“Martinů and his World” is the theme of the Summer Festival in Bard, 170 km north of New York, once again offering an opportunity for discoveries and renewed encounters with his music.
Martinů on the River Hudson
The first ideas about organising a Bard Music Festival focused on the work of Bohuslav Martinů began in 2004 at a meeting with Leon Botstein, the President of Bard College. But as works by Antonín Dvořák and Leoš Janáček had been presented in the recent past, it was to take over twenty years until the Festival was to feature another classic of Czech music.
At the time of writing this article, the final details of the programme for the 2025 Bard Music Festival have yet to be finalised. What is certain is that alongside works by Martinů, works by his Czech (Dvořák, Janáček, Suk, Kaprálová, Jan Novák, Eben and more), French (Ravel, Roussel, Honegger and more) and American (Copland, Diamond, Husa, Zappa and more) predecessors and successors will be heard.
A total of eleven Martinů concerts will include chamber music works (including the Piano Quintet no. 1, the Flute Sonata, the String Trio no. 1, the String Quartet no. 7,
“Les Rondes”, Three Madrigals for violin and viola, the Cello Sonata no. 3, the Nonet no. 2, “Variations on a Slovak folksong” for cello and piano, “Three Czech Dances” for two pianos, instrumental concertos (Harpsichord Concerto, Violin Concerto no. 2, Piano Concerto no. 4, “Incantation”), works for chamber and large orchestra (“Tre Ricercari”, “Memorial to Lidice”, the Double Concerto for two string orchestras, piano and timpani, Symphonies no. 2 and 6), a ballet (“La revue de cuisine”), cantatas (“The Mountain of Three Lights”, “The Field Mass”, “The epic of Gilgamesh”), and operas (the premiere of the first version of “Mariken de Nimègue” from the “Miracle of Our Lady” and the key work “Juliette”). Concert introductions before every event and two podium discussions with leading experts on the music of Bohuslav Martinů also feature in the programme.
Excitingly productive
As the Festival represents a unique interface between an educated audience mainly of non-professionals, elite performers and top academics, the question is what each of these groups can derive from “Martinů and his World” in 2025.
For the audience, the answer is simple: Martinů is one of the most exciting composers you can encounter as a listener. He is one of the most productive composers of the 20th century, and his oeuvre offers a feast of beautiful and profound works: 15 operas and 14 ballets, over 20 concertos, six symphonies, many songs, choral works and cantatas, a large number of chamber music works – a total of almost 400 opus numbers. From the sensuous inwardness of the “Andante moderato” from the Violin Concerto no. 2 to the folk-like exuberance of “Špalíček”, from the ghostly surrealism of Juliette to the power of the “Epic of Gilgamesh”, Martinů offers an almost inexhaustible collection of works, approaches and ideas. His fascination for madrigals, for Igor Stravinsky, the Virgin Mary, jazz, Baroque music, Bartók, surrealism, neoclassicism, Byzantine chant, medieval miracle plays and the folk cultures of Czechoslovakia lend his works both subtle and powerful accents.
Furthermore, Martinů’s life and his career unfolded in a series of unusual episodes. Born in 1890 in a church tower high above a small town in the Bohemian-Moravian highlands, like many young Czech composers he eventually moved to Prague, but in contrast with them he made Paris his second home in the 1920s and 1930s. Expelled by the Nazis, in 1941 he went to the United States and quickly became one of the most successful composers of the decade. Great orchestras premiered his symphonies. After the war he wanted to return to Prague, but a tragic fall from a balcony in an accident in Great Barrington in 1946 prevented this. By the time he had recovered from this the Communist putsch of 1948 had already taken place. Until the end of his life he remained a kind of exile, travelling back and forth between the USA, France, Italy and Switzerland. He never returned to Czechoslovakia. Each of these places left indelible traces on his creative life, from the church tower in the Bohemian-Moravian highlands with its view over an unchanging landscape which he, as he himself said, always had in his mind’s eye, to the pulsating Paris of the late 1920s and 30s, where he encountered jazz, surrealism and Stravinsky. But beginning in Paris, in a series of operas, cantatas and nostalgic miniatures, Martinů created the Czech world he had left behind him.
In the United States he became a symphonist and returned to opera. The result of his years on the move are works of great philosophical and political power such as “The Greek Passion”, “The Epic of Gilgamesh” and “The prophecy of Isaiah”. Even if Martinů himself may have despaired that the stories surrounding his life would colour our reactions to particular works, this is only one facet of his reception.
For performers the field is rich. There are not only compositions for almost every instrument and numerous different combinations of instruments, but Martinů’s music offers both lightness as well as considerable challenges. His music is far more than just his trade mark; the lyrical syncopation gives a clear aspect to his style which is based on subtle rhythmic shifts – one of the reasons why it is difficult to present him as a “dance-like” composer. When such moments are combined with contrasting others, performers have to create certain connections which demands skill and intuition. As Martinů often combines moments of apparently exquisite musical clarity with ideas which seem to circumvent these, performers cannot rely on their intuition alone, but have to consider how they can be most effective in performance. For Rudolf Firkušný, Rafael Kubelík, Garrick Ohlsson, Frank Peter Zimmermann, Julia Fischer,
Charles Mackerras, Jiří Bělohlávek, Stephen Isserlis, Magdalena Kožená and Jakub Hrůša, who have immersed themselves in the composer’s music for many years, Martinů’s works are amongst the most rewarding they enjoy performing.
A Beethoven or a Schubert type?
The exciting question is how we should understand Martinů’s exceptional productivity and his personality? There are many kinds of composer, but for simplicity we can talk of a “Beethoven type” or a “Schubert type”. With the Beethoven type there is, at least in the imagination of his contemporaries and modern-day audiences, a clear correlation between personality and music. Of course this cannot apply to every note or every composition, but we have the basic feeling that Beethoven’s personal power is always present. With the Schubert type we have a composer who appears to reveal only very few outer traces of the drama we find in his music, although newer biographers have discovered a more nuanced picture. With this in mind, Martinů probably belongs to the Schubert type. What is more, he behaved neither like a superstar – like Beethoven, Wagner, Stravinsky or Schoenberg – nor was he ever really really perceived as such. Because he had minimal self-importance, it perhaps took longer for performers, audiences and scholars to recognise the power that lies behind his works. And as with Schubert, the music seemed to pour out of him. Impressive as this is, there was also a critical downside. As Martinů was so exceptionally productive, he is sometimes seen disparagingly as over-prolific. There is also a tendency to regard him as a composer whose works are “too similar” or at least incline to be based on repeating material. The more we immerse ourselves in Martinů’s music, the more we notice how different, how original and how precise each composition is.
Finally, Martinů was a person who surprises time and time again. What he did had method, but it was never a system. He was a passionate reader; he never stopped reading, studying and trying to understand things. The fact that he nevertheless refused to act as some kind of “authority” figure is a notable testimony to his humility and modesty.
Aleš Březina (Director, Bohuslav Martinů Institute, Prague)
(translation: Elizabeth Robinson – from [t]akte 1/2025)