Igor Podracký

PhDr. Igor Podracký was a Slovak musicologist, music publicist, and editor. He studied piano performance at the Conservatory in Košice and musicology at the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University in Bratislava, where he also completed his doctoral studies. He spent a large part of his professional life as a music editor at Czechoslovak Radio in Bratislava.

“[...] he belonged to the small community of Slovak musicologists who, during the normalization era of the 1970s, stirred the waters—sometimes overly stagnant—of music criticism and journalism in Slovakia.” (In: Opera Slovakia online, 2021, Marenčinová)

As an author, Igor Podracký prepared numerous music-literary radio programs, primarily dedicated to 20th-century Slovak music. These included the series Ako žili a tvorili (How They Lived and Created), Dialógy s hudbou (Dialogues with Music), Mystérium ducha (Mystery of the Spirit), Musica slovaca, and Operné podvečery (Operatic Evenings). He also contributed to the recording of works by Slovak composers such as Eugen Suchoň, Ján Cikker, Dezider Kardoš, Jozef Malovec, Ilja Zeljenka, and others.

He wrote numerous critiques, reviews, articles, and essays, which were published in the cultural sections of daily newspapers such as Večerník, Práca, and Národná obroda, as well as in professional journals like Hudobný život (Music Life), Literárny týždenník (Literary Weekly), and others. He regularly wrote about the event Týždne Novej slovenskej hudby (Weeks of New Slovak Music) in the late 1970s and 1980s, and often reviewed works by contemporary Slovak composers.

From the early 1990s, he lived and worked in Košice, focusing on musicological research. He took an interest in the work, life, and legacy of composers and performers from Eastern Slovakia. He was the author of the study Moderný tradicionalista (The Modern Traditionalist) in a publication about Jozef Podprocký (1994), and together with Júlia Bukovinská, published the monograph Košické kvarteto (The Košice Quartet, 2003). He also wrote about Jozef Grešák and Norbert Bodnár.

He authored a number of essays exploring diverse cultural and social topics. Among them are Hommage á Béla Hamvas (born in Prešov, 1897 – thinker, essayist, philosopher), Hommage á Ján Johanides (writer), and Karikatúry svojského kresliara Adolfa Borna (Caricatures of the Distinctive Illustrator Adolf Born – Czech painter, illustrator, filmmaker, and cartoonist). His philosophically oriented essays include Umenie ako spôsob nadexistencie (Art as a Way of Over-Existence) and Päť veľkonočných esejí (Five Easter Essays): O nadbytočnosti (On Superfluity), O hľadisku večnosti (On the Perspective of Eternity), O človečom Ja (On the Human Self), O hlbine bezpečnosti (On the Depth of Safety), and O pozdrave Memento mori (On the Greeting Memento Mori).

In 1994, he was awarded the Jozef Kresánek Prize by the Music Fund.