Martinů’s Subliminal States: A Study of the Composer’s Writings and Reception, with a Translation of His "American Diaries" 1580465579, 9781580465571

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’ s ů n i

t r a M l a n i m i l b Su s e t a St A Study of the Composer’s Writings and Reception, with a Translation of His American Diaries

THOMAS SVATOS

Martinů’s Subliminal States

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Eastman Studies in Music Ralph P. Locke, Senior Editor Eastman School of Music Additional Titles of Interest Bedrich Smetana: Myth, Music, and Propaganda Kelly St. Pierre A Dance of Polar Opposites: The Continuing Transformation of Our Musical Language George Rothberg Edited by Jeremy Gill Dane Rudhyar: His Music, Thought, and Art Deniz Ertan Elliott Carter: Collected Essays and Lectures, 1937–1995 Elliott Carter Edited by Jonathan W. Bernard The French Symphony at the Fin de Siècle: Style, Culture, and the Symphonic Tradition Andrew Deruchie From Boulanger to Stockhausen: Interviews and a Memoir Bálint András Varga The Music of Luigi Dallapiccola Raymond Fearn Opera and Ideology in Prague: Polemics and Practice at the National Theater, 1900–1938 Brian S. Locke Portrait of Percy Grainger Edited by Malcolm Gillies and David Pear Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers Bálint András Varga A complete list of titles in the Eastman Studies in Music series may be found on the University of Rochester Press website, www.urpress.com

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Martinů’s Subliminal States A Study of the Composer’s Writings and Reception, with a Translation of His American Diaries

Thomas D. Svatos

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Copyright © 2018 by Thomas D. Svatos All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2018 University of Rochester Press 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.urpress.com and Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN-13: 978-1-58046-557-1 ISSN: 1071-9989 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Martinů, Bohuslav, 1890–1959, author. | Svatos, Thomas D., author. Title: Martinů’s subliminal states : a study of the composer’s writings and reception, with a translation of his American diaries / Thomas D. Svatos. Other titles: Eastman studies in music ; v. 149. Description: Rochester : University of Rochester Press, 2018. | Series: Eastman studies in music ; v. 149 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018030503 | ISBN 9781580465571 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Martinů, Bohuslav, 1890-1959—Diaries. | Martinů, Bohuslav, 1890–1959—Criticism and interpretation. | Music—Philosophy and aesthetics. Classification: LCC ML410.M382 A3 2018 | DDC 780.92 [B] —dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018030503 This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

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In memory of Emil Svatoš (1924–90)

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Contents List of Illustrations

ix

Preface

xi

Acknowledgments

xvii

Abbreviations

xix

Notes to the Reader

xxi

Introduction: Why Martinů the Thinker?

1

Part One: A Chronicle of a Composer 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Martinů’s Parisian Criticism General Polemics Until 1943 Martinů’s Creative Process On the Ridgefield Diary 1945 A Return to Prague? Banished and Revived Final Years

9 21 34 37 44 57 64 69 74

Part Two: The Composer Speaks 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

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Editorial Remarks 1941 Autobiography (Spring 1941) “On the Creative Process” (Summer 1943) The Ridgefield Diary (Summer 1944) Essays from Fall 1945 Notebook from New York (December 1945) Notes from 1947, Excerpts

83 91 98 103 138 152 166

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contents Part Three: Documentation and Further Reading

Appendix 1: Martinů’s Source Reading Appendix 2: Miroslav Barvík’s Report on Martinů from May 1955 Appendix 3: On the Literary Reception of Kaprálová and Martinů: Jiří Mucha’s Peculiar Loves and Miroslav Barvík’s “At Tři Studně”

173 175

Notes

191

Bibliography

231

Index of Martinů’s Musical Works

239

General Index

243

177

Illustrations appear after page 170.

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Illustrations Figure 1. Martinů with his friend Stanislav Novák. Prague, 1912. Figure 2. Martinů at the Polička music school, 1918. Figure 3. Bohuslav and Charlotte Martinů, most likely in New York City, shortly after their arrival in the United States, spring 1941. Figure 4. Martinů in his New York City apartment, 1942–43. Figure 5. Martinů with his personal library in his New York City apartment, 1942–43. Figure 6. Martinů in discussion with Antonín Svoboda in Central Park, New York City. Also seen are pianist Rudolf Firkušný and Charlotte Martinů. April 1943. Figure 7. From left to right: Antonín Svoboda, Bohuslav Martinů, Rudolf Firkušný, and Charlotte Martinů. Central Park, New York City, April 1943. Figure 8. Martinů in South Orleans, MA, 1945. Figure 9. The Searles Castle in Great Barrington, MA, Martinů’s residence while teaching at the Tanglewood Music Festival in summer 1946. Figure 10. Facsimile of a page from Martinů’s essay “On the Creative Process” from his Notebook from Darien, 1943. Figure 11. From Martinů’s essay “The Question of Rhythm” from his Ridgefield Diary, 1944. Figure 12. The first page of Martinů’s essay “Something about that ‘French’ Influence,” 1945.

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Figure 13. The first page of Martinů’s essay “The ‘Pastoral’ Symphony: What Are Invariable and Variable Conditions?” from his Notebook from New York, December 1945. Figure 14. The last page from Martinů’s sketch to his orchestral work Toilers of the Sea. Figure 15. A page from Martinů’s sketch to his Second Symphony, 1943. Figure 16. A page from Martinů’s sketch to his Second Symphony, 1943. Figure 17. Zdeněk Nejedlý speaking at a rally in St. Wenceslas Square, Prague, in February 1948, the month of the communist coup. Figure 18. The communist cultural politician Miroslav Barvík, 14 November 1951, at the height of his influence over Czech musical culture. Figure 19. Václav Kaprál, Vítězslava Kaprálová, and Bohuslav Martinů during their summer holidays at the village of Tři Studně, Czechoslovakia, 1938.

