Being Kafka #5 with Gerald Barry

02/14/24 • 15 min

“Without Ohropax day and night, I really couldn’t cope,” wrote Franz Kafka in 1922. The author from Prague struggled with the loudness of the city. The Irish composer Gerald Barry revisited precisely this characteristic in his work “Kafka‘s Earplugs” – and in 2023 he celebrated its world premiere by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in London. In this podcast episode, Barry speaks to Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson about how Franz Kafka’s auditory sensitivity inspired him. Barry finds it highly appropriate that “Kafka’s Earplugs” has been described as both the most beautiful and the most horrible music in the world. After all, Kafka was said to have been equally contradictory.

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Being Kafka #4 with Marianne Kolb

What does it look like when Franz Kafka changes your life? Artist Marianne Kolb from California – who is Swiss by birth – had this experience. She tells Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson about the grey days of her education and apprenticeship in a strict Switzerland during the 1960s and 70s. Her salvation: reading the works of Kafka, which were recommended to her by a colleague. In all her life, Kolb had never before felt so moved as she did by this Czech author. Kolb’s subsequent life shows how identification with the bug in “The Metamorphosis” can motivate someone to turn their own world around.

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Being Kafka #6 with Jaroslav Rudiš

Czech author and musician Jaroslav Rudiš is touring Europe with his group, the Kafka Band. These concerts attract audiences young and old, as he tells Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson in the podcast. What particularly fascinates the musician about Kafka is the mixture of tragedy and comedy in his works. Jaroslav sings these works in German, Czech and English, against a backdrop of alternative rock ... it’s tricky to describe, you need to listen!