The composer and pianist Oldrich Frantisek Korte gained a professional background at the Prague Conservatory (composition with F. Picha, graduated in 1949). Then he earned his living as a rehearsal and solo pianist. In 1958 he first appeared as pianist on the stage of the Laterna Magica Theatre, and this acitivity had quite a specific character in view of the experimental nature of the Laterna Magica Performances. With ensemble of Laterna Magica he had toured a number of European and overseas countries, included a six-month's sojourn at EXPO '67 in Montreal.
Since 1945 he has been engaged in writing, namely as a music critic of the daily press, script writer, author of a television series (Pilgrimage to an Inner Message), he wrote for the radio, the Supraphon publishing house, Czechoslovak and foreign journals. He organized lectures and seminars for the Czech Musical Youth and a series of schools abroad. The most impressive success in this sphere was a book of reflections and essays about celebrated musicians called "Legends in Our Midst". Korte's intimate knowledge of the theatre rests on considerable professional erudition and tangible results. Apart from acting as the Artistic Director of the Chorea Bohemica in 1972-1974, in the seventies and eighties Korte has collaborated as a composer and music adviser with the prominent theatre producers and choreographers in the Laterna Magica Theatre, Prague National Theatre, Munchner Kammerspiele and Folkteatern Goteborg.
Composing is the fourth and undoubtedly the most important sphere of Korte's creative work. His compositions constitute a significant contribution to Czech post-war music in more than one respect. The opuses are not numerous and have been written at long intervals, but each new composition by O. F. Korte always represents a remarkable artistic achievement polished to perfection and most of them have received performances by distinguished musicians at home, abroad and on gramophone records. The composer is not in search of novelties in the actual technique, nevertheless he employs his own, unconventional language. In principle he tends towards a timeless ideal of a crystal-clear musical work whose laws are neither subject to temporal "-isms" nor to rigid compositional rules. For Korte music does not lose its humanistic meaning of a personal message from man to man, the meaning of his existence and the search for the reasons of all things.
Symptomatically Korte's very singular aesthetic approach in composing was essentially already well defined in his first important works, beginning with his dynamic and still viable Sinfonietta, with which he graduated from the Prague Conservatory in 1949, premiered by the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra under Vaclav Neumann. Its gramophone recording was described as a discovery 17 years later by the Revue des Disques of Paris. Being an outstanding pianist himself, Korte expressed himself authentically in his Piano Sonata which was awarded a special prize at the 1956 Busoni composers competition in Bolzano, where it was played by Maurizio Pollini and has become one of the most frequently performed compositions of Czech post-war music on an international scale.
Although Korte' s compositions can be understood as "absolute" musical messages spontaneously expressed, their form is the result of profound creative reflections on the part of Korte not only as a musician, but also as a writer and critic with an unusually broad cultural knowledge. Hence they convey a comprehensive and definite impression. This applies to the romantically conceived, tragically coloured symphonic drama The Story of the Flutes, which was conducted, among others, by Karel Ancerl and Lovro von Matacic, and repeatedly performed by the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, L' Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and a series of other Czechoslovak and foreign orchestras. This is equally true of his Troubadour Songs, mirroring the author s enchantment with the Gothic and Renaissance period, and mainly of Philosophical Dialogues for violin and piano, premiered in 1978 by losef Suk and Josef Hala. While maintaining the characteristic traits of his manuscript, Korte is here more consistent than ever in steering towards the classical ideal of natural beauty of shape, demonstrating clearly the timeless orientation of his musical expression.
Korte's stage work "Pirates from the Fortunia", a full-length musical for teenagers, adapting elements of beat and pop music in a cyclic form, is equally characteristic of his style. In an audiovisual combination of scenic action and quadrophonic playback it was successfully premiered by the Theater an der Wien in 1975.