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Preface This book documents Bohuslav Martinů’s writings and reception, particularly in relation to the Czech musical milieu. It consists of two major parts: (1) my opening study (“A Chronicle of a Composer”), where I discuss the contents of Martinů’s writings and the issues of Czech musical politics that helped shape his career; and (2) a selection of Martinů’s writings in translation (The Composer Speaks). In my opening study, I have made an effort to provide relevant commentary about Martinů’s thought, yet readers are free to examine Martinů’s writings first if they so choose. This book is not a biography, yet I bring into discussion many of the key moments of his career and many of his important works. No prior knowledge of the composer is necessary. My primary focus in this book is Martinů’s American Diaries, a revealing collection of essays, aphorisms, and reading notes that bring us into a direct dialogue with the composer. Martinů’s diaries are exceptionally valuable since they were his outlet for exploring new ideas. But his diaries are also quite problematic since he never prepared them for publication and left many passages in a fragmentary state. I deliberated at length over how to present these writings: whether to produce a critical edition that captures each nuance of his text, or a more readable edition for the wider audience. In the end, I chose to produce a more readable edition. My decision to relocate certain kinds of material from the main text to the endnotes and iron out his idiosyncratic language textures might find objections among more specialized readers. Yet my hope is that my endnotes, at times quite copious, will satisfy those readers who will want to gain a greater sense for the originals. In the end, I believe the primary goal of bringing Martinů’s ideas into the public domain warrants my decision to transmit his core meaning as clearly as possible. The title of my book, “Martinů’s Subliminal States,” underscores one of my key findings about the composer: that he was exceptionally preoccupied with the role of the subconscious during musical creation, something I realized only after carefully studying the original manuscripts of his diaries. It was by working with his original diaries that I discovered that the Czech-language transcription of these writings, as found in Miloš Šafránek’s Homeland, Music, and the World, contains many errors. One of these errors, the transcription of the word “subconscious” as “conscious” towards the very beginning, contradicts Martinů’s discussion of his “subliminal states,” as I call them, and confuses much that follows. In order to understand

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Martinů, we must realize how important the subconscious aspect of musical creation was to him, something we might ordinarily call musical intuition. But perhaps just as important to him was the ability to observe oneself while composing, performing, and listening, and to distinguish how the subconscious and conscious mind each play a specific role. Martinů lived for more than half of his life outside of his native Czech milieu. Yet he always considered himself a part of the Czech musical tradition and fought for his place in it through his music and writings. Martinů’s life-long concern with the debate about Czech music led me to investigate the important Czech critics of his time. My decision to bring Zdeněk Nejedlý into my opening study comes from Martinů’s key statement that Czech musical style during his formative years was determined not by musicians, but “by aestheticians and university professors.” Since Nejedlý was the top Czech music professor in Prague while Martinů was a student there—if not the only Czech music professor of any note—it was a foregone conclusion that Nejedlý should form an integral part of my opening study. I found further justification for discussing Nejedlý in the two-volume A History of Czech Musical Culture 1890–1945, one of the most formidable Czech musicological works of the 1970s and ’80s; here Martinů and Nejedlý are shown explicitly to lead two opposing factions of the Czech musical debate during the 1920s. But as I stress, I do not purport that Nejedlý was the only factor in how Martinů related to the Czech musical milieu. 1920s Prague was home to a rich array of musical interests and ideas, including the microtonal composer Alois Hába (1893–1973), several gifted Jewish composers, and an indigenous population of Austro-German musicians. While I provide some background about the different figures we encounter in relation to Martinů’s writings, a more exhaustive treatment of Martinů in the context of Prague’s greater musical life is something that I do not pursue. This book is based on a collection of materials that I uncovered during my time researching in the Czech Republic. I selected these materials with the specific intent of establishing the nature of Martinů’s aesthetic profile. In my effort to achieve this goal, I present Martinů’s ideas at face value and refrain from challenging his views. My rationale for this is that we have yet to gain a clear perspective of his thought and that engaging with him in debate at this stage would be counterproductive. Another reason I have left his ideas intact is that—throughout his career—Martinů was often attacked and misconstrued in the Czech cultural press. Thus adding a further layer of criticism to his views without sufficiently clarifying them, I felt, would only bring more confusion. Furthermore, the fact that the central aspects of his thought are virtually absent from the academic literature provided me with more justification to make this book into a kind of platform for him to speak his ideas. Although it would defeat my purposes to challenge Martinů’s ideas, there are a number of aspects to his writings that require explanation. In his Parisian Criticism, for example, Martinů rarely names the Czech critics who, as he claims, perpetuated romantic and metaphysical appraisals of music. Since he remained

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vague about the identity of his opponents, we could argue rather skeptically that this was a groundless way for him to discredit them. At some level, I have tried to fill in this gap by positioning Nejedlý as one of his principal opponents, based on the evidence I have found. Yet in the end, we are left with little recourse than to accept the fact that Martinů’s argumentation about the “Czech critics” is rather vague and incomplete. Another aspect of his writings that calls for explanation is his frequent reference to “German metaphysics,” which, as he argues, plagued the Czech musical discourse. “German metaphysics,” of course, could refer to any number of things. Metaphysics, on the one hand, is a branch of philosophy, and the German-language philosophers of recent centuries have had any number of approaches to this field. Thus one can hardly speak of a single “German metaphysical school.” The irony in his vague use of this term is that—throughout his own writings—Martinů argues for deploying more precise semantics when describing musical phenomena. Yet at the same time, it was his relentless demand for establishing a more accurate lexicon for the musical discourse that actually informs us of what he meant. For Martinů, “German metaphysics” meant any ideological force that impinges on an artist’s natural creative powers, regardless of the language or culture in question. Here we should take note of a number of factors from his cultural background that contributed to the way he so often denoted negative phenomena as German. First, Martinů came of age in the Czech lands when German was still enfranchised as the dominant institutional language, something that affected virtually all of the Czech cultural figures who were born in the nineteenth century. What is unique in Martinů’s case, however, is that—as a Czech speaker of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—he did not feel compelled to master German himself and have a more direct interface with the German-speaking world. This was something possible for a member of his generation due to the amount of progress the Czechs had made in establishing self-sufficient, Czech-speaking institutions. That Martinů was not a fluent German speaker is something that distinctly separates him from his elder compatriots Smetana, Dvořák, and Janáček. These composers, as a result of their education, were all fluent in German, and interacting with the much larger German-speaking world was always possible for them, though not always desirable, lest they be seen by their compatriots as being too complicit with the culture in power. In Martinů’s case, however, it was by restricting himself to the Czech-speaking milieu that he fashioned his particular notions about what was culturally German, along with his rather idealistic notions about artistic values in France. Later, the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany reinforced his negativity about German culture, which, after the war, became intensified all the more by the full revelations of Nazi atrocities. I should also comment on Martinů’s rather distorted portrayal of musical life in Prague and Paris. As we read his reflections on musical life in either location, we should not expect to gain any sort of objective assessment. Instead, we should

