RIP Eva Pilarova

Eva Pilarová has died, no last farewell due to coronavirus

iDNES.com

March 14, 2020

At the age of 80, singer Eva Pilarová has died after a long illness, she was especially famous for duets with Waldemar Matuška, including the song “Oh, the Love of Heaven”. She also devoted herself to jazz, but she experienced her most famous era in the 1960s. The last farewell will not take place due to measures related to the coronavirus epidemic.

The iDNES.cz report was confirmed by dramaturg and producer Radan Dolejš. According to Blesk, the singer was in the care of Boromejek in recent weeks.  

"Due to measures related to the declaration of an emergency state, it will not be possible to make a final farewell," her husband Jan Kolomazník told CTK.

“I consider her our first jazz singer,” said the writer Josef Škvorecký, who invented her nickname FitzPilar for her reference to Ella Fitzgerald. It hit Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong Pilar herself considered her greatest role models. 

The Brno native Eva Bojanovská, who became famous under the surname of her first husband, could consider her life number three. She had three marriages, while the emigration of the first two partners made her career considerably more difficult during normalization, she won the Golden Nightingale three times, and her voice, with which she initially began opera studies, had an exceptional three-octave range.

Soon, however, she switched to popular music, practically immediately after joining the Prague Semafor Theater during the era of the Suchý-Šlitr duo began recording. With Matuška, who chose her personally for the song “Oh, the Heavenly Love”, she sang often in Semaphore and Rococo.

Thanks to the semaphore track, she also appeared in front of the camera, not only in the recordings of famous productions. She has performed in the musical “If Thousand Clarinets”, “Crime with Sandan”, or “A Well Walked Walk”, but also in the television comedy ‘Magnetic Waves Cures’ and in the series ‘Song for Rudolf III’. via Helsinki to Havana.

"I'm the type who always tries to have positive thinking," she said about herself. "I think that when a person is balanced, he does not lack energy - and I am very balanced because I believe in God," the interpreter of the famous hits Bad Night, Cat is not a Dog, Oliver Twist and It's Dangerous to Touch the Stars.

Post-November Eva Pilarová devoted more to swing and jazz, she also published two commemorative books and several cookbooks, besides concerts she tried to photograph and flicker in the series Fire Chicken or Traces of Life. There were several documentaries about her life where she also talked about her fight with cancer, about the loss of her band in a plane crash or about her signature on the so-called antichart, for which she apologized. In 2009 she was awarded the Medal of Merit.

PILAROVA, Eva (Eva Bojanovská)

Born: 8/9/1939, Brno, Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia

Died: 3/14/2020, Prague, Czech Republic

Eva Pilarova’s westerns – actress:

Revue pro banjo (TV) – 1963) (Barbara Ellie) [also singer]

Magnetické vlny lécí (TV) – 1965 (saloon singer)