Martinů
in Paris: A Synthesis of Musical Styles
and Symbols
By
Erik Anthony
Entwistle
Introduction
Although the world
has passed into the new millennium and
left the twentieth century behind, its
musical legacy will remain a fertile
source of inspiration, and even discovery,
for centuries to come. One artist whose
oeuvre reflects much of the diversity
of musical achievement in the first
half of the century is Bohuslav
Martinů, now acknowledged as the
greatest modern Czech composer after
Leoš Janáček. Yet Martinů
still maintains an uncertain status
in the Western musical pantheon, and
to many remains an enigmatic figure.
The images of the composer’s childhood
spent atop
the tower of St. James Church in Polička
and of his final resting place on a
lonely Swiss hillside emphasize a Martinů
who lived apart, in a world unto himself.
These visually poetic bookends encompass
a persistent Martinů mythos that
favors a certain view
of the composer - at odds with society,
hopelessly shy, isolated and solitary.
Like all myths there is a measure of
truth behind it, but in Martinů’s
case there is much more to consider.
When viewed from a more balanced perspective,
Martinů’s life and
work presents us with an opportunity
to examine vital questions concerning
the aesthetics, reception and significance
of art music, which both acts as a composer’s
personal manifesto and reflects the
society and times in which it was born.
With Martinů the ramifications
are particularly fascinating, for it
was in the alternately heady and sobering
climate of Paris, where the composer
resided between the wars, that he first
began to address these questions decisively.
What began as a three-month
visit to
study with Albert Roussel lengthened
into a residency of seventeen years,
and Martinů’s prolonged stay in
Paris increasingly begged seminal questions
about his music: was it in fact “Czech”
or “French”, or, in broader terms, national
or cosmopolitan? Reviewers
and critics invariably addressed the
notion of national identity when discussing
Martinů’s music from this period,
as did the composer himself, and it
has remained an obvious frame of reference
ever since. The issue of nationalism
is of course a thorny
one, particularly when viewed from today’s
post-modern perspective, but for Martinů
and many of his contemporaries the concept
remained a valid one.
There
is no question that Martinů’s relocation
had far-reaching artistic consequences,
and that it arguably represents the
single, most important turning point
in his life. Martinů was not alone
in his susceptibility to the siren song
emanating from the French capital. The
following words of Rudolf Firkušný
echo the sentiments of the many artists
and musicians who flocked to Paris in
the twenties and thirties: "After
the first World War, for us France became
the new world. It seemed that every
one of my peers had but one ambition,
to go to France and to see Paris."
Czechoslovakia, of course, was only
one source for the burgeoning expatriate
population in interwar Paris. Short-
and long-term residents from foreign
lands included such luminaries as Stravinsky,
Hemingway, Copland, Gershwin, Picasso,
and Prokofiev. Paris was destined to
become a well-known focal point for
artistic endeavor during a period that
was "so chaotic and so full of
promise."
Martinů had in fact already experienced
Paris in 1919 while on tour with the
Czech National Theater Orchestra under
Karel Kovařovic. He was completely
captivated by the French capital and
hoped to return in the near future.
Adding to the allure of Paris itself
were the personal reasons and expectations
that informed the Martinů’s eventual
decision to relocate. These are closely
tied to the artistic goals and
aspirations addressed by the composer
in the following excerpt from his so-called
"American diaries" during
the Second World War, in a section entitled,
"Something about that French influence":
What impelled me
to get to know French culture were
more serious considerations. Instinctively
I felt, even when I was still young
and couldn’t analyze or think clearly,
that there were things, opinions,
that are served up to us, that do
not and cannot find an echo in our
national spirit, in our national
Czech expression, and that there
are things artificially preserved,
which divert our natural spiritual
development into a domain that is
not native to our Czech expression,
that becomes a caricature and needlessly
exhausts our energies. Perhaps I
have exaggerated everything, but
this dissatisfaction was being continually
justified, although a large part
of past and present creative output
confirmed my view. In short, I saw
that our natural expression and
character has a greater bias toward
concretization and logical thought
than various mysteriously involved
metaphysical systems, which were
crammed into us and which, of course,
seemed to us much more valuable
and deeper, despite the fact that
the depth was obviously verbal and,
in reality, "on the surface",
without proof and without weight,
at least for me. I also felt that
such a view was not exactly in keeping
with the spiritual manifestations
of our great people, among whom
I always found a concreteness of
thought, a healthy sentimentality
and a creative attitude that was
healthily emotional rather than
mysteries and problems. And so I
went to France not to seek there
my salvation, but to confirm my
opinions... What I went to France
in quest of was not Debussy, nor
Impressionism, nor musical expression,
but the real foundations on which
Western Culture rests and which,
in my opinion, conforms much more
to our proper national character
than a maze of conjectures and problems.
