From the Classical Vault Dept.: Here are liner notes I wrote for a proposed CD release of Bohuslav Martinů’s Violin Sonatas, which would have been released on the Dorian Recordings label had that particular deal gone through. So you’ll have to pull out whatever version you have in your collection in order to listen along with the words below.
WE ARE ALL EXPATRIATES to some extent. If not cut off from our native soil, we still find it hard to stay connected with our communities. A sense of loss and of alienation is outstripped, we hope, by the excitement of discovery as we make the most of our travels.
Thus the Sonata No. 1. Written in 1927, as Martinů was gaining a reputation as a Czech-loyal individualist, it’s jagged, jazzy, hewn with cells of melody that pop in and out of its syncopated propulsion. To the French – to much of Europe – at that time, American jazz was a revelation, examined and celebrated with far more enthusiasm than the so-called serious musicians of its native country could spare.
This was his actually his third violin sonata, but it’s the earliest one that survives. He’s writing for instruments he knew well, although for him the piano was more of a composing adjunct than an means of artistic expression. The first movement (Allegro) begins with 90 seconds of unaccompanied violin that previews a plaintive, demanding melody soon whirled into syncopation and double-stops as the piano bursts in. It’s easy to imagine this movement as a dance punctuated with shouts of joy. A contrasting episode reveals a more lyrical treatment of this material, and then the violin reprises its solo opening before a quick wrap-up with piano.
A brief Andante features a marchlike pizzicato sequence until the piano’s strident chords mellow it into a sweeter tune. This prompts a yearning theme from muted violin, still with a jazzy edge and hints of chromatic movement. A full-bodied song emerges, unmuted, with a complex piano figuration adding energy until Martinů (in a typically witty move) sends the once-more muted violin into a dizzying stratosphere.
American jazz and Czech folksong come together with a Stravinskian feel for the concluding Allegretto, in which the violin emulates an antic guitar before a contrastingly wistful melody leads to a quick, bouncy finish.
The brief, efficient Sonata No. 2, written in 1931, imparts more of this folksong feel in the opening Allegro moderato. Like Prokofiev, Martinů explores the violin’s percussive qualities in a movement that’s direct in its intentions even as it shares a generous amount of melodic material.
What seems at first to be an easygoing slow movement (Larghetto) singing a children’s song slowly builds in complexity, coming to a forceful peak halfway through its three-and-a-half minutes. The song is more forcefully explored before easing into the gentle finish.
If you jazzed up the last movement of a Handel sonata, you’d get something like the Poco allegretto that concludes this work. It’s a mordant gigue, with the instruments commenting wryly to one another as it whirls to a sudden finale.
Twelve years passed before Martinů returned to this form. By this time he was in the United States and his compositional voice showed a more autumnal sound. The Sonata No. 3 is a polished and demanding piece of craftsmanship that requires skilled players. A bright piano introduction to the opening Poco allegro summons the violin to offer a characteristic dance theme peppered with answering piano commentary. The whole sonata is a study in propulsion, and this movement never stops, never even flags until it gives way to the Adagio that follows.
And even here there’s a rhythmic consistency in the hypnotic sequence that opens the movement. A chorale statement changes the mood, setting up a mysterioso sequence that pits three beats in the piano against the violin’s four beats, always an effective tension-builder. The subsequent melody is masterful, an example of Martinů’s able to express complex emotions in a deceptively simple form.
In terms of energy, the sonata peaks in the Scherzo: six and a half minutes of whirling, nonstop excitement. Listen for the mi-re-do sequence in the opening piano statement, a motif than informed much of Martinů’s work. A game of melodic tag bounces along in 6/8 time with delightful echo sequences – and the violinist has virtuoso technical challenges throughout. A muted, contrasting (but still fiery) middle section builds like one of Bach’s solo violin allegros.
In terms of drama, the climax of the piece is the concluding Lento. Again, the melody is wistful, plaintive, classical in its simplicity, with characteristically unexpected turns and contrasts. Thus the movement grows with ominous sounds to what emerges as a triumphant finish, all of it built on those compact rhythmic and melodic ideas that began the piece.
MARTINŮ WAS BORN in the town of Polička in 1890, which he described as “geographically in Bohemia but ethnographically [belonging] to Moravia.” The seeds of his solitary disposition may have been sown in his early living quarters: he lived in the top of a church tower where his father, a cobbler, was watchman.
