“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:
4Symphony no. 6, “Fantaisies symphoniques”
Martinů’s final symphony, originally titled Fantaisies symphoniques, is for a small orchestra – unusually, for Martinů, no piano or harp – and is unlike its five predecessors, a long way from the neoclassicism of his earlier years. The composer himself described it as “a work without form. And yet something holds it together, I don’t know what, but it has a single line, and I have expressed something in it.” From the murmuring, hallucinatory introduction to dissonances that suddenly dissolve, it is a mysterious, rhapsodic work that casts a strange spell. The symphony was dedicated to his old friend Charles Munch for the 75th anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
5Double Concerto for Two String Orchestras, Piano and Timpani
This powerful work was written in Switzerland in the late 1930s, reflecting Martinů's anxiety about the impending Nazi occupation of his Czech homeland, as well as his love for his composition pupil, Vítězslava Kaprálová. The work was commissioned by Paul Sacher for his virtuosic Basel Chamber Orchestra and was completed, ominously, on the day the Munich Agreement was signed.
6Violin Concerto no. 2 in G minor
After hearing Martinů’s First Symphony premiered by Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony in 1942, the violinist Mischa Elman requested a concerto from him. The work, long considered Martinů’s only violin concerto until an earlier one popped up nine years after the composer’s death, is energetic and edgy, dramatic and dissonant, particularly in the rhetorical exchanges in the first movement. The Andante moderato has a bucolic, folksong feel, while the finale is a lively dance in Rondo fashion.
7The Frescoes of Piero della Francesca
Composed during his extraordinary final decade, The Frescoes of Piero della Francesca were Inspired by Martinů’s viewing of religious paintings in the Basilica of San Francesco, Arezzo, an early Renaissance masterpiece entitled The History of the True Cross. However, the resulting composition – luminous and fluid – was not meant to be programmatic. “I tried to express in musical terms that kind of solemnly immobile calm and semi-darkness, that palette of colours creating an atmosphere filled with delicate, peaceful and moving poetry.”
8Cello Concerto no. 1 in D major
As well as jazz and the neoclassical, Martinů was also fascinated by Baroque music and its influence is heard in the First Cello Concerto, written in 1930 in the composer’s home town of Polička, but revised and rescored at various times up to 1955. Although he was a violinist, Martinů loved the cello and wrote two concertos and three sonatas for the instrument. The concerto opens like Dvorak in appealing American mode, but the Andante has a tremendous eloquence and nobility to it, followed by a vigorous, toccata-like finale.
9La Revue de cuisine
Martinů’s one-act ballet was composed in Paris and was his first major foray into jazz. It has a zany absurdist plot in which kitchen utensils who love, flirt, flatter and argue until the pot and the lid make up and a twirling stick goes off with a dishcloth! Scored for a sextet of trumpet, clarinet, bassoon, violin, cello and piano, listen out for a sleazy tango, a swinging Charleston and a sombre funeral march.
10Fantasia for Theremin, Oboe, String Quartet and Piano
One of Martinů’s least known works is this fantasia for chamber ensemble, commissioned by thereminist Lucie Bigelow Rosen. The work showcases that otherworldly electronic instrument the theremin with a part which covers four octaves and wide dynamics – it’s a fascinating instrument to watch being played, the player seeming to pluck notes from thin air.
This article was sponsored by the Year of Czech Music.
