One of the 20th century’s more versatile and prolific composers, Bohuslav Martinů was generally regarded as the most significant figure in Czech music since Janáček and Dvořák. Unlike his compatriots, however, Martinů declined to wear his nationalism on his sleeve; his style and outlook remained obstinately, almost defiantly, cosmopolitan to the last. As a result, his music is hard to pigeonhole, conforming neither to the tenets of modernism nor to those of any recognizable stylistic school. In 1923, Martinů moved to Paris to study with Albert Roussel, the highly respected teacher of Satie and Varèse, from whom the 32-year-old Czech expected to glean “order, transparency, balance, taste, and a clear, exact, expressive language—the characteristics of French art I had always admired.” But Roussel was equally sympathetic to Neoclassicism and jazz, idioms to which Martinů was increasingly drawn. He anticipated that his sojourn in France would last only a few months but ended up staying for 17 years.
That France remained Martinů’s spiritual homeland, even throughout his prolonged (and mostly unhappy) exile in the United States as a refugee during and after World War II, is demonstrated by his energetic Nonet for winds and strings of 1959. Among his last works, it harkens back to the Stravinskyan Neoclassicism of the 1920s in its sharply etched rhythms and textures, shifting meters, well-balanced structure, and thematic concision. Martinů was keenly aware that the Nonet was stylistically retro and prided himself on being out of step with the postwar modernist avant-garde. When the celebrated Czech Nonet—which commissioned the work for its 35th anniversary—scheduled the high-profile premiere for that summer’s Salzburg Festival, he anticipated a negative critical response. “If it isn’t dodecaphonic or 12-tone, it’s as if it didn’t exist there,” he told a friend, “so they shouldn’t take it badly if they give me a pounding.” In the event, the Nonet was enthusiastically received by the audience in the Mozarteum that June. But Martinů wasn’t on hand to reap the accolades: Undergoing treatment for stomach cancer, he died in Switzerland at the end of August. Two weeks later, the Nonet was performed at a memorial service for him in Prague.
Like most of Martinů’s music, the Nonet is “tonal” in the sense of being fundamentally pitch-centered, rather than adhering to an identifiable key. Each of the three movements ends with a simple triadic harmony. The outer fast movements, with their propulsive motor rhythms, ostinato-like repeating figures, and lighthearted ensemble repartee, contrast with the dark-hued lyricism of the central Andante. Martinů takes care to allot time in the spotlight to each of the nine players; he wrote the especially prominent violin part for the Czech Nonet’s director, Emil Leichner, who instigated the commission. In fact, Leichner had first approached Martinů 10 years earlier, but the chronically hyperactive composer was too busy even to respond. “To write as much music as I do should probably not be allowed,” he reflected at the time. “Maybe when everything is put in order something will come out of it, but I don’t think much.” Nor did he slow down even as his body wasted away. In the last year of his life alone, Martinů composed—in addition to the Nonet—a series of major choral works and the opera The Greek Passion, based on a novel by Nikos Kazantakis.
Long after the successful premiere of his opera Jenůfa in 1904, Leoš Janáček remained little-known outside his native Moravia. His modest fame rested largely on his accomplishments as a teacher, organist, and musical folklorist. Not until a revised version of Jenůfa was staged in Prague in 1916 did his reputation begin to spread. Janáček was already moving away from the Late-Romantic ethos of his early works to the distinctive sound world of his maturity, characterized by epigrammatic terseness, abrupt changes of mood and atmosphere, and irregular, speechlike rhythms. In the last decade of his life, his passionate but platonic affair with the much-younger Kamila Stösslová sparked a white-hot blaze of compositional activity. Janáček immortalized his muse in such masterworks as the operas Káťa Kabanová, The Cunning Little Vixen, and The Makropulos Case, as well as the Second String Quartet of 1928, subtitled “Intimate Letters,” which he described as having been “written in fire.”
Janáček’s gift for impassioned utterance and dramatic characterization are front and center in his First String Quartet of 1923. The work takes its subtitle from Leo Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, in which a pathologically jealous husband stabs his wife upon discovering her with her violinist paramour. At a crucial point in the story, the two lovers play Beethoven’s well-known “Kreutzer” Sonata together, prompting the husband to declare that “music in general is a terrible thing … Its effect is neither to elevate nor to degrade, but to excite.” After reading Tolstoy’s novella in the original Russian many years earlier, the Slavophile Janáček had been inspired to compose a Piano Trio (now lost), some of whose ideas, he explained, “gave rise to the quartet.” Whether those ideas were musical or programmatic, Janáček’s own loveless marriage provides a compelling subtext for the First String Quartet—though, unlike Tolstoy’s tortured protagonist, he found at least a measure of happiness in his last years.
That Janáček envisioned the quartet as a continuous narrative is suggested by the fact that all four movements are marked “con moto.” Yet nearly everything about the music—its restless, unstable rhythms; disjointed, episodic structure; and harsh juxtapositions of tender lyricism and savage angst—bespeaks discontinuity. The opening theme, a sad little tune that rises and falls back on itself, exhausted, casts a mood of bleak despair that is never fully dispelled: Its return in the quartet’s final bars is less a sign of closure than of open-ended grief. Even the work’s lighter moments, such as the cello’s perky countermelody at the beginning, are fraught with anxiety and foreboding. Whatever attracted Janáček to Tolstoy’s morbid tale of marital infidelity, his sympathies were clearly with the wife: In a letter to Stösslová about the quartet, he conjured the image of “a poor woman, tormented, beaten, battered to death.”
A comparatively late bloomer, Dvořák was in his early 30s when he first made his mark in his native Bohemia. Up to then, his reputation had hardly reached beyond the city limits of Prague, where he earned a modest living as a piano teacher and church organist. A few of his songs and chamber works had been performed locally, and his comic opera King and Charcoal Burner had been well received at the city’s Czech-language opera house. But Dvořák’s career finally took off when the Austrian government awarded him a stipend in 1875. In addition to providing a measure of financial security, the prestigious prize brought him to the attention of Brahms, who proceeded to write a glowing recommendation to his own publisher in Berlin. Dvořák “has written all manner of things: operas (Czech), symphonies, quartets, piano pieces,” Brahms informed Fritz Simrock in 1877. “In any case, he is a very talented man.” Soon the obscure Czech composer was inundated with so many requests for publications and commissions that he had trouble keeping up with them.
Among the works Dvořák produced in this first flush of celebrity was the 1875 Serenade for Strings, Op. 22. The suite of five short movements is at once an homage to the Classical masters whom Dvořák revered—much like Tchaikovsky’s equally beloved Serenade for Strings of 1880—and a manifestation of the 34-year-old composer’s deep emotional attachment to the folk music of his native Bohemia. (Three years later, Dvořák would follow it up with an equally crowd-pleasing Serenade for Winds, Op. 44.) Dvořák wrote his Serenade for Strings in a happy burst of inspiration between May 3 and 14, 1875. First performed in Prague 19 months later, it quickly established itself as one of his most enduringly popular creations. In the opening Moderato, a tenderly expansive theme unfolds against a backdrop of gently pulsing eighth-notes. The languid waltz that follows is interrupted by a brisk countersubject in dotted rhythm, with a trio section of sharply contrasting character and tonality thrown in for good measure. The dancelike Scherzo weaves a cunning chain of melodies, each more beguiling than the last (and each spanning the interval of a fifth). The yearning Larghetto and exuberant Finale offer further evidence of Dvořák’s lyrical genius, as well as his facility in developing simple musical ideas.
—Harry Haskell