When he was ten, Martinů began violin lessons with a local tailor. He showed promise enough that he was sent to the Prague Conservatory at the age of sixteen, but he had his own path to follow, which included frequent trips to the theater (he was one of many smitten by Russian actress Olga Gzovska of the Moscow Art Theatre, and for whom he wrote a long-lost orchestral work). Expelled from the Conservatory for playing violin in public (school rules forbade such a thing), he was reinstated by influential friends but then almost immediately dismissed on grounds of “incorrigible negligence.”
He enrolled at the Prague School for Organ, which numbered Janáček among its alumni, but paid scant attention and soon dropped out. A last-ditch attempt to pass a state exam that would allow him to teach high-school music was another disaster: according to his friend and early biographer Miloš Šafránek, he “failed in every subject: violin, composition, harmony, pedagogy, and psychology. He had simply refused to study the prescribed material. A year later he made another attempt, and this time succeeded in passing the violin examination. But in the examination for composition he failed again, all because of one question. He was asked: ‘Can a composition start with a bare interval of a fourth?’ and Martinů without hesitation replied: ‘Yes’ – an answer that cost him his diploma.”
A friend of his got him a first-violin seat in the Czech Philharmonic in 1913, but the opening program – all works by Richard Strauss – swamped the young violinist, who was thereafter relegated to the second violins for the rest of his off-and-on ten-year stint.
The Prague music world was at that time divided between worship of Smetana and cultlike adulation of Bruckner, Mahler, and Strauss, but Martinů typically chose neither camp. His most discernible musical influences came from folk tradition and the works of Dvořák.
Martinů played the premiere of Josef Suk’s masterful symphonic poem Ripening, premiered just two days after the October, 1918, founding of the Czech Republic. Later, playing under conductor Václav Talich, Martinů fell in love with the new music of France that Talich championed. His earliest surviving string quartet dates from this time, and shows the influence of Debussy and Roussel.
By the end of the First World War, Martinů had well over a hundred scores to his credit, including chamber music, songs, ballet scores, and other orchestral works. Early in the 1920s, he was bowled over by a performance by the English Singers, sparking an interest in the polyphony of the old madrigals. He also became fascinated with the concerto grosso form, and Martinů holed up with Corelli scores, thus drawing from the same source that inspired Bach and Handel. The result was a body of work that combined the concerto grosso form with madrigalian polyphony, spoken in an up-to-the-minute voice that also added folksong modalities.
In 1923 he received a scholarship that enabled him to travel to Paris, where he would remain for the next 17 years, chased away by the onslaught of German occupation. He studied with Roussel and was introduced to people influential enough to bring about performances of his works – and he churned out some 40 different pieces during his first five years in Paris alone.
Why Paris? Šafránek recounts a visit to Paris by Czech playwright František Langer, who asked Martinů that question. “He was surprised when Martinů did not speak of the material and spiritual advantages of his voluntary exile in the world’s cultural metropolis, but praised instead the peace and quiet, and the possibilities for complete isolation which Paris afforded for his work.”
His reputation grew in the meantime. In 1924, the Prague National Theatre presented his ballet Istar, to considerable acclaim; at a 1925 Festival for Contemporary Music, the Czech Philharmonic played Martinů’s Half-Time, a seven-minute orchestral work that calls for fortissimo brass throughout, and portrays, in Martinů’s words, “the tension of spectators at a game of football.” Football – soccer, in American parlance – was Martinů’s favorite sport, and the Czech team held a world championship from 1919 to 1923. In keeping with the spirit of that sport, the work was provocative enough to prompt an audience fistfight. Martinů’s first orchestral triumph in Paris was a performance of his Piano Concerto No. 1 at Concerts Colonne in 1925.
With the premieres of his second string quartet (1927) and his opera The Soldier and the Dancer (Voják a tanečnice) (1928), his characteristically melodic, often mournful voice began to achieve a recognizable sound, despite the influence of Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale on the opera. The quartet won him the Coolidge Prize in 1932, a significant step in the spread of Martinů’s music to American shores, with prize money that enabled him to buy a piano.
Serge Koussevitzky conducted the Boston Symphony in Martinů’s La Bagarre (The Tumult) in 1927, which, the composer noted, represented “a chaos governed by a common feeling, an invisible bond, which pushes everything forward, which moulds numerous masses into a single element full of unexpected, uncontrollable results.” According to the Christian Science Monitor (Nov. 19, 1927), the work enjoyed “the greatest popular success that has been won at Symphony Hall by a novelty for a long time.” This began a relationship between Martinů and Koussevitzky that would bloom when the composer eventually journeyed to America.
