On day two, we settled in for lunch at the Mucha Restaurant, which was celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birthday of the establishment’s namesake, the famed Czech artist, Alphonse Mucha. His name did not ring a bell but his work was immediately recognizable. This was the guy who drew the artwork for JOB rolling papers. I’d seen his work a million times.
As we waited for lunch to be served, it couldn’t help but notice that the placemat in front of me provided with an English rendition of Mucha’s fairytale life story. I was fascinated to learn about his pioneering work in Paris during the peak of the Art Nouveau movement in the late 1800s and his return in 1920 to the newly formed Czechoslovakia where he would help launch the nation with contributions of artwork for currency and stamps. He would spend the last nineteen years here working on his masterpiece – a twenty-piece, painted mural history of the Slav people - appropriately titled, The Slav Epic.
As I reached the final paragraph, it was as if a needle had been carelessly dragged across the vinyl surface of an old LP record.
“In 1939, Mucha is among the first to be arrested by the Gestapo when the Germans invade Czechoslovakia. He is allowed to return home but his health is impaired by the ordeal. On July 14, Mucha dies in Prague and is buried at Vyšehrad cemetery.”
A few days earlier I was hiking in the hills of my wife's hometown just outside the northeast Czech city of Opava. The vicinity had come under heavy Allied bombing during the final days of World War II to rid her from foreign occupation. When we came to rest at the village pub, I pointed at the ceiling at what looked like a 500 year-old collection of flies.
"How do you say that in Czech?" I asked.
My wife laughed and out of her mouth came the word, "Mucholapka."
The word loosely translates as flycatcher and also shares a reference to nature’s meat-eating plant the Venus Fly Trap.
I am told that the word has Polish roots which would not be a stretch for Opava lies on the border of Poland. I loved the word. I like the way it began on my pursed lips and rolled off of the tip of my tongue MOOKOLAAAPKAAA. Very punk rock. I told my wife that my next band would be called MUCHOLAPKA. But now here in Prague, the word began morphing itself into something new. MUCHA …. MUCHALAPKA.
The fly.
I decided it was great fodder for a musical in the spirit of The Producers or maybe the next great Eastern European rock opera. My intro to Nazis came in the form of the cast of Hogan’s Heroes with Colonel Klink and Sergeant Shultz. The word had conjured up some sort of comic-tragic imagery all wrapped up in one single bad pun, MUCHALAPKA. I couldn’t wait to get back home to the states and begin my detective work. I could not wait to Google “Alphonse Mucha.”
The next morning I picked an edition of the Czech-based English newspaper The Prague Post. The day's headline was dedicated to a controversy that was brewing between the City of Prague and the descendants of an American Industrialist named Charles Richard Crane over the rights to Alphonse Mucha’s Slav Epic. Crane had bankrolled Mucha to create the now legendary work with stipulations that had now fallen into dispute.
I must be honest. I am one thousand times more interested in music history than in world history - especially when it comes to the time period concerning Mucha and Crane. My eyes start glazing over when words like Federalist, Reconstruction, The Progressive Party, Ottoman Empire, Anti-Trust or New Deal start being bandied about. This time was different. The deeper I dug, the more bizarre and twisted this tale became.
You can pick some things in life but this story had just picked me.
to be cont'd
Mucholapka will be published here as a serial work.
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History radiates from everything in the Czech Republic in an overwhelming assault on all of one’s senses –the sights, the smells, the sounds, the taste, the touch. I, who have never found occasion to shut my mouth, became mute upon my entrance to Prague’s Old Town. I was unsure where to look first. It took twenty-four hours before I could settle down long enough to snap my first photograph.
