Dagmar White

Dagmar White (born Dagmar Hasalová ; * 1926 in Prague ) is a Czech singer and music teacher .

Hasalová's father, Antonín Hasal, was an officer in the Czechoslovak army who joined the resistance organization Obrana národa during the Second World War and later the Czechoslovak army in exile and as a military advisor to Edvard Beneš of the Czechoslovak government in exile . After Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated , Dagmar Hasalová, her mother and siblings were taken to an internment camp in Svatobořice in South Moravia , where they were imprisoned until the end of the war.

After the war, Hasal became Minister of Transport in Beneš's cabinet, and his daughter studied at Charles University and the Prague Conservatory, where she trained as an opera singer. After the Communists came to power in 1948, the family fled to the United States, and Dagmar continued her education at the University of Kansas .

She then studied at the Juilliard School of Music and earned a Masters Degree in Music Education from Columbia University . Her first job as a music teacher was at the Bogotá Conservatory. There she met the diplomat Lewis White, whom she married in 1954. The couple subsequently lived in New Caledonia , the Dominican Republic , Nicaragua and Morocco , where they taught at the conservatories, directed choirs and performed in operas, concerts, radio and television.

Eventually they settled in Vienna, Virginia , where Dagmar White founded the Vienna Light Opera Company and taught music at Northern Virginia Community College. She was active in promoting Czech music in the US and received an award from the Czech government for two productions of Bedřich Smetana's The Bartered Bride (1986 and 1998) with the Vienna Light Opera Company. For a long time she was Vice President of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts & Sciences (SVU), founded in Washington in 1958.

Web links

• National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library - Dagmar White
• Czechoslovak Society of Arts & Sciences (SVU) - Dagmar Hasalova White