Bohuslav Martinu is one of the great unrecognized theater composers of this century. Those who know and love his music must be glad that this year's celebrations marking the centenary of his birth promise come overdue recognition from orchestras and record companies. But the stage works remain as neglected as ever - except, of course, in his native Czechoslovakia, where the main festivals and opera companies have been celebrating in style.
The Prague Spring Festival hosted the first complete cycle Martinu's operas. The Moravian city of Brno will stage a series of rare Martinu works in October, and most of the smaller Czech towns and cities have organized their own smaller tributes. Musicians from Czechoslovakia have also been championing Martinu abroad. In April, the Prague National Theatre gave the first performances in Paris of The Greek passion; and the Slovak National Theatre from Bratislava is performing Julietta this year's Edinburgh Festival in Scotland. But the most significant contribution to the centenary has been the revival in Czechoslovakia of two operas that had not been heard for many years - Three Wishes and The Miracle of Our Lady.
Martinu is still a relatively unknown quantity in the pantheon of twentieth-century music. Born on December 8, 1890, in the Bohemian town of Policka, he studied at the Prague Academy of Music and in 1916 became violinist in the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1923 he left Czechoslovakia to study in Paris with Albert Roussel. He never returned to live in Czechoslovakia. Martinu fled occupied France in 1941 and settled in New York, later returning to Europe in 1953. He died in Switzerland in 1959. Despite his long exile, Martinu's music remained essentially Czech. His output was prolific and uneven, moving from a progressive early phase to a maturity that gave full expression to his gift for rhythmical energy and imagination. Although his harmonic range was wide and often dissonant, he kept within the bounds of tonality in an age that gave pride of place to atonal music. This - and the fact that he used a variety of publishers, many of whom have been slow to promote his music - helps to account for the late flowering of his international reputation.
Contrasting Insights
Martinu is best known as a symphonic composer. However, judging by the new productions of Three Wishes at the Prague National Theatre and The Miracle of Our Lady at the Janacek Theatre in Brno, the time may have come for Martinu the opera composer to receive equal recognition. The two works give sharply contrasting insights into Martinu artistic personality.
Three Wishes, or The Vicisitudes of Life, an opera-film with prologue and epilogue, was a product of Martinu's association with the cosmopolitan artistic avant-garde of Paris in the late 1920s. In this, his second operatic project with the Dadaist painter, writer, and musicians Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Martinu fashioned a comic musical fantasy that even today is strikingly original in its combination of cinema, dance, spoken dialogue, cabaret, and conventional operatic expression. The music alights on all the then-current vogues, particularly jazz and Neo Classicism; there are prominent parts for accordion, saxophone, and guitar. The influence of Poulenc, Roussel, and Ravel is also clear. Martinu molded them all into a unique and restless whole. The traits of the mature Martinu are here in shorthand - the motor rhythms, jumpy tunes, and
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