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remember that his thoughts on these subjects were conceived to promote the polemical project he was spearheading in the Czech musical world. As we will see, Martinů projected great symbolism by conceiving of himself as a “Czech composer in Paris,” and he believed that this gave him unique authority to speak out on certain matters. We will leave it open to question, however, whether he was able to truly separate himself from what he argued in the Czech press. Also deserving some remarks—in the case of his American Diaries—are his vague references to the “experts” of the 1940s American musical milieu who, as he claims, peddled a kind of primitive music appreciation to the wider, concert-going audience. These experts, as we will see, consisted primarily of music critics and concert program annotators who, through their writings, were diverting listeners’ attention away from the creative aspects of the musical work. Here it is important to remember that Martinů was not interested in engaging with the more serious musical writers of this time, or those we would consider today a part of academia. Instead, he wanted primarily to challenge the role that critics and music educators were playing in the common listener’s experience. With his focus on the common listener, we see the beginnings of his project for music education, where the musicians themselves play the primary role of educators by personally relating the principles of musical craft from their point of view. As I compared and contrasted his thoughts on this subject, I began to envision a pre-concert talk or workshop. In this setting, a moderator would interview a composer or performer and ask questions such as, “Why did you mark this passage pianissimo? Why do you play this passage in a detached style? How does this musical decision enhance the integrity of this work, or the efficacy of your interpretation?” Then the composer or performer is free to respond about their conception of the work, perhaps even taking questions from the audience in the sense of an open forum on musical creation. Any musician who wants to create a greater dialogue with his audience might try embracing Martinů’s modes of inquiry in an attempt to elicit new ideas. In the case of his American Diaries, we might also ask why he spends so much time dealing with romantic ideologies when he is writing as late as the 1940s. From the perspective of these writings alone, our conclusion might be that the American concert hall of Martinů’s time was still dominated by the romantic repertoire and that the means for capturing the interest of common audiences still required romanticizing the composer and the meaning of the musical work. That the romantic repertoire still dominated the concert hall at that time might come as a surprise to those of us who commonly view the musical progress of the early twentieth century through modernist works such as Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, or Berg’s Wozzeck. Yet even in the case of the romantic repertoire, Martinů felt that ordinary listeners were unable to hear these works free from a vast repository of deeply entrenched, pre-conceived ideas. As we will see, Martinů proposes a clean slate in the way we approach both the canonical and contemporary works.

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Somewhat related to this matter is the way a romantic nineteenth-century sound emerges in his musical works during the 1940s. What we should realize here is that his sound world at that time was transformed not so much by a new-found appreciation of the nineteenth-century masters, whose works he already knew well from his time playing as a violinist in the Czech Philharmonic many years earlier. Instead, his transformation in style was more of a response to the performers he was commonly hearing and composing for in the United States, who were obliged to perform the nineteenth-century repertoire. The way that Martinů consciously shaped and styled his music according to the performers he heard comes out clearly in his essays “An Orchestra is Not a Machine” from his Essays from Fall 1945 and “The Soloist Today” from his Notebook from New York. Apart from this, we should note that seeking out specialized performances of modernist works was not as common for him in the United States as it was during his Parisian years of the 1920s and ’30s, when attending the Straram and Triton concerts, among others, was more regular fare for him as a matter of assimilating the newest musical styles. It would be difficult to deny that there are conceptual shortcomings to Martinů’s writings, which we could point out systematically were we inclined to discredit his thought. Yet if we read his writings in a positive light and realize that Martinů was primarily a composer, and not an academic writer, we might gain a greater appreciation of his aesthetic aims. Naturally, by dedicating a book to his writings, I make the strongest case for Martinů’s ideas. But at the same time, I do not propose that Martinů was a transformative thinker of some kind. Many composers have made statements about the way they serve as a medium for their musical works, where their conscious involvement is restricted. The same holds true for presenting the idea of the musical work as a complex of functional relations: formalist thought of this kind can be traced back to Hanslick and even before. I do feel, however, that many of Martinů’s formulations are insightful, poetic, and if not completely original, they are certainly cast in his own distinctive way. And I have no reservations in commending his honesty and candor as he examines the nature of musical experience and his willingness to discuss certain matters that would seem beneath us. A final addition that I have made to this book is my study, “On the Literary Reception of Kaprálová and Martinů: Jiří Mucha’s Peculiar Loves and Miroslav Barvík’s ‘At Tři Studně’” (see appendix 3). This study concerns the fictitious letter excerpts found at the end of Jiří Mucha’s novel Peculiar Loves, which continue to be passed down to us today as authentic evidence. My study also exposes the communist cultural politician Miroslav Barvík, and specifically, how this figure played a role in Martinů’s late and posthumous reception. Certainly, we cannot consider Mucha’s Peculiar Loves a scholarly source. Yet it has made an impact on the way we view Martinů today. In some ways, Mucha’s novel holds a position in the Martinů literature similar to the one held by Solomon Volkov’s Shostakovich memoirs in the Shostakovich literature: both are read by all who are interested in either Martinů or Shostakovich, and—although most scholars realize they are dealing

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with an unreliable source—elements from each work creep into the more serious studies. In the case of Mucha’s Peculiar Loves, we will never know the truth about Mucha’s account of Kaprálová’s final hours, when she purportedly heard the sounds of Martinů’s opera Julietta in the rain. What this account suggests, in fact, is that Kaprálová had an innate bond with Martinů that went beyond the common respect she had for him as a composer and teacher. Over the past decades, a subgenre of literature has emerged that speculates on the depth of the Kaprálová–Martinů relationship and how Martinů might have even enshrined her in his music. My discussion of the fictitious letter excerpts in Mucha’s novel, I believe, will deflate this line of inquiry. Yet my primary goal here is to present the undeniable evidence that these letter excerpts are, in fact, fictitious, and relate the unusual story behind them.

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Acknowledgments There are several individuals who deserve recognition for their contributions to this book. First, my thanks go out to Michael Beckerman, who helped generate this topic. The director of the Martinů Institute, Aleš Březina, and his staff have my gratitude for sharing with me the institute’s vast range of research materials and their expertise on the composer. The brothers Boris and F. James Rybka—the sons of Martinů’s close friend in America Frank Rybka—have my appreciation for sharing with me their many insights coming from their personal encounters with the composer during their youth. I congratulate James for having completed a biography on Martinů that offers not only an original theory about the composer, but also numerous details about his life that would have gone lost. For their inspiring academic engagement, I would like to note my former colleagues in Cyprus: the cellist Nicolas Deletaille and the music theorist John William MacKay. Nicolas has my additional thanks for compositing the musical examples in this book, and John—with your blend of brilliance and contagious laughter—I will remember you always. My sister Veronica Svatos DeLuca provided invaluable support from her home in the United States while I resided in several different countries as I worked on this text. For their general support, my thanks also go out to Joy Haslam Calico, Frank Cibulka, Sabine Feisst, Robert A. Green, Yoel Greenberg, Christopher Kayler, and Jan Smaczny. And for supporting this publication and providing their unique perspectives, the editors of the Eastman Studies in Music and the University of Rochester Press—as well as the anonymous reviewers of my work—have my gratitude as well. My special thoughts go out to two veterans of Martinů research—Jaroslav Mihule and František “Iša” Popelka—whose work on Martinů dates back to the 1950s. It was a pleasure that Professor Mihule could meet with me on several occasions to discuss Martinů and allow me to examine some of the composer’s personal effects in his possession. I congratulate Professor Mihule on his many achievements, which include an authoritative Martinů biography and numerous invaluable articles on the composer. Professor Mihule’s achievements also extend beyond musical research to diplomacy, as he served as the Czech Republic’s first ambassador to the Netherlands during the 1990s. It is hard to describe my indebtedness to Iša Popelka and his wife Vladimíra. On several occasions, Iša made arrangements for me during my research trips to Polička,

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the composer’s hometown and the site of the Bohuslav Martinů Memorial (now the Bohuslav Martinů Centre). And as a curator at the memorial’s archive, he guided me through its rich array of documentary materials. Iša’s many years of editorial experience working on Supraphon’s musicological releases and his sheer depth of knowledge in so many fields played a key role in how this book took shape. Had it not been for the generosity of the Popelkas, who on several occasions hosted me at their home in Prague, where Iša and I engaged in tedious but rewarding work over Martinů’s manuscripts, this book would have never arisen. Abu Dhabi, January 2018

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Abbreviations AMU

Akademie múzických umění v Praze (Academy of Performing Arts in Prague). HAMU is one of its faculties.