Martinů married dressmaker Charlotte Quennehen in 1931, a time when his music took an even more nationalistic turn toward its Czech origins. It’s reflected in his Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra of 1931, which he wrote in a blaze of inspiration following a very casual conversation in a Paris café with members of the Pro Arte Quartet, who were looking for just such a piece.
His reputation continued to rise during the ensuing years, during which Martinů and his wife continued to share his austere way of life. He turned out scores with astonishing speed, but his mood became colored by increasing tension on the political front.
He traveled from festival to festival; in 1939, he was at the Sokol Festival in Prague and took the opportunity to vacation in his native Polička; it would be his last visit to his homeland. His Tre Ricercari premiered at the Vienna Festival, and shortly after that he saw the premiere of his powerful Double Concerto for Two String Orchestras. Martinů wrote that the work was obviously affected by his feelings of loss for his homeland, and that “the critics spoke of the tragedy of Czechoslovakia ... and at the end of the [first] performance the entire hall demonstrated its sympathies.”
ALMOST IMMEDIATELY AFTERWARD, Bohemia and Moravia were declared a “Reichsprotektorat” of the German army. Martinů himself was put on the Nazi blacklist and his music was banned, so he and his wife hurried out of Paris in June, 1940, abandoning many manuscripts and all belongings. He arrived in America in 1941 with a visa that identified him as a “blacklisted intellectual.”
One piece that did make its way from Europe was Martinů’s Concerto Grosso, smuggled over by George Szell and premiered by Koussevitzky, who also helped him out his financial straits by commissioning a symphony – the first of Martinů’s six. So buoyed was the composer by the experience of writing the work that he pledged to compose a symphony each year, a practice he followed for the next half-decade. At this time he also wrote his Variations on a Theme of Rossini for cellist Gregor Piatigorsky.
Although he nominally settled in Jamaica, Queens, he spent much time working at an artists’ colony in Middlebury, Vermont, as well as in Darien, Connecticut, and at Koussevitzky’s summer home (now Tanglewood) in Lenox, Massachusetts.
Renowned conductors throughout the world were now paying attention to his work. Ernest Ansermet conducted the European premiere of Martinů’s First Symphony in 1946; a year later, Rafael Kubelik gave the Prague premiere of the Symphony No. 2.
Martinů became an American citizen and taught for a while at the Berkshire School of Music in Great Barrington, Massachusetts; while there, he took a fall from an un-railed balcony, a fall that damaged his hearing and affected his nervous system. He recovered slowly, but by 1948 he was able to accept a teaching position offered by Princeton University, where he spent the next three years.
These were marked by an increase in his chamber works. The Sinfonia Concertante of 1949 and the Piano Trio No. 2 (1950) both show the influence of Haydn; he also dabbled in unusual colorations, such as in his “Fantasia for Theremin” (with oboe, string quartet and piano), written in Ridgefield, Conn., in 1944 while thunderstorms and snakes plagued what was supposed to be a pleasant summer vacation.
Martinů the expatriate removed himself from his adopted country in 1953 to spend two years living in Nice, working on a pair of operas and a series of chamber cantatas. He met novelist Nikos Kazantzakis while in Antibes; the writer offered a new text as the basis for an opera that would be Martinů’s last such score: Řecké Pašije (The Greek Passion). Always afflicted by homesickness, unable to return because of the Communist regime, Martinů continued writing evocative chamber cantatas.
When he returned to the U.S. in 1955 to teach at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, he looked unhappily around at what he considered a “too-slick” way of life and returned to Europe, this time to teach for a year at the American Academy in Rome. Martinů found hope in the Hungarian uprising of 1956, hoping that the fervor would spread to Czechoslovakia, but the cruel suppression by Soviet tanks proved even more depressing.
Paul Sacher conducted the successful premiere of Martinů’s oratorio The Epic of Gilgamesh (Gilgameš) in 1957 in Basle, and then invited the composer to remain in Switzerland. Martinů took advantage of his friend’s offer. He wrote his symphonic poem Skála (The Rock) and continued work on The Greek Passion; in 1958, however, he was diagnosed with stomach cancer and began treatment at a hospital in Basle. His apparent convalescent was short-lived, and he died in 1959.
Martinů’s output is vast, varied, and unique. Always an individualist, he nevertheless brought a nationalistic sense to his music. He composed seemingly artlessly and often was compared to Mozart in that respect. As these violin sonatas demonstrate, his music is consistently exciting and full of surprises: pleasant upon hearing them for the first time, they continue to yield even deeper pleasure with each subsequent visit.
– Unused liner notes, 15 August 2002
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