Oskar Nedbal
Oskar Nedbal was a Czech violist, conductor, and composer, born in Tábor on 26 March 1874. He studied violin and composition at the Prague Conservatory, graduating in 1891; in his final year, he studied with Antonín Dvořák. In 1892, he helped found the Czech Quartet, where he played viola.
From 1896, Nedbal worked actively as a conductor, chiefly with the National Theatre orchestra. In 1902, he conducted the premiere of his first ballet, A Tale of Honza, which was later staged in Vienna as Lazy Hans. After leaving the quartet in 1906, he moved from Prague to Vienna and founded the Vienna Artists' Orchestra, which he led until 1919. The orchestra gave weekly Sunday concerts at the Theater on the Wien, and Nedbal used it to promote Czech music in Austria and elsewhere.
Nedbal also wrote operettas, beginning with The Chaste Barbara in 1910. His later works included Polish Blood (1913), The Winemaker's Bride (1916), The Beautiful Saskia (1917), and Erivan (1918). Polish Blood, with a libretto by Leo Stein based on Alexander Pushkin's story The Squire's Daughter, became especially popular.
He returned to Prague in 1919 and moved to Bratislava in 1923 to become artistic director of the Slovak National Theatre. He remained there until 1930, when an economic crisis brought the theater close to bankruptcy. That December, Nedbal went to Zagreb to conduct a production of A Tale of Honza and died after jumping from a window of the Zagreb Theatre on Christmas Eve. His remains were reburied in Prague in 2006. A theater in Tábor, his birthplace, is named after him.