Miroslav Venhoda

Miroslav Venhoda ( born April 18, 1915 in Moravské Budějovice, † May 7, 1987 in Prague) was a Czech choir conductor.

Venhoda had during his school days at the music school of his native town lessons with Anna Blatná. From 1930 he was organist and the following year he gained his first experience as a choral conductor with a student choir. In 1934, he joined the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague to study the Czech language, which he completed in 1938. In parallel, he attended lectures at musicological Zdeněk Nejedlý, Josef Hutter, Metod Dolezil Josef Bohuslav Foerster and.

In the years 1938 and 1939, Venhode his training at the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music in Rome continued. On the American model he founded after his return to Prague, the Schola Cantorum, with which he was more than a hundred concerts to its forced dissolution in 1950 and several tours undertook. In addition, he taught, among others music teacher at the Prague Institute and worked as an organist and choirmaster at the church of the Dominican monastery of St. Giles Gilles ( 1940-45 ) and the Monastery Church of the Assumption of the Strahov Monastery ( 1946-50 ). In 1946 he published the textbook Úvod do studia gregoriánského chorálu ( Introduction to the Study of Gregorian Chant ).

Following the forced dissolution of the Schola Cantorum in 1950 Venhoda first worked at a junkyard, to him, a job as a music editor procured the head of Gramofonové závody, Jaroslav Šeda, which he held until 1967. In 1954 he became head of the Children's Choir Hlahol, in Folgwejahr head of the Glagolitic Chamber Choir. In 1957 he handed over the management of the children's choir and was a successor of his teacher Dolezil head of Pěvecké sdružení pražských učitelů ( Chorvereinigung Prague teacher), with whom he worked for a year. During this time, Bohuslav Martinů composed the piece Zbojnící for the choir.

In 1956, the Novi Venhoda pěvci madrigalů a komorní hudby from which Pražští madrigalisté ( Prague Madrigal Singers ), a double quartet of singers and instrumentalists emerged. With the successful ensemble he toured Czechoslovakia and beyond, and for the performances in the stairwell of the National Museum, it was awarded the prize of the city of Prague. Participation in Josquin des Pres Competition 1971 brought the ensemble invitations to two (successful) Kontzerttourneen by the United States.

After retiring from the Prague Madrigalisten Venhoda founded the Společnost per starou hudbu ( Society for Early Music), an association that music amateurs in the theory and practice of early music, introduced for this purpose and annual summer seminars conducted. While preparing for this third seminar cycles 1987 Venhoda died in a car accident. On his 80th birthday in 1995, he was honored with a concert of Prague Madrigal Singers on the steps of the National Museum in Prague.