Martinů was widely regarded as the most significant figure in Czech music since Dvořák and Janáček. Unlike them, however, he declined to wear his nationalism on his sleeve; his style and outlook remained obstinately, almost defiantly, cosmopolitan—and consequently hard to pigeonhole—to the last. After immigrating to the United States as a wartime refugee in 1941, Martinů itched to escape from New York (he fled first to Jamaica, then to New England) and never ceased to pine for his native Bohemia. Although he didn’t return to Europe until 1953, he made good use of his exile, turning out a number of symphonies, string quartets, and other works. The Fantasia for Theremin, Oboe, String Quartet, and Piano was commissioned in 1944 by a wealthy New York dilettante named Lucie Bigelow Rosen, who had met the theremin’s Russian inventor at a party in 1929 and became one of his biggest boosters, even providing him with a low-rent workshop on West 54th Street.
Unlike the ondes Martenot, another first-generation electronic instrument with a similar sonic profile, the theremin never really caught on with composers. In part, this was due to the notorious fickleness of its tone production: Olin Downes, reviewing the premiere of the Fantasia at Town Hall in 1945 in The New York Times, noted its alarming tendency to “scoop like an inexperienced, hallooing, open-toned soprano” in the higher register. Rosen took a sunnier view, likening the theremin to “an archangel’s voice, of five octaves, and incredible power and sweetness, that can dive to the rich low tones of a cello, and include the thin high harmonics of the violin.” Martinů was sufficiently convinced of the novel instrument’s potential that he assigned it the solo role in his Fantasia, its quavery cantilena providing an otherworldly counterpoint to the “straighter” tones of the oboe, strings, and piano. Like much of Martinů’s music, the Fantasia combines a dissonant, energetically rhythmic modernist idiom with lushly Romantic flowing lines, culminating in a radiant D-major chord.
Gesualdo exhibited a flair for drama in both his music and his private life. A titled nobleman, he earned notoriety in 1590 for the gruesome honor killing of his first wife and her paramour. His second wife accused him of neglect and cruelty. “Afflicted by a vast horde of demons,” as one contemporary put it, he spent the last two decades of his life sequestered in his ancestral palace near Naples, attended by musicians who performed for his ears only. Despite, or perhaps because of, his tormented existence, Gesualdo was one of the most adventurous musicians of his time. His daring harmonies and text painting inspired the up-and-coming school of madrigal composers, for whom, as Monteverdi put it, words were “the mistress of harmony, and not the servant.”
Gesualdo’s bold tonal experiments also fascinated modernist composers as diverse as Igor Stravinsky, Alfred Schnittke, and the late Peter Maxwell Davies. The last was a lifelong student of early music and throughout his career drew sustenance, as well as specific compositional techniques, from such preclassical masters as Dufay, Purcell, and Monteverdi. In arranging a pair of five-voice motets from Gesualdo’s 1603 collection Sacrae cantiones for brass quintet in 1982, Davies kept his originality in check and hewed close to the original scores. The penitential theme of the Latin texts was made to order for Gesualdo’s edgy, emotionally charged musical language, rife as it is with chromaticism, unprepared dissonances, and tonal shifts.
Villa-Lobos was still eking out a living as a cellist in a movie-house pit orchestra when Artur Rubinstein visited Rio de Janeiro in 1920. Tipped off by friends, the pianist went to the cinema in hopes of meeting the young Brazilian musician about whom everyone was talking. “One of the orchestra members, looking around the auditorium during the intermission, noticed me in the audience,” Rubinstein recalled. “When the next part began, I heard music that was completely unlike what had been played in the previous part. It was a furious, exotic dance, crazy in its ceaseless rhythmic impulse, extraordinarily colorful, clear in its harmony and instrumentation. I immediately felt a breeze of uncommon talent in this music.” The music that captivated Rubinstein—who soon became one of Villa-Lobos’s most enthusiastic champions—may have been an improvised version of the symphonic poem Amazonas, inspired by folk music that the young composer had heard on his forays into the Brazilian rainforest.
