English Deutsch Français An introduction to Martinu’s music by Patrick Lambert
With the current renewal of interest in composers who never claimed to be
avant-gardists, Martinu is becoming recognised not only as one of the 20th century’s
most prolific and versatile musicians, but also as one of its most independently-minded
creative talents. This is not to say that during his protracted path to maturity he did
not absorb a profusion of influences – French Impressionism, Stravinsky, jazz,
neo-classicism and the English madrigal, in addition to his abiding love of Czech and
especially Moravian folks songs. Yet, despite such multifarious influences, each and every
piece is infused with his distinctive personality. Martinu himself attributed the unusual
character of his music to his extraordinary birthplace in a room at the top of the church
tower in the Bohemian town of Policka, where he was to spend the following 12 years of his
childhood. Throughout his life he sought to recapture in sounds the ‘sense of
space’ and ‘pure forms’ of Nature that had surrounded him. It was therefore
perhaps inevitable that as a student in Prague he should succumb to Debussy’s music,
‘the greatest revelation’ of his life.
Martinu’s decision to seek guidance from Roussel in Paris was prompted by his
desire to escape the Czech ‘cult of Smetana’ and acquire some of the qualities
that he detected in French art: order, clarity, balance and refinement of taste. But the
cosmopolitan Paris of the 1920s had moved on: Impressionism was dead and the scene was
dominated by Les Six, jazz and especially Stravinsky, who demontrated to Martinu that folk
sources could convincingly be integrated into art music. This led to a series of colourful
folkloristic scores, beginning with the pantomime-ballet
Spalícek. Like
Stravinsky, Martinu briefly and effectively flirted with jazz, for instance in the ballet
La
Revue de Cuisine and the opera
The Three Wishes, and due to the economic
realities of the 1930s he also turned his attention towards chamber forces. Neo-classicism
became the dominant influence with the 17th century concerto grosso providing the model
for a series of works, several composed for Paul Sacher and his Basel Chamber Orchestra.
Despite the busy, seemingly detached manner, deep emotion lurks beneath the surface,
coming to the fore in the powerful
Double Concerto written on the eve of the Munich
Agreement, which cut the composer off from his homeland.
However, the key work of the 1930s proved to be the ‘dream opera’
Julietta,
where he discarded his ‘geometrical’ neo-classical manner to explore the often
irrational world of the imagination with its ‘dream-logic’ determined by
fantasy. For the music associated with the elusive heroine, he devised a characteristic
series of harmonic progressions, the ‘Julietta chords’, based on the Moravian
cadence, which were often to reappear at significant moments in later pieces as a kind of
‘idée fixe’. The fantasy element assumed ever-increasing importance during the
1940s as he strove in the United States for ‘a new lyricism, something rather rare in
modern music’. The war-time symphonies composed for American orchestras are notable
for their spontaneity and organic development, the rhythmic freshness of their strongly
syncopated melodies, the rare beauty of their harmony, and above all an indefinable Czech
aura that suggests a latter-day Dvorák.
By the 1950s Martinu had successfully found the artistic courage and technical means to
allow his fantasy unfettered expression, while retaining an almost intuitive sense of
form. This approach reached its zenith in large-scale scores such as the visionary
Fantaisies
symphoniques (Symphony No.6) and the luminous
Frescoes of Piero della Francesca,
where the sophisticated neo-impressionist textures anticipate aleatoric techniques and
conjure up a heightened world of the imagination. Running parallel is a series of
down-to-earth, folk-orientated works, deeply poignant ‘greetings home’, which
display a daring simplicity and rare purity of expression. In these last years the
composer began to tackle fundamental questions of human existence, though without
exaggerated weightiness or sentimentality. This trend is discernible in
The Greek
Passion and
The Epic of Gilgamesh and even in non-vocal works such as
The
Parables and
Incantation (Piano Concerto No.4). In connection with the latter
Martinu outlined a credo that seems likely to be of increasing relevance to audiences in
the 21st century:
"The artist is always searching for the meaning of life, his own and that of
mankind, searching for truth. A system of uncertainty has entered our daily life. The
pressures of mechanisation and uniformity to which it is subject call for protest and the
artist has only one means of expressing this, by music."
Patrick Lambert, 1997
(broadcaster and writer on music, with a special interest in
Czech composers including Janácek and Martinu)
Hans Gál