CBM

Centrum Bohuslava Martinů (Bohuslav Martinů Centre in Polička). Successor of the PBM.

ČSR

Československá republika (Czechoslovak Republic).

DBM

Martinů, Bohuslav. Divadlo Bohuslava Martinů (Bohuslav Martinů’s Theater). Edited by Miloš Šafránek. Prague: Editio Supraphon, 1979. An anthology of Martinů’s essays on musical theater.

DHS

Martinů, Bohuslav. Domov, hudba a svět (Bohuslav Martinů: Homeland, Music, and the World). Edited by Miloš Šafránek. Prague: SHV, 1966. An anthology of Martinů’s music criticism; includes an edition of the composer’s American Diaries.

H

Halbreich numbering system of Martinů’s works according to Harry Halbreich, Bohuslav Martinů: Werkverzeichnis und Biografie. 2nd rev. ed. Mainz: Schott Music, 2007.

HAMU

Hudební fakulta Akademie múzických umění v Praze (Music Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague). One of the faculties of AMU.

IBM

Institut Bohuslava Martinů (Bohuslav Martinů Institute in Prague).

ISCM

International Society for Contemporary Music.

NMZ

Neue Musikzeitung.

PBM

Památník Bohuslava Martinů (Bohuslav Martinů Memorial in Polička). Predecessor of the CBM.

PBM Kmš Martinů’s correspondence with Miloš Šafránek. At the CBM.

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PBM Kr

Martinů’s correspondence with his family in Polička. At the CBM.

PBM Na

Autograph manuscript with non-musical notation. At the CBM.

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abbreviations Státní hudební vydavatelství (Czechoslovak State Music Publisher).

SNKLHU Státní nakladatelství krásné literatury, hudby a umění (Czechoslovak State Publisher for Fiction, Music, and Art).

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Notes to the Reader Since readers may wish to skip to Martinů’s writings in the second part of this book, I will provide some initial remarks about how I present these writings and about this book in general. A large portion of the writings by Martinů that I present in this book are from his American Diaries. I do not present all of Martinů’s diaries since they contain a great deal of repetition. Nevertheless, in my opening study and my endnotes, I provide some discussion about those texts I omit. In my opening study, I try to cover the core ideas of Martinů’s diaries but give extra attention to certain passages that could benefit from some interpretation. I do not consider my discussion exhaustive, and I certainly welcome any dialogue should others find alternative readings or insights. As a general practice, I italicize the titles of Martinů’s American Diaries, the different portions of his American Diaries, his Parisian Criticism, and his 1941 Autobiography, even though the composer never published these writings himself as separate works. I also italicize the titles of musical and artistic works, if appropriate, whenever they appear in passages from Martinů’s diaries and personal correspondence. When I quote passages from the Czech press where the titles of musical works were originally set off in quotation marks, I have changed these to italics as well. Two published anthologies contain most of Martinů’s writings on music in the original Czech. I cite these anthologies frequently, using the abbreviations DHS and DBM. The reader should see my “Abbreviations” for the full bibliographic details of these anthologies. Also regarding bibliography, I list the books that Martinů read while he was writing his diaries in appendix 1 as “Martinů’s Source Reading.” For more details on Martinů’s personal library, see my “Editorial Remarks.” For the benefit of non-Czech readers, book titles and article titles originally in Czech are presented in English in the main body of my text. The full titles in the original Czech can be found in my bibliography. I also present English titles for musical works originally entitled in Czech. In my works index, I provide the original Czech title in parentheses if the title has a poetic nature. Martinů entitled most of his early works in Czech. Many of these works are relatively unknown internationally and have yet to gain standardized English translations. In most cases, I use the English translations I found in the Czech sources on the composer. Two exceptions to this, however, are Martinů’s “Workers of the

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Sea,” which I have changed to Toilers of the Sea (the most common translation of Victor Hugo’s novel), and “Istar,” which I have changed to Ishtar (the more common English spelling of the Mesopotamian deity). Any discrepancies in titles can be cleared up by consulting my works index, where I give an “H” number for each work. The “H” numbering system is the one found in Harry Halbreich’s authoritative catalog of Martinů’s musical works (see “Abbreviations”). I relied on Halbreich’s catalog when compiling my own list of Martinů’s compositions in my works index. My list only includes those compositions by Martinů that are discussed in this book. I have tried to make my translations of Martinů’s writings as readable as possible. Yet there remain certain passages where he writes a considerable amount of material in parentheses, and this can make it hard to follow his main line of thought. In general—if a passage is at all encumbered by parenthetical material—I recommend that the reader go through that passage first without the parenthetical material, and then with it once the context is clear. In my translations of Martinů’s writings, I use the pronouns “he,” “him,” and “his” when he refers to composers, listeners, critics, etc., in a general sense. I do this in response to Martinů’s original Czech-language text. I also use masculine pronouns in my opening study where I paraphrase and discuss Martinů’s thought. This, I hope, will be seen to reflect the original text and the fact that the author is male rather than any gender bias on my part. A major impetus for Martinů to write his essays was his dissatisfaction with the writings about music he encountered. Yet he was often vague about the identity of the authors he criticizes, and we cannot always be certain that he is referring to music critics, concert program annotators, musicologists, music theorists, or any other kinds of writers on music. For this reason, I employ the neologism “musical writers” in order to not mislead readers about the particular nature of those authors. Finally, in his diaries, Martinů was very intent on illuminating what he calls the “subconscious creative process.” This was such a fundamental premise to him that he often uses the term “process” in an unspecified way. The fact that he felt no need to be more specific with this word shows how much his own process of musical creation formed his frame of reference for virtually everything he observed. Martinů’s writings are used courtesy of the Bohuslav Martinů Foundation.

