Biography
Waldemar Matuska entered the world in Kosice, Czechoslovakia, on July 2, 1932, and soon ranked among the country’s most prominent pop vocalists of the 1960s. His stature on the concert stage was equaled by parallel achievements in theater and cinema throughout those same years. Beyond the stage and screen, he drew equal attention for his 1986 departure from Communist-controlled Czechoslovakia, undertaken so he could join his wife in Florida. Authorities promptly branded him a moral failure, removed his songs and film scores from circulation, and cleared his recordings from store shelves. Despite the sudden scarcity of his catalog across Europe, he sustained a performing career in the United States, drawing steady crowds among Czech and Slovak expatriates. Following the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and the close of the Cold War, his catalog reappeared in his homeland, welcomed warmly by listeners who had long been deprived of it. He kept issuing new recordings and taking the stage for years afterward, remaining active well into his seventies and delivering a final public performance in Prague to mark his seventy-fifth birthday. Long afflicted by asthma, he succumbed to pneumonia and heart failure in Florida on May 30, 2009, at the age of seventy-six.