At its core the passage
is clearly a slap in the face to the
musical establishment
in Prague, and reflects the artistic
crisis that Martinů was experiencing
at that time. The composer here is unequivocal
in his condemnation of musical currents
“not native” to the Czech capital but
nonetheless entrenched there. Martinů
rails against the trends of expressionism
and post-romanticism, which in his point
of view are foreign to the musical characteristics
of the Czech people (he tactfully omits
the fact that they are of principally
Germanic origin). The last sentence
sums up the passage well,
with Martinů boldly equating the
national character of the Czechs with
the “real foundations” of Western culture.
Such polemics, taken
out of context, might seem to border
on the rabidly nationalistic and myopic,
although such sentiments were the norm
in Hapsburg-dominated Bohemia and Moravia
(one could also quote Janáček’s
writings here as well). However, delivered
in hindsight after Martinů’s experience
in Paris, the composer’s statements
gain credibility and perspective, if
not a measure of irony.
For equally in Prague and Paris, Martinů
struggled with his status as an outsider.
Indeed, the fact that he maintained
personal and musical ties to home while
residing in Paris is one of the most
intriguing aspects of this period, since
it reflects in some
measure the duality of his existence.
Still, it is apparent from his own words
that, musically speaking, Martinů
felt profoundly out of place in his
homeland, and that by contrast the welcoming
metropolis of Paris seemed to offer
limitless artistic freedom
- an ideal alternative to the stifling
atmosphere of Prague with its institutionalized
musical totalitarianism. Yet in Paris
Martinů would face the equally
formidable obstacles of physical isolation,
owing largely to the language barrier,
and chronic destitution, which
he had little hope of transcending.
Of
course specific circumstances, and not
merely ideological considerations, also
influenced Martinů’s decision to
relocate and later remain in Paris.
Apart from the composer’s own writings,
the most valuable primary biographical
source comes from Martinů’s lifelong
friend Miloš Šafránek, who discusses
at length the issues behind Martinů’s
move to Paris, often relaying information
from the composer himself in his two
invaluable biographies. It is
not the intention to paraphrase these
here, but to comment on how this momentous
change has been presented in the biographical
context, and to attempt to shed further
light on the issues in question. In
one particularly memorable passage Šafránek
offers the following storybook account:
And one day in
Prague, while playing Roussel’s
symphonic piece Poème
de la forêt,
he suddenly realized where his loyalties
lay. At once Martinů’s inner
struggles came to an end, and he
knew that he must go to Paris...
But if the composer
did indeed experience an epiphany while
performing Roussel, the sudden decision
to relocate was arguably as much an
act of running away as it was a planned
pilgrimage to a new artistic milieu.
For, as Šafránek’s
account continues, “In September 1923
[Martinů] left Prague for Paris,
still oppressed by various problems
and full of contradictions.”
Here Šafránek is being more realistic,
as the "problems" he hints
at were numerous - indeed, there is
little doubt that the 33-year-old composer
had reached an impasse in his musical
career in Prague.
Although the founding
of the Republic of Czechoslovakia
in the aftermath of the Great War promised
new artistic opportunities in a climate
of optimism and pride, Martinů’s
path as a composer was proving at best
uncertain. Several performances in 1919
of Martinů’s earnest and full-blooded
Czech Rhapsody, a cantata
for baritone solo, mixed chorus, orchestra
and organ, had put the composer on Prague’s
musical map. Indeed, President Masaryk
was in attendance at one of the performances.