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Introduction Why Martinů the Thinker? On 31 March 1941, Bohuslav Martinů arrived in New York City following a dramatic nine-month journey from occupied France. Once in the United States, he was only one of many fine composers in exile who hoped to continue his work while Europe was at war. And like most of his colleagues from the old world, he was unsure about how he would be received. Martinů’s situation might have seemed exceptionally bleak. He was extremely withdrawn and could barely speak English, making him reliant on others for some of the most ordinary personal and professional tasks. What is more, the chaos of his flight from France left him in possession of only four of his scores. Considering Martinů’s uniquely difficult circumstances, which I will discuss in this book, we might think that he would have been unable to succeed. But instead, he managed to establish himself quite well in the United States, and he gradually rose to a level of fame that is seldom recognized in the historical literature. Pivotal in launching Martinů’s American career was the Boston Symphony’s Serge Koussevitzky, who not only premiered Martinů’s Concerto Grosso (November 1941) and brought him to Tanglewood as a professor (summer 1942), but also commissioned and performed Martinů’s First Symphony (November 1942), the first of five works in the genre that the composer completed in consecutive years.1 Apart from Koussevitzky, the list of high-profile musicians performing Martinů’s works at this time reads like an encyclopedia of 1940s American musical life. Also conducting his works with the major East Coast and Midwestern orchestras were Erich Leinsdorf, Charles Munch, Eugene Ormandy, Artur Rodzinski, and George Szell. And among the soloists premiering his concertos and chamber works were Mischa Elman, Rudolf Firkušný, and Gregor Piatigorsky. Based on the number of first-rate performances he received of fresh, new works, it is hardly an exaggeration that, by the end of World War II, Martinů was among the preeminent composers in the United States, and on the East Coast alone, he clearly ranked at the top of his profession. After the first performances of his Symphony no. 6 (“Fantaisies symphoniques,” 1953), a work gaining great critical acclaim with the East Coast press, Martinů’s star

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began to fade. Partly responsible for this was his decision to change residence several times over the course of his final years, when he lived for periods in Nice, New York, Rome, and Switzerland. After his death in 1959, Martinů’s status went into further decline. This we can see in the first edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980), where he receives merely three and a half pages, and in his complete omission from Robert Morgan’s Twentieth-Century Music: A History of Musical Style in Modern Europe and America (1990).2 That he continues to be eclipsed in more recent years can be seen in Richard Taruskin’s five-volume Oxford History of Western Music (2005), where he is completely absent once again.3 One of the reasons Martinů has eluded the academic discourse is that, unlike the case with many of his peers, little has been known about his intellectual ideas. Indeed, a common step in the reception of a composer is that his writings become available, creating handles for historians to learn more about his aesthetic and technique. Few will doubt that the notions of “twelve-tone composition,” “speech melodies,” and “Gebrauchsmusik” all help create points of departure in the reception of Schoenberg, Janáček, and Hindemith, even if these ideas serve merely as sounding boards to a much larger creative world. But what were Martinů’s key ideas about musical composition? With one of the most prolific composers of his generation, whose catalog of works extends to nearly four hundred items,4 the reigning impression has been that he was merely a silent craftsman who had little need to reflect on his music. Among those who helped create this image is biographer Brian Large, who noted the purported disregard Martinů had for the quality and reception of his works, while remarking simply that “he was not a conscious theorist like Schoenberg.”5 From this point of view, it might seem that Martinů was not a serious thinker. Yet it is difficult to accept that a composer who perfected his craft over almost sixty years would not have something significant to say. It is the goal of this study, therefore, to establish Martinů’s intellectual world. My focus is on some of the richest and most revealing texts he left us: his Parisian Criticism, by which I mean his polemical essays from his early Parisian years, and his American Diaries, of which I present a large portion in translation here. Forming a link between these two bodies of writings is his 1941 Autobiography, which I have also translated and discuss; here Martinů reflects on his creative development to the time of his arrival in the United States with great thought and detail. A primary source for Martinů’s writings has been Bohuslav Martinů: Homeland, Music, and the World (henceforth DHS),6 compiled and edited by the Czechoslovak diplomat Miloš Šafránek (1894–1982). Appearing in a limited edition in 1966, this volume was an attempt by Šafránek to present the most complete collection of Martinů’s writings outside of the composer’s personal correspondence and essays on theater.7 Researching Martinů will always take us through the work of Šafránek, who, from his post in Paris as a Czechoslovak cultural attaché, began following Martinů’s career in the late 1920s; he was the first to transmit the most basic knowledge of the composer through two biographies and several other publications.8

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3

Šafránek was also of crucial importance to Martinů in that—after assuming a post with the Czechoslovak Information Service in New York City as a cultural affairs administrator—he helped Martinů get quickly settled in the United States upon the his arrival from Europe.9 The first part of my study explores Martinů’s Parisian Criticism.10 Of the many essays Martinů wrote for the Czech cultural press during his early residence in Paris, I focus on those of an explicitly polemical intent. What these essays reveal is that—many years before his arrival in the United States—Martinů was passionately engaged in a debate over Czech music criticism, which, in his view, suffered from the lasting influence of German romanticism and was hopelessly out-of-date. In his Parisian Criticism, we realize that his lifelong aesthetic outlook—characterized by an objective distance from his materials and a desire for clarity—was a response to the “depth of expression” that he felt the vast majority of Czech critics preferred. Reading Martinů’s Parisian Criticism often leaves us with the impression that he was engaged in a battle against all, with little need to specify who was at fault. For this reason I explore the history of Czech music criticism, focusing on some of the most important debates that led to the Czech critical discourse of Martinů’s early years. Since Czech music criticism at this time was under the strong influence of Zdeněk Nejedlý—that eternal champion of Bedřich Smetana and later a minister in the post-World War II communist governments—it is to this figure that I devote the greatest attention. Although an open polemic between Martinů and Nejedlý never arose, I present these two figures as spokesmen for two antagonistic factions of Czech musical debate: one calling for the acceptance of the most current modernisms, with the other demanding political engagement based on a very specific view of the Czech musical heritage.11 Apart from Nejedlý, I conducted a broader study of the 1920s Czech musical press to see if the biases Martinů rebukes were as pervasive as he claimed. While the reviews from this time clearly reveal that these biases did exist, I also found notable commentaries by Czech critics about Martinů’s early works; these commentaries will offer us some comparison with the way Martinů himself depicted his early Czech reception. Other paradigms from the Czech press will help us gain a picture of the musical discourse during Martinů’s early years. What is striking, for example, is the way so many writers argued for a single path for national music. And this included Martinů himself, whose works during the late 1920s sometimes ventured into the extremes of Dadaist pastiche. Also notable is a debate about musical realism, with Nejedlý shaping a paradigm that anticipates the socialist-realist aesthetic of communist Czechoslovakia. Martinů’s realism, on the other hand, called for an embrace of styles and ideas that corresponded with the technological changes of the day. The Czech cultural press also reveals nomenclature that—although certainly shared in some ways by other European milieus—reflects the particular values of the Czech musical community. Wagner’s New German School, for example, is commonly referred to as neo-romanticism, a term that allowed the Czech critics to

