Jiří Trnka and Václav Trojan’s Bajaja: Czech myths and memories, from animation to the stage and beyond

From 1945 to 1965 Václav Trojan, one of the foremost Czech composers of the 20th century, collaborated with master animator Jiří Trnka on a series of stop-motion animated films, which later gained a reputation as some of the finest outcomes of Czech art in the aftermath of the Second World War. As musicologist Jan Vičar argued, Trojan’s career was deeply marked by his partnership with Trnka. The style of Trnka’s puppet pantomimes allowed Trojan to achieve a synthesis of his eclectic interests, which encompassed folk songs, jazz and blues influences, incidental music for radio shows, neoclassical symphonic and chamber works, opera and music for children. According to composer and writer Karel Šrom, Trojan and Trnka did for Czech cinema what Bedřich Smetana did for the Czech musical theatre: they created a highly peculiar dramatic language, true to the spirit of their time as well as to the cultural roots of their nation. Trojan kept reworking his film music into new concert pieces well after Trnka’s demise. The experimental features of those arrangements testify a strenuous research on musical dramaturgy, which transfigured Trnka’s poetics and their take on Czech myths and folklore. The article studies how Trojan’s interpretation of Trnka’s style perpetuated and enriched the image of the mythic past of the Czech nation constructed by their animated films, by referring to several compositions related with Trnka’s film Bajaja (1950).