“Music must be beautiful,” wrote Bohuslav Martinů, “or it wouldn't be worth the effort.” The Czech composer wrote a huge amount of music – around 400 works – that covered many styles and genres. He was influenced by the music of Debussy (he began composing after attending the Prague premiere of Peliéas et Mélisande), Les Six, jazz, Stravinsky as well as the folk melodies of his Bohemian and Moravian roots. In 2009, 50 years after Martinů’s death, the conductor Jiří Bělohlávek told The Guardian, “At his best, he is irresistibly original, cosmopolitan and Czech in one stroke.”
Martinů was born in 1890 in Polička. His father was a cobbler, fire-watcher and church bellringer. The family home was high up (193 steps) in the church tower which Bohuslav, a shy, sickly child, seldom left, looking out upon a “vast and boundless space I am always searching for in my music”. He excelled as a violinist and the townspeople raised money to fund his studies. Aged 16, he attended the Prague Conservatory, but was expelled for “incorrigible negligence”.
He studied with Josek Suk and played violin in the Czech Philharmonic, touring with them to London, Geneva and Paris. The latter made a big impression on him and in October 1923 Martinů moved there to study with Albert Roussel. Paris opened up a wealth of avant garde influences – dadaism, cubism, surrealism, Stravinsky – many of which found their way into the radical change his music underwent, such as the surrealist opera The Tears of the Knife, or the jazzy La Revue de cuisine featuring dancing kitchen utensils. A neoclassical style emerged, although Czech elements remained.
In the wake of the 1938 Munich Agreement that led to the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, Martinů attempted to join the Czech Resistance, but was rejected because of his age. Instead, he composed the Field Mass to honour Czech volunteers fighting in the French army, which got him blacklisted by the Nazis. Martinů and his French wife, Charlotte, were sheltered by the conductor Charles Munch near Limoges before spending six months in Aix-en-Provence while trying to find a way to leave Vichy France. In 1940, they fled to the United States.
Up to this point, Martinů had not composed any symphonies, but America provided fresh inspiration and he swiftly wrote five of them, at yearly intervals, a sixth following several years later. Martinů became an American citizen in 1952, but returned to France the following year, settling in Nice where he composed several masterpieces in a glorious final compositional burst. Conductor Paul Sacher reflected, “I never met a man more simple, sincere and affecting in my life.”
1The Greek Passion
Martinů’s final opera is his masterpiece. The Greek Passion was inspired by Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel Christ Recrucified about refugees who have fled a massacre and seek shelter in a Greek village, where the locals are preparing their Easter Passion play. They are given a hostile reception and are turned away. Manolios – a local shepherd who has been chosen to portray Christ in the Passion – stands up for the refugees, but pays the price when the villagers turn on him and his “disciples”. It’s a moving work which, sadly, has great resonance today.
2Symphony no. 1
I think the opening of the First Symphony offers a microcosm of Martinů’s musical fingerprints – a sense of yearning and nervous tension, wide open spaces, syncopation, the characteristic use of a piano within the orchestral texture. The jazzy second movement is neoclassical in style, while the finale is urgent, tinged with hints of his Czech homeland. The symphony was commissioned by Serge Koussevitsky, who conducted the Boston Symphony in the 1942 premiere.
3Juliette, or The Key of Dreams
Martinů’s ninth opera, Juliette, or The Key of Dreams was premiered in Prague in 1938, just a few months before the composer left Czechoslovakia for the final time. The libretto is based on Georges Neveux’s surrealist play Juliette, ou La clé des songes. It tells the story of Michel, a Parisian bookseller, who dreams his way into a strange coastal town, where fantasy and reality are blurred and where the inhabitants have no memory beyond a few minutes. He is searching for a woman he once met there, Juliette. It’s a wonderfully quirky opera, where Martinů employs an accordion at key moments in the score. He later began preparing a concert work with voices, Three Fragments from Juliette, completed after his death by Aleš Březina: