1. Karel Gott was a Czech singer, considered the most successful male singer in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic.
32 Facts About Karel Gott
1. 2.
Karel Gott was voted the country's best male singer in the annual Cesky slavik national music award 42 times, most recently in 2017.
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Karel Gott achieved considerable success in the USSR and the German-speaking countries, where he was known as "the Golden Voice of Prague", winning the Goldene Stimmgabel award three times.
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Karel Gott initially wanted to study art, but failed the exams at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, and so trained as an electrician.
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Karel Gott experimented with playing the bass and the guitar, but eventually decided to focus on singing, studying privately.
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Karel Gott studied opera at the Prague Conservatory under Konstantin Karenin, a student of the Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin.
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In 1962, Karel Gott released his first single with Supraphon, a duet with the jazz singer, Vlasta Pruchova entitled Az nam bude dvakrat tolik.
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That year Karel Gott appeared in the first Zlaty slavik national poll, placing 49th with three votes.
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Shortly afterwards, in 1963, Karel Gott left the conservatory to continue with private singing lessons until 1966.
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In 1963 Karel Gott was offered a place at the recently founded Semafor Theater, which was at the forefront of the emerging Czechoslovak pop music scene, his first significant experience of stage performance.
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Shortly afterwards, Karel Gott received the first of forty-two Zlaty slavik awards, given to the most popular artist of the year.
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Karel Gott established the Apollo Theater in 1965, along with two colleagues from Semafor: Jiri and Ladislav Staidl.
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Karel Gott began composing his own songs, and toured Czechoslovakia and abroad with the Apollo Theater.
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In 1967, Karel Gott performed at Midem, the music industry trade fair in Cannes, France, where the applause was measured during every concert.
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Between 1967 and 2000, Polydor released over 125 albums and 72 singles for Karel Gott in German-speaking countries.
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Karel Gott represented Austria in the Eurovision Song Contest 1968 with the song Tausend Fenster, finishing in 13th place.
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Karel Gott regularly appeared in television shows like the ZDF-Hitparade.
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Karel Gott recorded the theme in German, later in Slovak and Czech for the dubbed versions in those languages.
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On 3 May 1977, Karel Gott was awarded the title of Merited Artist, and in the following year received the Golden Hat of Cologne, awarded annually to a prominent cultural or social figure.
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Karel Gott recorded a cover version of the song All by Myself called Kam tenkrat sel muj bratr Jan, dedicated to Jan Palach, the student activist who killed himself by self-immolation as a protest against the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in January 1969.
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Towards the end of the decade, Karel Gott began to experiment with other genres outside popular music, including country music and classical compositions, and he appeared at the Fan Fair Country Music Festival in 1979, the first of five appearances.
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The 1980s were marked by international success for Karel Gott, including the filming of the musical In the Track of Bel Canto in Italy in 1981, with an accompanying German-Italian album, and a duet performance with Sofia Rotaru in the Soviet Union.
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In 1983, Karel Gott was awarded the Gold Medal of Hermann Lons in Munich, Germany, for his role in the development of German traditional song.
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In 1990, Karel Gott announced the end of his career and arranged a long farewell tour.
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In 1996, following renewed public interest in his career, Karel Gott again won the Cesky slavik, and won the accolade every year since, with the exception of 1998 and 2012.
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Karel Gott remained popular in a number of countries and performed widely outside the Czech Republic.
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In May 2014 Karel Gott released his autobiography Zwischen zwei Welten.
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In May 2019, only months before he died, Karel Gott released his last song and music video - a duet with his daughter Charlotte entitled "Srdce nehasnou".
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Karel Gott had two daughters from different former relationships.
30.
In October 2015, Karel Gott was diagnosed with cancer of the lymph nodes.
31.
Karel Gott died at around 11:30 pm on 1 October 2019 at his home in Bertramka, aged 80, with his family around him, and his death was reported the following morning.
32.
Karel Gott's fans travelled from around the Czech Republic and Germany and waited for several hours in a five-kilometre queue to the palace.