Concert at the End of Summer

František Vláčil resumed his collaboration with screenwriter and author Zdeněk Mahler at the end of the 1970s. The result of the rekindled partnership was the unconventional biographical film portrait of Antonín Dvořák, Koncert na konci léta (Concert at the End of Summer, 1979). Instead of producing a descriptive biography or telling the story of a given part of Dvořák’s life, the authors opted for a complicated narrative structure based on retrospective depictions. Ageing Dvořák recalls a deeply painful point amid the relationships of his life: his unreciprocated love for the actress Josefina Čermáková and his eventual marriage to her younger sister Anna. A family conflict had threatened to dissolve the promising future of the fledgling composer after he criticised a composition by Josefína’s influential brother-in-law Kent... Vláčil turned to Josef Vinklář to play the colossus of Czech music. The part of the incompetent and manipulative Kent, who for Dvořák nearly amounts to an “Amadeus-type” Salieri, is played by František Němec.