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place Smetana among the foremost exponents of Wagner’s extramusical symbolism while enabling them to keep some distance from Wagner himself. Also notable is the concept of ideovost, which we can roughly translate to “philosophizing.” This, for the critics of Nejedlý’s persuasion, was a positive musical attribute in the works of the “progressive,” neo-romantic practitioners. By contrast, favoritism for ideovost in Czech music was a proclivity that Martinů and other musical writers sought to temper. My discussion of Martinů’s Parisian Criticism begins with his plea for Stravinsky’s greater acceptance in Czech musical life. In connection with his Stravinsky essays, I discuss Martinů’s Half-Time (Rondo for Large Orchestra, 1924), a work that held such great significance for him that he once even wrote, “everything that had come before this work was mere preparation,” a remark linked to his sudden break with Debussy, who had been his greatest influence until that time.12 While tracing the reception of Half-Time, I discovered an undocumented but significant polemic between Martinů and the conductor Jaroslav Vogel, who, outside the Czech Republic, is best known for his authoritative Janáček biography.13 An important part of this polemic includes Martinů’s forgotten essay “Igor Stravinsky,” to which I give special attention. Martinů’s writings from this time clarify his early views not only on Stravinsky, but on several other composers as well. Particularly notable are his thoughts on Schoenberg and his generalizations about “German music,” which, as a part of his polemical strategy, he made synonymous with romanticism in its more excessive forms. Also striking are his remarks about the “Battle over Dvořák,” which cast a shadow over Prague’s musical life during his early years, as well as his thoughts on Smetana and the Czech national tradition. Further illuminating Martinů’s polemical stance are the major musical events in Prague at that time, such as the Smetana centennial birth celebrations (1924), the two ISCM festivals (1924, 1925), and the controversial production of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck at the Prague National Theater (1926), all of which he touches upon at least in some way. The essays from Martinů’s early Parisian residence that I omit from discussion fall more into the sphere of his work as a musical correspondent, where his basic aim was to show how musical life in Paris differed from that in Prague. But by simply assuming the role of Prague’s top musical reporter in Paris, these writings, too, had a specific polemical intent: for by merely portraying the musical distinctions of Paris—with his call for his colleagues at home to come “up-to-date” with the times—he was coming into direct conflict with a large portion of the Czech critical world that was hostile to French idioms and styles. Indeed, the Czech critics commonly denounced Martinů for his French sympathies, which contributed to the fact that he never worked a season in Czechoslovakia following his departure in 1923. My next chapters deal with Martinů’s American Diaries, a collection of writings that requires some clarification. In 1943, while on summer holidays in Darien, Connecticut, Martinů began sketching a number of ideas on musical creation.

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5

According to Šafránek, Martinů’s impetus for producing these writings had been the frequent discussions he had had with the composer to establish contents for a first biography.14 The next summer, Martinů wrote down his thoughts once again at Ridgefield, Connecticut, but in a way that went far beyond the sketches and essay fragments that are for the most part typical of his writings from Darien. Drawing from several books on cultural history and the physical sciences, he penned a remarkable collection of essays in what was seemingly an attempt to produce a monograph of his own. Martinů continued assembling his thoughts during the summer of 1945, when his retreat was the Cape Cod Peninsula; in the fall of 1945 to the end of the year in New York City; and once again in New York City in 1947. Thus what I refer to here as his American Diaries consists of a body of writings that Martinů sketched over the first part of his American residence but never saw through to publication. After perusing these materials in the 1950s and recognizing their value, Šafránek suggested to the composer that they should form a part of his collected writings, an idea that Martinů encouraged and Šafránek later realized as DHS.15 In DHS, Martinů’s American Diaries are found in an annotated edition in the section called “In America” and are referred to there as his “Diaries and Notebooks.”16 After initially translating Martinů’s diaries from DHS, I began to question their value once I detected several contradictions in his thought. But after comparing the printed text in DHS with the original manuscripts, I realized that DHS is rife with omissions, faulty transcriptions, curious substitutions of words, and other irregularities. This led me to amend my work, based on Martinů’s originals, in order to verify the exact contents. I discuss these matters in more detail, as well as my approach for producing my final translations here, in chapter 10 of this book. Since the nature of his diaries is completely different from that of his Parisian Criticism, I produced studies of a different kind.17 These studies take form as synopses, where I clarify the focal points of Martinů’s thought while providing some commentary as well. Notable about his essay “On the Creative Process” (1943) from his Notebook from Darien are his idiosyncratic concepts, such as “subconscious concentration,” “sensation-attitude,” and “emotion-complex,” all of which he coins in his attempt to establish what he saw as the real nature of musical creation. In my discussion of this essay, I also examine Martinů’s idea of his “unexpected works,” and based on this idea, I suggest new avenues of thought for how we might view his musical output as a whole. Martinů’s principles of the creative process extend to his Ridgefield Diary (1944), which is further unified by his thoughts on organic musical relations. Holding great importance for him here is the inviolable perfection of the completed work, and in order to draw us closer to this phenomenon, he employs concepts such as the work’s “irreversibility” and “inner order.” Other notable concepts from his time at Ridgefield include “unwritten laws” and “common denominator,” through which he attempts to shed light on certain sociological phenomena in music.

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introduction

In his Essays from Fall 1945 we find “Something about that ‘French’ Influence,” where he explains his reasons for leaving Prague for Paris. This is a key reflection that reveals how deeply he had been wounded by the Czech critics, who had often equated his assimilation of Parisian styles with issues of national loyalty. My title Essays from Fall 1945 comes from my discovery that these writings were misdated in DHS to June 1944.18 This discovery and the subsequent redating of the writings, given the crucial world events of that time, has implications on our understanding of Martinů’s post-war situation, particularly his feelings about returning to Prague and resuming his discourse with potentially hostile Czech critics. In December 1945, in his Notebook from New York, Martinů produced what is perhaps his most beautiful essay, “The ‘Pastoral’ Symphony: What Are Invariable and Variable Conditions?” Although his goal here is to offer an alternative means for analyzing musical works, this essay is exceptionally valuable because he discusses another composer’s work in some technical detail, in this case Beethoven’s Symphony no. 6 (“Pastoral”). Afterwards, Martinů comments on the endemic problems in musical culture that inhibit aesthetic immediacy and how these problems might be resolved by perceiving the musical work as a gestalt. My study concludes with a look at Martinů’s reception under Czechoslovak communism, and how the “automatistic” nature of his creative philosophy left a vacuum in our understanding of his artistic profile. The goal of this book is to show that Martinů had a substantial repertoire of ideas that merits study and debate. Performers of his music will undoubtedly relish the trust he places in the basic instincts of the musician. For those interested in his intellectual influences, his diaries bring to light a number of new details, such as the role of the Czech scientist Antonín Svoboda, who was a primary catalyst on Martinů’s thought during the mid-1940s. Finally, for the music historian, his diaries show yet another major composer who addressed the issues of his day—and suggested some solutions. For Martinů, this meant reasserting musical craft as the central tenet of musical culture, from composing and performing through to the common listening experience that each one of us has.

