The most memorable concert I ever attended was in Prague, for a belated music award. Marta Kubišová’s husky ballads epitomised the idealism and excitement of the Prague Spring in 1968. Her defiant Prayer for Marta was the anthem of resistance to the Soviet-led invasion of August that year.

Czechoslovakia’s most popular singer paid a heavy price. Under the so-called “normalisation” which followed the Soviet occupation, her music was banned; the authorities retrospectively falsified a poll which would have awarded her a third Golden Nightingale award. They assigned her a menial job in a toy factory; her husband emigrated.

Undaunted, she became a spokeswoman for the Charter 77 dissident movement, and then in 1989 the musical voice of the Velvet Revolution. When I watched her sing