Karel Gott

Czech singer and actor (1939–2019)

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Source-basedRising

Lived 1939–2019, aged 80

MusiciansSinger / Musician

Wikipedia
45 languages
Cross-language footprint
Era
1939–2019
Aged 80
Known for
Times Change You
2010

Summary

Updated 2026-08-30

Karel Gott held the Czech Nightingale — the country's top music award — 42 times across six decades, a dominance no other singer in Czechoslovakia came close to matching. His baritone carried across the Iron Curtain, selling tens of millions of records in both the Soviet bloc and West Germany under the billing "the Golden Voice of Prague."

Biography

About

Born 14 July 1939, Gott built a career that spanned the Cold War's hardest years and outlasted the state that first made him famous. He released over 100 studio albums and another 100 compilations, moving between Czech, German, and Russian repertoires with enough fluency to win the Goldene Stimmgabel three times by 1995. Sales estimates run between 50 and 100 million records worldwide — 23 million in German-speaking Europe, 15 million across Czechoslovakia and its successor states. He last took the Český slavík in 2017, two years before his death on 1 October 2019, the vote a final confirmatio…

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