Bohuslav Martinů Gala

The Gala Concert marking 50 years from the death of Bohuslav Martinů (b. in Polička, December 8, 1890; d. in Liestal, Augusst 28, 1959) presents a cross-section of Martinů’s output over a period of 43 years (from 1915 – 1958), at the same time aspiring to point out the commitment of today’s Prague State Opera to the glorious history of its premises.

Cast

• Charles Olivieri-Munroe – conductor
• Simona Houda-Šaturová – soprano
• Svatopluk Sem – baritone
• Martin Šrejma – tenor
• Prague State Opera Orchestra and Choir

Programme

The Rock

symphonic prelude for large orchestra

Commedia dell'arte

orchestral suite from the 1st act of the opera Divadlo za bránou

Saltarello

from the opera Mirandolina

Sinfonia No. 1

overture to the opera Ariadne

Ariadna´s aria

Interval

Nocturne No. 1 in f sharp minor

world premiere

Czech Rhapsody

cantata for baritone, mixed choir, orchestra and organ

The era of the New German Theatre (1888 – 1938) is represented in the programme by the opening symphonic prelude, The Rock, commissioned from Martinů, at the behest of the principal conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra, Georg Szell (between 1929 and 1937 head of the New German Theatre opera company), to mark the 40th anniversary of the orchestra’s founding. The commission of a twelve-minute score took the composer by surprise: “...as it would seem, we have in music no other form, apart from overture or tone poem, which would fill in the space of twelve minutes. After all, not even overture and tone poem are actually forms, and nor do I find them suitable. In the end, however, a tone poem it will be, albeit one with a very vague programme...”, he wrote in a letter to Miloš Šafránek, of March 1957. And yet, he did eventually find a programme for the work: During his stay at the American Music Academy in Rome, where he was composer-in-residence in 1957 – 1958 Martinů discovered a book by Nathaniel Morton, New England’s Memorial, containing an account by the first governor of New England, William Bradford (1588 – 1657), of the disembarkation of English settlers at Plymouth Rock in 1619. The composer, who spent the years 1941 – 1953 mostly in the United States, saw in the Pilgrim Fathers’ voyage to America, inspired by “the perennial hope of a better life for themselves and for anyone else,” an analogy with his own fate. A single-movement, largely meditative composition, The Rock was given its world premiere by the Cleveland Orchestra under Georg Szell’s baton, on April 17, 1958. Its first performance in Prague took place on May 22, 1961, when it was played at the Prague Spring Festival, by the Prague Symphony Orchestra, with Bohumír Liška conducting.

Martinů’s love of the theatre dated back to his childhood. In his fourteen finished operas, from the earliest, The Soldier and the Dancer (1926 – 1927) to the last one, The Greek Passion (1954–59), he drew on a wide variety of source material (ranging from Italian and English Renaissance-era madrigals and Italian Baroque opera, to French Impressionism and jazz music of the 1920s, all of this ingeniously intertwined with melodic inspiration by Moravian folk songs), and tackled an equally wide variety of forms (opera buffa, Surrealist sketch, Surrealist drama, opera-film, medieval miracle plays, radio and television opera, opera-ballet, lyrical drama). In Theatre behind the Gate, Martinů set his sights on the beginnings of modern-age theatre, namely, the commedia dell’arte (in fact, a title he put down at the head of the opera’s autograph score). The first act, a ballet mime, uses characters and plot familiar from the mime productions of “the greatest of Pierrots,” Jean-Gaspard Debureau, whereas the second and third acts – an opera buffa to the composer’s own libretto modelled on folk verse and Molière’s play, Le Médecin volant, transposes the mime subject to Czech milieu: “...It’s nothing else than theatre, a marketplace scene at the outskirts, where everybody goes in the evening to seek entertainment. An ambulant kind of theatre, really... It’s funny, spontaneous, conflict-free, wishing to amuse. More than anything else then a sort of improvised acting and setting, as was commonplace in Italian comedy”, Martinů wrote in an article for the Brno-based magazine, Divadelní list, of September 16, 1935. The premiere of the opera, composed in France from 1935 – 1936, took place in Brno, on September 20, 1936. An orchestral suite from its music was arranged in Paris, in 1936, for concert production purposes by Miloš Říha (1906 – 1973), a conductor and pupil of Václav Talich.

The era of the Smetana Theatre (1949 – 1992) will be brought back by the orchestral Saltarello from Martinů’s opera Mirandolina, whose world premiere took place on this stage, fifty years ago, on May 17, 1959. In 1953, Martinů received from the New York-based Guggenheim Foundation a yearlong grant which enabled him to return from America to Europe. From the autumn of 1953, he and his wife Charlotte lived in Nice, at the villa of their friend, the painter Josef Šíma. Late in that year, he finally found a theme for a new opera with which he wished to pay back to the Guggenheim Foundation for the grant. He decided to set a text he himself wrote in Italian, based on the famous play by Carlo Goldoni, La Locandiera, dating from 1773. He finished the witty opera buffa, named for its principal female character, the sprightly innkeeper Mirandolina, in Nice, on July 1, 1954. The composer prefaced the opera’s third act by a brilliant stylization of the much loved Italian dance, in lively 6/8 time (previously employed by Mendelssohn, in the final movement of his Italian Symphony). The Saltarello has since also earned popularity as a separate concert number. Projecting the principal musical idea assigned to the character of Mirandolina, it overflows with dashing tempo and corresponds exquisitely with the opera’s overall atmosphere evoking the sun-soaked Italy Martinů so loved.