Although Villa-Lobos wrote in a wide array of genres, he is best known for the Bachianas brasileiras, a set of nine suites for various chamber ensembles that infused the forms, harmonies, and procedures of the European Baroque with the Latin spirit of his native land. Having learned to play the cello from his father, Villa-Lobos featured the instrument’s burnished timbre in many pieces, notably his ever-popular Bachianas brasileiras No. 5 for soprano and eight cellos. The first of the work’s two movements, composed in 1938, is a haunting, exotically inflected “cantilena” in which two statements of a wordless vocalise—the first sung, the second hummed—frame a setting of an ode to the moon by Brazilian poet-singer Ruth Valadares Corrêa. The lyrics’ sultry beauty is enhanced by the burnished, baritonal sound of the cello choir. In 1945, Villa-Lobos appended a contrasting second movement, a percussive, dance-like celebration of birdsong based on a traditional Brazilian musico-poetic form known as embolada.
In the wake of their fortuitous encounter in Rio, Rubinstein was instrumental in securing funding for Villa-Lobos to embark on a lengthy sojourn in Europe in 1923. (With characteristic bravado—and a touch of defensiveness—the 36-year-old composer announced to the press: “I do not go to France to study. I go to show them what I have done.”) Over the next seven years, Villa-Lobos traveled widely, consorting with Ravel, Stravinsky, Varèse, and other leading modernist composers, whose influence contributed to the potpourri of styles that characterized his music. At the same time, he made a determined effort to introduce Europeans to authentic Brazilian music, notably in a series of works titled Chôros, in which, he wrote, “different modalities of the Brazilian Indian and popular music are synthesized, having as its principal elements rhythm and some typical melody of a popular nature ... The word ‘serenade’ can give an approximate idea of what ‘chôros’ means.”
Dating from 1926, the fourth of the 13 Chôros calls for an unusual combo of three horns and trombone, a scoring reminiscent of the serenading musicians Villa-Lobos had encountered on the streets of Rio in his youth, as well as the African American jazz bands that were all the rage in contemporary Paris. That the sound of the latter was ringing in his ears as he wrote Chôros No. 4 is suggested by the frequent solo breaks, the pervasive syncopations, and the trombone’s swooping glissandos. Echoes of the “neoclassical” Stravinsky can be heard in the music’s clipped march rhythms, as well as the gently undulating theme of the lullaby-like midsection. Villa-Lobos’s final touch is a high-spirited Latin dance in duple meter, a joyous free-for-all in which each of the four instruments marches to a different drummer.
Stravinsky’s long and storied career took him from the drawing rooms of czarist St. Petersburg to the tinsel-town sound studios of Los Angeles. It was as a Russian nationalist that he rocketed to fame on the eve of World War I with a trio of colorful, folkloric ballets written for Serge Diaghilev’s celebrated Ballets Russes: The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring. The last’s legendary premiere, which took place in Paris in 1913, sealed the composer’s reputation as one of modernism’s enfants terribles. The Parisian Stravinsky of the 1920s and 1930s cut a more cosmopolitan figure, characterized by such coolly neoclassical masterpieces as the ballet Apollo, the Violin Concerto in D Major, and the hybrid opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex. After immigrating to the United States in 1939, the protean master reinvented himself yet again in works like the quasi-Mozartean opera The Rake’s Progress, the jazz-tinged Ebony Concerto, and the spikily serial Movements for piano and orchestra.
The Octet for Wind Instruments epitomizes Stravinsky’s brand of neoclassicism, from the music’s transparent, divertimento-like textures to the historically evocative movement titles and the use of classical procedures like fugue and variation. Stravinsky saw the work as a kind of anti-Romantic manifesto for the modernist era, a demonstration of his unshakable conviction that music was an autonomous art form and had no meaning outside of itself. In an article published a few weeks after the Octet’s Paris premiere in 1923, he famously referred to it as “a musical object” whose “architecture” and expression could only be described in purely formalist terms. “In general,” the composer avowed, “I consider that music is only able to solve musical problems; and nothing else, neither the literary nor the picturesque, can be in music of any real interest. The play of musical elements is the thing.” Indeed, it is precisely the intricate and imaginative “play of musical elements” that makes the Octet so consistently delightful.
—Harry Haskell