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Part One

A Chronicle of a Composer

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Chapter One

Martinů’s Parisian Criticism Martinů’s career as a writer began with a burst of essays he wrote for the Czech cultural press shortly after his arrival in Paris in 1923. Although his writings from Paris deal with a variety of themes, what frequently emerges here is his protest against the norms of Czech music criticism, which he found excessively romantic and harmful to the efforts of the younger Czech composers. Throughout his Parisian Criticism, Martinů does not name the critics who perpetuated these norms. This, too, is characteristic of his essay from his American Diaries, “Something about that ‘French’ Influence” (1945), where he illuminates the biases of Prague’s musical life as he perceived them as a young man.1 In this later essay, Martinů describes how the Czech critics had considered French music “superficial” in relation to the “deeper” and “better” conception of music at home. But the closest he brings us to the specific critics involved is by referring to them as the “dominating ideologues,” whose thinking was based on “German metaphysical philosophy.”2 Martinů’s first biographer, Miloš Šafránek, does not make this matter any clearer. This we see in Šafránek’s second biography, where, also without naming any individuals, he explains Martinů’s motivations for leaving Prague: “Martinů was aware that there was something false in the philosophical conception of music as a vehicle for extramusical ideas, subscribed to by music theorists and professors of aesthetics under German influence.”3 In the case of his Parisian Criticism, we can propose various reasons for Martinů’s oblique references to the critics. Playing a role here might have been his ostensibly non-confrontational nature, or the fact that overt challenges to well-positioned figures in Prague might have hurt his chances for gaining a position there in the future.4 But as we will see, some of the targets of Martinů’s critiques were well known to the Czech cultural world, suggesting that his motive was to marginalize them and help lead the Czech musical discourse into more cosmopolitan directions. In the case of the communist-era literature, however, which includes Šafránek’s second biography, the reason Martinů’s opponents fail to appear in print is much clearer: the most influential Czech music critic of the early twentieth century, Zdeněk Nejedlý (1878–1962), emerged as a minister in the Czechoslovak

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communist governments, in a position to punish those who had challenged him in the past. Thus out of fear of Nejedlý, who became a kind of cultural icon for the communists, most writings from the communist period on Martinů and the conductor Václav Talich (1883–1961) make no mention of the ways that these figures had opposed him.5 With respect to these factors, I will devote the following pages to Nejedlý and his web of associates—whom I will call the “Nejedlý School”—and trace the origins of their cultural-political cause. Then I will show how Martinů challenged the Nejedlý School, which—due to Nejedlý’s rise to power—continued to impact Czech musical life all the way through to the communist period. The Nejedlý School was only one part of a rich spectrum of musical thought during the First Czechoslovak Republic, and we cannot consider them the exclusive reason for Martinů’s discontent with Czech critical culture. I will show, nevertheless, that Nejedlý’s cohesive paradigm played a decisive role in how Martinů developed as a composer and compelled him to establish his unique philosophical views.

The Nejedlý School So great was Nejedlý’s influence over Czech musical thought during the twentieth century that we should establish a few facts about him. In terms of ideology, Nejedlý was chiefly responsible for perpetuating the work of his teacher Otakar Hostinský (1847–1910), the aesthetician who justified the use of Wagner’s operatic reforms in Czech music and argued for the recognition of Bedřich Smetana (1824–84) as the single progenitor of the national musical tradition. A central aspect of Nejedlý’s agenda was to cultivate a correct succession of composers in Smetana’s wake. Having already published books on Fibich’s melodramas, Smetana’s operas, and the Hussite chorale,6 Nejedlý gained notoriety in Prague’s musical life through his militantly led protest against Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) at the time Dvořák was being celebrated posthumously upon his seventieth birthday. By this time, to Nejedlý’s great aggravation, Dvořák’s popularity had begun to eclipse Smetana’s legacy, leading the public to forget how much Smetana had sacrificed for the national musical cause. One of the results of the “Battle over Dvořák” was a chasm between academicians, who, under Nejedlý’s moral leadership, insisted on continuing in the Smetana tradition, and the performing musicians of Prague, who were more liberal regarding the dialogue Czech music could have with new music from abroad.7 Although relatively small in number, Nejedlý’s followers were well situated and gained a formidable presence in the Czech cultural press. In 1909, Nejedlý became the first chair of musicology at the Czech branch of the Charles University, a position from which he trained the first generation of Czech musicologists, many of whom he indoctrinated into his school.8 Among his closest student followers was the critic Josef Bartoš (1887–1952), who worked tirelessly alongside Nejedlý as a speaker on

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music and was exceptionally fierce in attacking Nejedlý’s foes.9 Another key figure was Otakar Zich (1879–1934), who, apart from his work as a composer, became a professor of aesthetics at the Charles University in 1924; as a writer, Zich assimilated and reworked Hostinský’s ideas in his books The Aesthetic Apperception of Music and The Aesthetics of Dramatic Art, which became pillars of study in Prague’s academic milieu.10 Other important figures included Vladimír Helfert (1886–1945), who later broke ties with Nejedlý once he established his own school of musicology in Brno, and the conductor and composer Otakar Ostrčil (1879–1935), who assumed the powerful position of Director of the Prague National Theater in 1920. For promoting his revisionist agenda, Nejedlý had several journals at his disposal of which Smetana became most symbolic. Emerging at the time of the Dvořák debates, Nejedlý’s flagship for Czech music lasted until 1926 and had a short revival of ten further issues in the years 1936–38.11 A perusal of this particular journal from the 1920s reveals who Nejedlý’s chosen composers were, as articles on Smetana, Zdeněk Fibich (1850–1900), Josef Bohuslav Foerster (1859–1951), Ostrčil, and Emil Axman (1887–1949) dominate throughout. With a preference for these composers, Nejedlý’s post-romantic orientation becomes clear. Although hostile to most modernisms, Nejedlý’s camp was at least partial to expressionism, which we see not only in Nejedlý’s glowing reviews of the Prague National Theater’s production of Wozzeck,12 but also in several highly chromatic works by Ostrčil and Zich. The Nejedlý School was certainly hostile to impressionism, which was deemed a negative attribute in Martinů’s works, as we will see. Nejedlý’s outright dismissal of impressionism—even if drawn on false grounds—can be seen in the following remarks from 1909: “Debussy’s impressionism is, in short, interesting, but it represents the utter mistake that appears when the characteristics of one art form are forced onto another. It is a sin against artistic nature . . . an unnatural approach that produces merely a façade.”13