Basing himself on the drama by his friend and inspirer, the French playwright Georges Neveux, Le Voyage de Thésée, of 1943, Martinů wrote his own libretto to the one-act opera Ariane. He composed it while also working on his masterpiece, The Greek Passion, within a month (May 13 – June 15, 1958), at Schönenberg, Switzerland, where he and his wife Charlotte were staying in the home of Paul and Maja Sacher. The ancient legend of Ariadne has been one of the oldest and most cherished subjects treated in the opera literature, from Claudio Monteverdi (L’Arianna, 1608), to George Frideric Handel (Arianna in Creta, 1734), Jules Massenet (Ariane, 1906), Richard Strauss (Ariadne auf Naxos, 1912), and Darius Milhaud (L’Abandon d’Ariane, 1927) to Alexander Goehr (Arianna, 1995). In Martinů’s opera, Theseus’ fight with the Minotaur works as a symbol for struggle within one’s self: the Minotaur is the hero’s alter ego that he is bound to kill – he has to kill the Theseus who is in love with a woman. Eventually, Theseus does prevail over himself (slaying the Minotaur) and leaves Knossos. Martinů conceived Ariane as a Baroque-style monody with instrumental sections (three Sinfonias) and self-contained scenes (three scenes, plus a final aria). The opening Sinfonia No. 1 includes an apron-stage prologue in which the Knossos Watchman announces he has beem advised by a seagull of an approaching black-sailed ship with eight Athenian youths on board. “I will now take a final breath, Theseus, to be strong enough to bid you goodbye,” says Ariane parting with Theseus in the opera’s ravishing final lamentation which takes up nearly one-fifth of the 43-minute-long opera’s duration. According to the composer’s wife, when writing the virtuoso part of Ariane, Martinů was thinking of Maria Callas, whose vocal art was coupled with a phenomenal capacity to characterize a role in terms of expression. The composer did not live to be present at the opera’s premiere, at Gelsenkirchen, on March 2, 1961.

With the end of the First World War imminent, it became increasingly clear everywhere, including the composer’s birthplace, Polička, that the defeat of the Triple Alliance (with Austria-Hungary) entails the hope of sovereignty for the Czech nation. Early in 1918, Martinů asked his friend Stanislav Novák, leader of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, to send to his address in Polička the score of Smetana’s My Country, and Zdeněk Nejedlý’s book, A History of the Hussite Chant. He felt obliged “to write some Czech work now, something clear-cut, nothing too intricate,” he wrote to Novák, “...a Czech rhapsody, for large orchestra with baritone solo and chorus... closing on Saint Wenceslas, which is an amazingly beautiful chant...” Like they would during the Second World War, two decades before its outbreak too, Czech composers chose to turn to the symbol of Czech national music, Bedřich Smetana. For its part, Martinů’s Czech Rhapsody does nothing to hide its indebtedness to Smetana. The composer’s manifestation of his patriotic feelings was not limited to his quote of the illustrious melody of the Wenceslavian chant; it was still enhanced by the work’s dedication to the then generally recognized spokesman of the nation’s aspirations, the author Alois Jirásek; and in its texts: namely, Psalm 23, Jaroslav Vrchlický’s poem, Bohemia, and the words of the Wenceslavian Chant itself. The cantata opens on an orchestral overture giving prominence to the composition’s principal subject, the Wenceslavian Chant (“a suffering, a struggle”, wrote Martinů in his commentary on the work). This is followed by a choral setting of Psalm 23 (“prayer of the entire nation”), initially a cappella, and in the second part taking on organ accompaniment. The orchestra (“a motif of freedom, victory, in the horns at their full blast”) provides a bridge leading to the third and final part, where an introductory harp passage gives way to a large-scale baritone solo to the text of Vrchlický’s poem (“a hymn to the beauty of homeland and to faith in victory”), gradating with help from the choir and organ, all the way up to a robust, broadly worked out rendition of the Wenceslavian Chant into which is incorporated in a baritone solo the closing part of Vrchlický’s poem (“the return of Duke Wenceslas of Bohemia, and the advent of a new future, the ardently awaited Freedom”). The Czech Rhapsody, written by Martinů in Polička, during May and June of 1918, was first performed by the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra under Ludík Vítězslav Čelanský’s baton, on January 12, 1919. The following performance, on January 24, was attended by the first President of Czechoslovakia, T.G. Masaryk.

The programme of this concert is being further enriched by a special feature: the world premiere of Martinů’s orchestral Nocturne No. 1 in F sharp minor, composed in Polička, in 1915. Martinů started to write music very early, at the age of 13 – then with no hope for his works ever to be submitted for expert scrutiny, let alone to be publicly performed or published. Fortunately, autograph scores of some of these juvenile works have survived at the Bohuslav Martinů Centre in Polička. That is also the case of the short, sixteen-page score of Nocturne No. 1 in F sharp minor, which was newly edited by Sandra Srnková Bergmannová, and published by Editio Bärenreiter Prague in September 2009. The composition, dominated by the plaintive song of solo viola (whose melody is towards the end also adopted by solo violin), does not belie the influence of the young Martinů’s best-loved composer, Claude Debussy, ranks among Martinů’s most interesting early opuses.