I come from a musical family.
My father, Koloman Bitto, came from southern Slovakia and was a truly versatile musician: his principal instruments were double bass, trumpet, guitar, and dulcimer. He played folk music most of time, but he also spent several seasons as double-bass player with Zdenek Nejedly Theatre's opera company. My mother, Ludmila Bittová, nee Masarova, a native of Moravian Slovakia, is a teacher by training. However, she has spent all of her life singing in the theatre choirs and other vocal ensembles.

I am the second of my parents' three daughters. I was born in the town of Bruntal, in northern Monrovia, on 22 July 1958. As my father changed jobs quite a few times, we kept moving from one place to another. We would even move to Slovakia, then back again ...
Anyway, we mostly stayed in Moravia. After a rather long period in the city of Opava, we eventually settled in Brno, where I completed studies at a drama college and for over ten years (from my first year at college) worked as an actress with the avant-garde Husa na provazku company.
This year is my seventh in the heart of the country: I now live in the village if Lelekovice near Brno, in a small house with a garden, close to a wood, with my two sons, Matous (born 1982) and Tonik (1991).

When I was a child our whole family lived for music. I took ballet lessons, sang, played the violin, and did children's parts on stage. After we moved to Brno, I left the violin aside and devoted myself wholly to the drama studies. I had the chance to appear in several feature films: The Island of Silver Herons Rosy Dreams Outlaw Ballad The diary of One Who Disappeared as well as in various television and Brno Radio productions.I acquired my sole formal and practical vocal training while a student at the Drama College, in the form of basic information about voice and singing techniques.

Having spent some time working as an actress, I began to feel a renewed inner urge to express myself through music. I found a violin teacher. His name was Rudolf Stastny. By then my father was already seriously ill. He died three years later, and Professor Stastny became in many respects a second father to me.
I have continued to engage in my own personal violin lessons to his day, with special focus on the classical literature for the instrument, which is so abundant that I can easily carry on until the end of my life. I sing along with the violin, creating my own music and earning, my living as professional musician, making concert tours at home, in Bohemia and Moravia, and worldwide.

The violin is one of the finest musical instruments. It shapes and transforms me, awakens my feelings and emotions, fulfills me in the term, pointing to the highest values in my attitudes to music, to other people, and to myself.

That is why I love the violin - and to love means to live !    

Iva Bittová        

©1996 - 1999

07.12. 1999: "The Relative Violin - Wien/Vancouver"