That same year, though, Czech Philharmonic
conductor Václav Talich rejected
Martinů’s
Small Dance Suite at the
rehearsal stage,
delivering a blow to the composer’s
confidence. Also during this period
Martinů had been relegated to the
post of second fiddle in the Czech Philharmonic
- a far cry from Polička’s
hopes that its native son
would follow in the footsteps of the
famed violin virtuoso Jan Kubelík. When
Martinů finally managed to get
his symphonic poem Modrá
hodina (Blue Hour) performed by
the Philharmonic in 1923, critics responded
by dismissively labeling him a "French"
composer, adding a dimension of irony
to the situation given that the composer
was soon to leave for Paris.
Despite
these setbacks Martinů could well
have remained in his homeland, since
in fact Prague was becoming much less
provincial since the end of the
war and was musically coming into its
own. But
there were institutional difficulties
as well. The earlier humiliation of
Martinů’s expulsion from the Prague
Conservatory for “incorrigible negligence”
was now being compounded by his obstinacy
in Josef Suk’s composition class, in
which he routinely failed to complete
the required compositional exercises.
Martinů once again found himself
unable to work in the structured environment
of the Prague Conservatory. If anything,
attendance at Suk’s master class
underscored to Martinů his need
to pursue a different direction, and
his own failure to achieve significant
success in Prague only fueled his desire
to start over in a new environment,
despite the dissenting voices of Suk
and Talich.
Although he had once
rather naively proclaimed to Suk that
above all he wanted to compose like
Debussy, Martinů soon came to the
conclusion that works such as Suk’s
post-impressionist symphonic poem Ripening
were a culmination of an epoch, and
that it was no longer possible to continue
along the same path. One consequence
of this realization was the ballet composed
in secret while in Suk’s class, Who
is the Most Powerful in the World,
whose parodic use of various popular
dances remarkably looks forward to his
Paris style and already demonstrates
a radically changing aesthetic.
Why, then, did a work
such as Roussel’s Poème de
la forêt
supposedly reveal to Martinů where
his loyalties lay? For it is a distinctly
impressionistic work, a kind of landlubber’s
version of La Mer dating
all the way back to 1906 and hardly
reflective of Roussel’s more recent
compositions. Surely this is one of
the “contradictions” to which Šafránek
refers but does not explicitly state.
The suggestion that this single work
inspired Martinů’s pilgrimage seems
bizarre, considering that the composer
had already ended his love affair with
impressionism with his symphonic
poem Modrá hodina and
ballet Istar.
Nonetheless, Roussel more recent scores
would exert a decisive influence on
Martinů once he had arrived in
Paris and established contact with his
French counterpart.
There were two additional
circumstances that gave
impetus to Martinů’s decision.
First was the death of his father, which
came as a severe blow. He was not as
close to his mother and was anxious
to escape her domineering presence.
At nearly the same time he received
a modest stipend awarded for three
months of study abroad from the Ministry
of Education, and so everything came
together to precipitate Martinů’s
departure. Thus, Martinů’s decision
to leave for Paris did not yet have
the trappings of a momentous change,
since the visit was initially to
last only three months.
If
there is inevitably some speculation
involved in ferreting out the composer’s
motives for going to Paris, then, what
is clear is that Martinů’s eyes
(and ears) were opened by his experiences
there, and that all of the other factors
at least reinforced a decision to stay.
Paris evidently offered the best environment
for Martinů to develop his technique
and experiment stylistically in a path
towards artistic maturation, and by
examining his life in Paris and his
early Parisian works it becomes
apparent that the composer enthusiastically
embraced the challenge set before him.
Introduction
I.
A New Beginning: Life In Paris
II.
How Martinů "Got Rhythm"
III.
Of Folk Tunes, Pastorals, and the Masses
IV.
Dvakrát Svatý Václave
(St. Wenceslas, Twice)
V.
An Aspect of Minor/Major Significance
VI.
Fin de séjour: Julietta
and Musical Symbolism
VII.Conclusion:
Martinů’s Parisian Legacy
