Bohuslav Martinů did not complete work on his cheerful one-act opera for the World Exposition in 1937 on time. And so it was to take another quarter century before the premiere of “Alexandre bis” took place. Now there is a new Urtext edition. 

Bohuslav Martinů completed Alexandre bis on 8 March 1937 as the last stage work he wrote before the Second World War. The opera was a commission for Expo 1937 in Paris, which lasted from 25 May to 25 November 1937, and its theme was “Art and Technology in Modern Life”.

The composer’s first mention of the new composition is in a letter to his family dated 12 January 1937: “They also asked me to offer something for the theatre at the exposition, so it looks like I will have plenty of work.” The libretto of Alexandre bis was written by the French author and journalist André Wurmser, to whom Martinů had probably been introduced by Miloš Šafránek. Wurmser himself describes the circumstances.

International guest performances were being prepared in Paris theatres on the occasion of the 1937 Universal Exposition. One Czech diplomat – he just wrote to me – phoned me that a compatriot composer of his intends to write a merry composition and is looking for a libretto that would suit him. And so I was visited by Bohuslav Martinů. He told me straight up that he wanted the piece to have either a cat or a plant singing in it. The short text I could offer him only had a framed portrait speak. He made do with it.

The plot of the opera is introduced by a text that was later published in the 1939 edition of Almanach ouvrier et paysan in Paris:

That was in the days when our grandmothers sang, around 1900. Mr. Loubet presided over the Republic and sported a full beard, as did Alexander. Alexander is happy. As is Armande, his wife. Philomène, their maid, takes things as they come. But then a crazy idea springs up in Alexander’s bearded head.

The play of faithfulness and seduction takes its course. A portrait begins to speak, and in the end, all is well. The witty, parodic text is full of puns and hyperbole. In it, André Wurmser has Philomène quote the verses of the French poets Paul Verlaine, Jean Racine, Félix Arvers, and Charles Baudelaire, along with excerpts from the librettos of “famous comic operas”.

On 16 March 1937 Martinů sent the score to Henry Barraud, who functioned as the Expo’s music commissioner and was also a member of the exposition’s General Committee. In the enclosed letter the composer voiced his hope that Barraud could place the work at the Comédie des Champs-Elysées, which hosted the Expo’s opera-buffa series performances. This shows that Barraud commissioned the opera from Martinů.

It seems that Martinů did not finish the opera on time (the opera-buffa performances at the Comédie des Champs-Elysées ran from mid-June to September 1937) because it was not staged during the world fair. Unfortunately, it was not possible to find when the works were commissioned or when the composers were required to hand in their scores.

However, shortly after its completion (in 1937 and 1938), when it was clear it would not be performed in Paris, Martinů began negotiating its production with Karel Šebánek and the Czechoslovak publisher Melantrich. The idea was to perform it together with two other one-act operas – Hlas Lesa (The Voice of the Forest( (H 243) and Veselohra na mostě (Comedy on the Bridge) (H 247). He negotiated about the production with Adolf Heller, head of the opera in Olomouc, but it was never realised. The opera was finally premiered in 1964, after the work was published by Bärenreiter (which published the full and vocal scores and the performance material). The premiere took place on 18 February 1964 at the Mannheim National Theatre, followed by a Czechoslovak premiere in Brno on 22 May that same year. These two performances also occasioned a German translation by Kurt Honolka (which was also printed in the full score and the vocal score) and later a Czech translation from German by Eva Bezděková.

Reviews suggest the opera was very well received at its Czechoslovak premiere, and it has since appeared repeatedly in the repertoires of Czech and foreign theatres (the most recent performance was in May 2024 in London at the Susie Sainsbury Theatre, and another staging is planned for June 2026 at the Kammeroper of the MusikTheater an der Wien).

Jitka Zichová
(from [t]akte 1/2026)