Romance for Trumpet

A guest leaving a village pub late one evening recognises a melody being played on trumpet and goes to get a better look at the musician. This is how two men, connected long ago by their love for a girl from a carousel, meet once again after thirty years. Onetime student Vojta, now the ageing headmaster of a local school, asks Viktor about their long-ago encounter with Terina. Viktor has returned to the village with the carnival, and he takes Vojta to where the girl is buried. The melody Viktor plays on trumpet transports the protagonists into the past. Their story took place in a country landscape filled with the smell of grass and flowers and the summer sounds of a Czech village. Student Vojta, who takes care of his invalid grandfather, meets Terina one day at a carnival carousel. A naive yet fateful love blossoms between the two young people, but Vojta’s grandfather upsets their plans to run away: the old man dies, causing the student to stand the girl up. Terina, disconcerted by thoughts of Vojta’s ‘betrayal,’ doesn’t have the strength to resist shooting-gallery operator Viktor. In the morning Vojta catches up with the carnival on its way out of town. Speechless with grief, Terina sits by Viktor as he brandishes a whip at the student. Only years later does Vojta finds out, from Viktor himself, that within two months the girl succumbed to diphtheria because she wanted to die. Romance for Trumpet, an adaptation of the poetry collection of the same name, won the Special Jury Prize and a Silver Medal at the 1967 Moscow IFF and a Silver Siren at a festival of Czechoslovak film in Sorrento in 1969.