On Saturday 7 June 2025, Karel Cón, a composer closely associated with the Brno City Theatre, passed away at the age of 73.
Karel Cón was born on 12 September 1951 in Košice; his father was the operetta composer, arranger and radio editor Zdeněk Cón. He studied violin (with Jan Vacek) and composition (with Bohuslav Řehor) at the Brno Conservatory from 1966-1972 and continued to study composition at the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts with Miloslav Ištvan (1972-1977).
His career as a composer focused on scenic and music-dramatic work, characterised by a combination of music imitating historical styles with non-artistic and sometimes even jazz music. At the turn of the 1970s and 1980s he worked in a number of regional theatres across the country, where he wrote incidental music for productions or played in the orchestra.
In the 1980s, he entered into a significant partnership with the puppet-acting troupe of the Naive Theatre in Liberec, where he worked with the biggest stars of Czech children's theatre, Pavel Polák and Markéta Schartová. His compositional début, the puppet musical The Devil, Káča and the Lambs, won the main prize of the Skupova Plzeň festival in 1980 for the Naive Theatre in Liberec. The same prize was also awarded to his musical comedy Turandot the Cruel (1982) and A Krakonoš Tale of Kuba and Káča (1984, special prize for music). His musical comedy About the Faithful Love of Aucassino and Nicoletta was a critical success at the Theatre Youth show in České Budějovice (1982).
In the mid-1980s, after working in theatres in Liberec, Hradec Králové (where he collaborated with prominent puppet theatre director Josef Krofta), Karlovy Vary, Šumperk, Jihlava, Pardubice, Cheb, Uherské Hradiště and Kladno, Karel Cón again established himself in Brno, where he began to work with the National (then still State) Theatre Brno, initially with the drama department and in the early 1990s also with musical theatre, writing several musical fairy tales together with the librettist František Zacharník (e.g. Mowgli and The Proud Princess).
Cón also penned musicals such as Gypsy Fairy Tales or Who is Lord of the Gypsy (1974, premièred by the JAMU Drama Studio in Brno), Beauty Unseen (1982, Naive Theatre Liberec), A Wonderful Place to Be Born (1985, Divadlo Vítězného února in Hradec Králové, now the Klicpera Theatre) and They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1994, JAMU Brno - Studio Marta), in the preparation of which he met Stanislav Mosa, who dramatized the work for the stage, wrote the lyrics and directed it.
Karel Cón was also a prolific composer of chamber, vocal and orchestral works; in addition he was employed, among other things, as the music editor and director of the radio studio in Hradec Králové, and in 1996-2002 he taught composition and music theory at the Brno Conservatory (one of his pupils was the current chief conductor of the MdB, Dan Kalousek).
Karel Cón began working with the Brno City Theatre (then the Mrštík Brothers Theatre) in his second year at the conservatory, when he assisted in Jožka Karen's orchestra; collaboration developed further in 1991, and from 30 January 2004 he became a permanent member of the Brno City Theatre, where he worked on more than fifty productions as conductor, composer, arranger or accompanist (often in several capacities at once). From all these, we should at least mention My Fair Lady (from Zelňák) (1999 and 2022), A World Full of Angels (2000), Cabaret (2003), Hair (2004), If a Thousand Clarinets (2005), Nana (2005), Oliver! (2005), Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (2006), Fiddler on the Roof (2006), Gypsies Go to Heaven ( 2006), Markéta Lazarová (2007), Jánošík or Painted on Glass (2008), The Naked Muse (2010), Birds According to Aristophanes (2010), School of Life (2010), A Well Played Game (2010), Beauty and the Beast (2011), Moses (2011), The Taming of the Shrew (2011), The Full Monty (2013), Promises of Error (2014), A Night at Karlštejn (2014), Heavy Barbora (2014), Johnny Blue (2015), The Sparrow and the Angel (2015), Sold Laughter (2016), Frank V. (2016), Shakespeare in Love (2016), Viki’s Journey Toward Happiness (2017), Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (2017), Romeo and Juliet (2019) and For Nothing (2019).
In 2008, Karel Cón wrote the music for the popular crazy musical fairy tale for the whole family, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and after that regularly collaborated with the author trio of Stanislav Slovák, Jan Šotkovský and Petr Štěpán. As a co-author, he worked with them on original productions created specifically for the summer open air stage of the Brno City Theatre in the Bishop's Court of the Moravian Museum. The world première of the narrative legend with songs Baron Trenck (2012), the comedy with songs about the Brno genius Mendel or The Revolt of the Peas (2015), The Brno Wheel (2017), a musical based on Brno myths and legends, and the historical fresco Napoleon or The Alchemy of Happiness (2021) have been performed here. Together, however, they also created the popular recapitulation leporello Osmyčky ( 2018), which won the main award at the International Theatre Festival Without Borders in Český Těšín and Cieszyn, Poland, with the Broken Curtain. Directed by Stanislav Slovák, Karel Cón also worked on the immortal Czech comedy Men about Town (2021), writing brand new songs, incidental music and arrangements of original film songs, while also assuming the role of conductor.
In 2022, as part of the Dokořán musical theatre festival, he was awarded the annual Bard of Musical Theatre Award by the panel of experts in the Musical-operetta magazine poll. At the same time, an open-air concert entitled Karel Cón 70 was organised to mark his 70th birthday, consisting of songs from many of the above movies and shows, sung by soloists from his home theatre.
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