Karel Gott, the acclaimed Czech performer known as the "golden voice of Prague" and the "Sinatra of the East," maintained a six-decade career in singing, acting, and painting that produced hundreds of albums and compilations before his death in October 2019.
His breakthrough arrived in the early 1960s with an initial solo single—a Czech rendering of Henry Mancini’s “Moon River”—after which he explored styles ranging from pop, rock, and country to opera and swing. Fluent in Russian, English, German, and Italian in addition to his native Czech, he commanded enormous audiences throughout Eastern Europe while also winning listeners in Western Europe and the United States.
Born July 14, 1939, in Pilson, Gott relocated to Prague at age six. Although he first aimed to become an electrician, an interest in jazz prompted him to begin singing publicly in the late 1950s. By 1960 he had entered opera and voice training at the Prague Conservatory under Konstantin Karenin, who urged him to value both popular music and the classical repertoire.
His earliest release, a 1962 duet with Vlasta Pruchova issued on Supraphon Records, preceded his first solo single, the aforementioned Czech version of “Moon River,” which appeared the next year. After leaving his formal studies at the conservatory, he swiftly built a career as a singer and composer.
In 1967 he joined Polydor/Deutsche Grammophon, the label that would support him for the remainder of his professional life, during which he released over 100 albums and sold an estimated 50 to 100 million copies worldwide.
A lymph-node cancer diagnosis in 2015 did not interrupt his stage appearances or recording activity. Acute leukemia developed in the summer of 2019, however, and proved fatal that October. Earlier that year he issued his final single, the duet “Srdce nehasnou” (“Hearts Will Go On”) with his daughter Charlotte.
