoslovakia Czechoslovakia ( ; Czech language, Czech and , ''Česko-Slovensko'') was a landlocked country in Central Europe, created in 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland beca ...

, in 1928, Havlík died on October 28, 2013, at the age of 85.

References

Czech clarinetists Czech composers Czech musical theatre composers Czech film score composers Czech male film score composers 1928 births 2013 deaths {{CzechRepublic-composer-stub