Karel Gott

Karel Gott (14 July 1939 – 1 October 2019) was a Czech singer, considered the most successful male singer in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. He was voted the country's best male singer in the annual Český slavík (Czech Nightingale) national music award 42 times, most recently in 2017.

He achieved considerable success in the USSR and the German-speaking countries, where he was known as "the Golden Voice of Prague",

Early life Gott was born in Plzeň in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic),

Early career In 1958, he was an unsuccessful participant in an amateur singing contest in the Prague Slavonic House, entitled "Looking for New Talent", One of his best-known hits was the title song to the anime series Maya the Honey Bee. In the years following the fall of the communist regime in 1989, Gott was often confronted by journalists for this act, however he denied any wrongdoing for many years, saying that he did not know what he was signing. In his posthumously published autobiography My Way to Happiness (2021), Gott expresses regret writing that "[The anticharta] was a manipulation of all the members within the music industry. And I admit that to this day I am deeply troubled that I got so foolishly tricked."

On 3 May 1977, Gott was awarded the title of Merited Artist, the student activist who killed himself by self-immolation as a protest against the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in January 1969. The song was recorded in 1977 while Soviet troops were still present in the country. In 1983, Gott was awarded the Gold Medal of Hermann Löns in Munich, Germany, for his role in the development of German traditional song.

In 2009 he was awarded a Distinguished Merit Medal by the Czech state. In May 2014 Gott released his autobiography Zwischen zwei Welten (Between two worlds).

Personal life

He had two daughters (Dominika and Lucie) from different former relationships. He married his last wife, , in January 2008 in Las Vegas, and they had two daughters, Charlotte (born in April 2006) and Nelly (born in May 2008).

During the 1990s, Gott began to focus on painting. The first exhibition of his paintings took place in 1992, at the Prague Christ Child Gallery, and his work was since exhibited in Berlin, Moscow, Munich, Cologne, Vienna, and Bratislava.

Health problems and death

In October 2015, Gott was diagnosed with cancer of the lymph nodes. On 18 March 2016, it was reported in the media that he had beaten cancer, but in September 2019, he developed acute leukemia, due to which he cancelled all upcoming appearances and started outpatient treatment. He died at around 11:30 pm on 1 October 2019 at his home in Bertramka, aged 80, with his family around him, and his death was reported the following morning.

All major television stations in the Czech Republic featured breaking news announcements and commemorative programs in their schedules, and Czech Radio and Radio Impuls also adapted their scheduled broadcasts. At an extraordinary meeting on 2 October, the government approved a state funeral and declared the day of the funeral a national day of mourning. A day later, Prime Minister Andrej Babiš withdrew the proposal for a state funeral, saying that it should only be a funeral with state honours, as in the case of Otakar Motejl in 2010. At the presidential chateau in Lány, the Presidential flags were flown at half-mast as a sign of mourning, but according to the former proto-logger Jindřich Forejt, this violated the law on the use of state symbols of the Czech Republic.

A public commemorative ceremony was held at 8am on Friday, 11 October 2019, in Prague's Žofín Palace. Gott's fans travelled from around the Czech Republic and Germany and waited for several hours in a five-kilometre queue to the palace. The ceremony ended at midnight, by which time around 49,000 mourners had paid respects at his coffin. The funeral mass with state honours was held at Saint Vitus Cathedral on Saturday, 12 October, presided over by the Archbishop of Prague, Cardinal Dominik Duka. A day of national mourning was declared on the same day. The requiem guests included many famous Czech singers, actors, and sportsmen, as well as President Miloš Zeman and Prime Minister Babiš.

Discography