Mister Morgen - Ivo Robić
Exhibition concept: Maja Šojat-Bikić, MSc, Boris Mašić, Vesna Leiner
Multimedia: Maja Šojat-Bikić, MSc
Exhibition design: Ante Serdar, Maja Šojat-Bikić, MSc, Boris Mašić
Poster design: Miljenko Gregl
On a fragile raft in the sea of pops, Ivo Robić has kept his place more than half a century. Withstanding all the wartime and post-war trials of light music, he rose from being a bar and radio singer to the high society of European and world crooners. From being his school’s regular reader at literary meetings, he developed into the pioneer of interpretation with perfect pronunciation and promoter of the melody of the Croatian language.
He either song or composed the finest pages of the Croatian pop songbook and cut a whole salon of disks. Generations of lads used the refrain from the song That little hand of yours to whistle below the windows of their girls. His song Only once has by now for fifty years been keeping warm hope for the one true love of a lifetime. Heart, Good Night , in many people’s opinion his best tune, for decades announced closing time at dances and called all hearts in love to the last dance. The song You’re just seventeen (Save the last dance for me) was used to send radio birthday greetings to all seventeen-year-old girls for some sixty years.
With his song about a better tomorrow, Morgen, he won the longed-for spaces of freedom and the very acme of success – a Polydor Gold Disk, rose to the top of the Billboard chart, became the singer of the season on the waves of that cult station for launching melodies, Radio Luxembourg, hurtled round the world and appeared in the best-known TV review on the other side of the Atlantic – the Perry Como Show. He sang everywhere and for everyone and was able suddenly to touch the hearts of thousands of Croatian expatriates, giving them at the end of a concert another song or two from the old country.
The first gentleman of Croatian pop, regular guest at all domestic festivals, always even-tempered, he would sing anything given him. Lover of the sea, the Kvarner, Opatija and Zagreb, he never wanted any other homeland, because music anyway knows no borders. As Croatian-German pop star, today he still finds his way into all the compilations made up from the archives of pop.
Maja Šojat-Bikić, MSc
photo Miljenko Gregl, ZCM