In Memory of Anton Viskup (1953–2026)

On the morning of Monday 28 September 2026 the Slovak Philharmonic received the news of the death of Anton Viskup. He was 73. He devoted more than half a century to the Philharmonic – as a double bass player, as a dramaturge and finally as its archivist (chronicler).

Half a Century at the Reduta

He was born on 25 April 1953 in Bratislava. He joined the double bass section of the Slovak Philharmonic orchestra in 1972, while still a conservatory student, and played in it until 1995. Alongside, he graduated from the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, studied counterpoint privately with Juraj Pospíšil for a year and completed composition studies at the Janáček Academy in Brno. From 1983 he taught double bass and chamber music at the Bratislava Conservatory.

In 1995 he moved from the orchestra into management: with a short break, until 2013 he was chief dramaturge, adviser and deputy director for artistic operations. As a member of the festival committee he also helped shape the programme of the Bratislava Music Festival. He compiled the jubilee publication Musica aeterna 1973–2003, part of the book Slovenská filharmónia 1949–2019 and, most recently, a documentary text for the 80th anniversary of the Slovak Philharmonic Choir. He was also a composer – his Chamber Concerto for Viola and 13 String Instruments was premiered in 1989 at the Week of New Slovak Music.

In its farewell, the Slovak Philharmonic called him a living encyclopaedia and a witness to its history. He kept coming to the Reduta after leaving his post – to season concerts and to the festival – and whoever was unsure of a date, a name or a programme turned to him.

What He Did for This Archive

Throughout his life, alongside his work, he wrote an inventory of all concerts of the Slovak Philharmonic – Koncertné sezóny SF 01–77, known in our archive as the Anton Viskup Catalogue. It runs to 2,405 pages and 13,453 entries and it is complete: it begins with the first concert on 2 November 1947 and reaches the 77th concert season 2025/2026. For each concert it records the date, series, hall, ensemble, conductor, soloists and the programme with opus numbers. He did not record only evenings at the Reduta – also tours to Vienna, Prague or Tokyo, school and chamber concerts.

For this archive it is a cornerstone:

• 3,139 concerts from 1947–1972 entered the archive directly from his inventory. Without it we would know about the Philharmonic's first quarter-century only what survived in programme bulletins.
• For 3,142 concerts his inventory is listed among the sources – under his name. For those whose programme bulletin has not survived, it is the only evidence that they took place at all.
• More than 10,000 further entries are still waiting to be processed – the Philharmonic's history from 1973 to the latest season. Only a fraction of them is on the website so far, but Anton Viskup did all of that work. It is up to us to bring it here.
• For the early years of the Bratislava Music Festival it served us as an independent check. It revealed, for example, a work that does not exist: the journal Slovenská hudba listed Moyzes's “Symfonietta giocosa”, Viskup correctly the Sonatina giocosa, Op. 57.
• It was not the work of an outsider. You will find him in the inventory himself – among the players of Schubert's Octet at a concert in the Reduta foyer in March 1994.

Like every source, we cross-check it in the archive against bulletins and the press of the day. But without it there would be nothing to cross-check. How we establish what was really played at a concert, and what place Viskup's inventory has in it, is described in the article Struck out in red.

Farewell

The funeral of Anton Viskup will take place on Friday 2 October 2026 at 9.30 am at the Bratislava crematorium.

Thank you, Mr Viskup. Every concert from the Philharmonic's history that people open in our archive carries your work too.

Anton Viskup in the Concert Archive