She was perhaps the first female star in the history of Czech rock. Yvonne Přenosilová, one of the most famous singers of the 1960s, died at the age of 76. She sang the hits Boots against love, Roň slyz, Klípek and So empty. After the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, she went into exile, ending her career.
About death informed Czech Radio, with whose former Radio Free Europe the singer collaborated in emigration. Her departure was confirmed by former colleague Radko Kubičko on the broadcast of Radiožurnál.
She was born in Prague to Jiří Přenosil, an Austrian and Czech officer, who served in the British army during the Second World War, spent some time in a communist prison in the 1950s, and was subsequently promoted to general only after the revolution. “My father wanted to have a boy and raised me accordingly,” Přenosilová recalled. “I didn’t play with dolls, and my parents came to my mother so I wouldn’t spank their children. As a schoolgirl, my father often beat me with a rubber belt from a washing machine that he made himself. I used to have such intestines all over my body that I proudly showed them for a crown,” she said .
photo="" data-placeholder="Yvonne%20P%u0159enosilov%E1%2C%20Karel%20H%E1la%2C%201966" guid="9453597650b211ee8d680cc47ab5f122" name="template" value="athletics">She graduated from 12-year-old school in Libni, she started her career by auditioning for the Semafor theater, but she was not accepted there. Her back then rendition of the song Malagueña noted Miloš Forman in the film Konkurs from 1963. According to the critic Jiří Černý, at that time Přenosilová was listening to Radio Luxembourg, from which she picked up “a bit of Elvis Presley, but even more Hana Hegerová from records”. Her talent was recognized by traffic light composer and director Karel Mareš.
photo="" data-placeholder="Yvonne%20P%u0159enosilov%E1%2C%20Karel%20H%E1la%2C%201966" guid="9453597650b211ee8d680cc47ab5f122" name="template" value="athletics">Thanks to him, she soon started singing with the group Olympic, in February 1964, as a sixteen-year-old, she recorded the Czech version of the song I’m Sorry from Brenda Lee’s repertoire, called by lyricist Jiří Štaidl Shed tears. It has already become a hit, although Přenosilová caused embarrassment for some critics with her singing performance.
photo="" data-placeholder="Yvonne%20P%u0159enosilov%E1%2C%20Karel%20H%E1la%2C%201966" guid="9453597650b211ee8d680cc47ab5f122" name="template" value="athletics">Jiří Černý was one of those who defended it. “The way she sings cannot be judged by the standards of a traditional singing school. The voice itself has nothing to do with the larkish sounds of child choir soloists. It is as if we are listening to the singing screams of a gymnasium full of girls, harsh and soft at the same time. This voice is predatory and raw Therefore, the style in which she sings cannot be different,” Černý wrote about her in the book Singers without a conservatory.
Yvonne Přenosilová in Prague’s Lucerna on December 6, 1989, when she returned from exile. | Photo: CTK
Přenosilová also completed a three-week stay in London, where she sang, among other things, on the radio and recorded a record for the company there with the single When My Baby Cries/Come On Home for the renowned Pye label. However, the recording failed.
From the fall of 1965, after returning to Czechoslovakia, the singer was a member of the newly established Apollo Theater, where Karel Gott and Karel Hála performed. However, it did not enjoy popularity for long. Her promising career was ended by the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops into Czechoslovakia in August 1968. As one of the first signatories of the manifesto Two thousand words from June of the same year, due to which, according to critic Jiří Černý, she was threatened by anonymous people, she emigrated already six days after the invasion.
“On August 27, 1968, she headed through Austria and Italy to London. But the working acquaintances from 1965 were still there. The English commentator David Frost introduced her at a concert in support of oppressed countries, and then she left for her parents in Munich. It didn’t even work out for her as a musician there,” wrote Černý.
According to him, the Federal Republic of Germany at that time was improving relations with Moscow even at the expense of anti-communist exiles, and none of the three singles that Přenosilová released with the company Ariola under the pseudonym Yvonne Silová took off. “At twenty-one, you don’t think. I didn’t think about the fact that I might not sing again. It was an instinct for self-preservation,” she recalled after years of emigration.
She spent the next more than a quarter of a century in Munich, where she worked as an airport ground steward, then married a lawyer with the noble title of Baron von Stuckman and gave birth to a son, Max, with whom she stayed at home. When he grew up, around 1987, he started working with Radio Free Europe. “Karel Kryl came up with the idea to work in ‘Svobodka’. I always claimed that I enjoy editorial work more than singing,” she said.
Yvonne Přenosilová sings the song So empty. Petr Rada wrote the Czech text to Pietro Soffici’s music. Photo: ČTK | Video: Supraphon
She came to Czechoslovakia immediately after the borders were opened in December 1989. Although she claimed at the time that she would not return to Bohemia permanently, when the Free Europe relocated to Prague, she moved with it. She divorced her German husband and the son stayed in Munich with his father. “I regretted it terribly, but at the same time I fulfilled my resolution to respect my son’s decision,” she admitted.
Although Přenosilová did not follow the path of one of the most popular Czech singers years later, she tried to imitate some of the acts from her youth. For example, in 1999 she added another signature to the Two Thousand Words manifesto from August 1968, this time under the declaration of the Impuls 99 civic initiative. In her twenties, she played a hag in the Apollo Theater, three decades later she became a hag again, this time in the musical Rusalka.
Later, she had her own show on various radio stations and toured the Czech Republic with it. In addition to singing, she performed as a presenter.
She lived in Žižkov, Prague, and called her apartment, which she practically did not leave in recent years due to illness, the Cape of Good Hope. She didn’t change anything in him. “No one believes me, but I really don’t listen to any music at home. When I come home in the evening, I turn on the debilizer, as Karel Kryl used to say on the TV, so that someone would talk to me from afar. The neighbors had fun with me – they had to listen to arias from Rusalka all year long . The walls can’t bear my scream,” she wrote in 1999 in Reflex magazine.
Video: Yvonne Přenosilová sings Boots against love
Boots against love, one of Yvonne Přenosilová’s hits from the 1960s. The Czech text was written by Eduard Krečmar to the music of Lee Hazlewood. | Video: Supraphon