Nejedlý’s Motivations and Style Nejedlý’s need to promote Smetana at the expense of Dvořák was based on several political and aesthetic factors—and often a deliberate intermixing of the two. The “Battle over Dvořák” that peaked in the years 1910–13 was at some level an extension of the debate over Wagner and program music that had become a part of the Czech musical discourse during the 1860s and ’70s. Linked to the opposing paradigms of absolute and program music during that earlier period were the two most significant political entities of that time: the conservative, land-owning “Old Czechs,” who had supported Dvořák during his early career, and the more aggressively nationalistic “Young Czechs,” for whom Smetana was a leading figure. For Nejedlý, some decades later, it was a moral affront to Smetana’s legacy that Dvořák had become the more popular Czech composer. Not only had Dvořák accepted the support of

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the monied Old Czechs, but he had also exploited a nationally conceived idiom that was Smetana’s hard-won contribution to Czech national culture. Nejedlý was also keen to point out that Dvořák had accepted the support of powerful individuals in Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. According to Nejedlý, Eduard Hanslick and Johannes Brahms, both situated in Vienna, had “encouraged an opponent” to the nationalist movement Smetana had been leading in Bohemia; this was a reference to the compositional awards that Dvořák had received from the Austrian state government upon the recommendation of both Hanslick and Brahms.14 Thus Nejedlý’s embrace of Smetana, program music, and the Wagnerian music drama was also a response to “rakušáctví,” or the way certain Czech musicans were perceived to have collaborated with the imperial state. This we can see in Nejedlý’s infamous review of Josef Suk’s symphonic tone poem Ripening from just after Czechoslovakia’s independence (1918), in which Nejedlý scolds Suk for his decision to accept Austrian state honors: “Completely different figures will be needed than those who accepted orders of merit from the Austrian government at the time of our greatest national suffering. There is no place for such figures in the present national climate, even if he decorated himself more with the tricolor of the Czechoslovak flag.”15 Nejedlý was also instrumental in transforming the struggle between the Old Czechs and the Young Czechs into the issues of class politics that later defined Czech history. In other words, by World War I, Nejedlý had merged the aesthetics of the Young Czechs with those of the early Czech socialist movement, even transforming Smetana into the artistic leader of the class struggle.16 Towards the end of the war, in anticipation of an end to imperial rule, there was even talk about “socializing music,” with the Nejedlý School represented by Helfert’s essay Our Music and the Czech State.17 A major cause of Nejedlý’s discontent had been the Prague Conservatory, an institution that had been supported by the Old Czechs, subsidized by Vienna, and remained subservient to imperial politics by shunning programmatic nationalism and Wagner’s chromatic innovations. It was on these grounds that both Dvořák and Suk—who had both held important positions at the conservatory (but can hardly be considered simply anti-Wagnerian)—became two of Nejedlý’s primary targets. In the following passage, also coming from just after Czechoslovakia’s independence, we feel the invective through which Nejedlý censures the conservatory, as well as his demand to see new personnel installed: Let us just recall our conservatory, an institution where Czech musicians were supposed to be trained! Was it our institution? It was controlled by a German aristocracy that regulated it both financially and spiritually. Shaping the conservatory’s agenda was this unpatriotic, inhumane attitude, and even those Czechs who had an influence over its leadership submitted to this feudal-German spirit . . . It was due to this thralldom—which produced so many slavish souls among our musicians—that the free-thinking Smetana towered above them like a hero, whose

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greatness the feeble minds of these little people could not comprehend. This must end once and for all. In the future, our music needs to be morally Czech not only through our strong individuals, but our musical attitude needs to be thoroughly Czech in the way that the civic honor of our musicians demands it. And taking steps towards this goal will be our primary task.18

These excerpts show how much Nejedlý had intermeshed patriotic morality with musical considerations, notwithstanding the extremes to which he went to argue his views. As we read Nejedlý’s writings, we are often surprised by the skill with which he could spin the news of the day in order to promote his particular agenda for Czech music. Yet the grounds for his views were usually quite consistent, as he argued the same points over the course of many years. This we can see in his case against Dvořák, who, as he claimed, had ties to the Czech bourgeoisie, the conservatory, and the oppressive Austrian state, and whose “regressive” music, if anything, could only “fill in the gaps” in the Czech repertoire before Smetana had arrived on the scene.19 But to champion Smetana in the 1920s? In what way could Smetana remain a viable point of departure for Czech music at a time romanticism was becoming an historical phenomenon? And by what means could the younger generation of Czech musicians oppose Nejedlý’s views?

Martinů’s Early Years in Prague Martinů had a thorough knowledge of Prague’s musical life by the time he launched his polemics in 1924. He had come to Prague as a music student in 1906 from the eastern Bohemian town of Polička, whose influential citizens hoped he would bring the town recognition by becoming a famous violinist.20 Rather than working diligently towards this goal, he lived a nonconformist lifestyle where practice and academic work took second place to the whims of artistic exploration. For Martinů, this meant reading the trendy decadent literature of the time,21 attending opera performances with his friend and violinist Stanislav Novák (1890–1945; see fig. 1),22 and writing the kinds of works he felt were necessary for his development as a composer. It was at this time that he discovered Debussy, and in place of the strict theoretical exercises he was being assigned at the conservatory and the programmatic works that were of interest to Prague’s academic milieu, assimilating Debussy’s style became a matter of sudden importance. His orchestral scores such as Dream of the Past (1920) and As Midnight Passes (1922) were the result of his autodidactic study of Debussy’s musical language, making him virtually the first Czech composer to fully embrace the French impressionist style.23 Despite the recognition he received in 1918 with his neoromantic, patriotic cantata Czech Rhapsody, a work that nods to both Smetana and Mahler (the cataclysms

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of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony come vividly to the surface),24 Martinů was soon stigmatized by the critics as a “Czech impressionist.” Helping establish this stereotype was Otakar Ostrčil, who recognized the emphasis on tone color in Martinů’s symbolist ballets Night (1914) and Shadow (1916) while reviewing these works in 1919 for performances at the Prague National Theater. And it was on the basis of tone color that Ostrčil rejected both works for being “monotone,” citing an overuse of celeste, harp, and piano. Ostrčil justified his dismissal of Shadow, in particular, for its “trendy harmonic piquancy achieved by the direct connection of harmonically distant triads.”25 The characterization of Martinů the impressionist is clearly found in the reviews of this time. But the way the Czech critics often appraised new works according to their “depth of expression” is worthy of note. In a review of a 1923 concert featuring Blue Hour, the second movement of Martinů’s orchestral triptych As Midnight Passes, one dismissive critic notes: The Czech Philharmonic continues with its “dumping” of Czech novelties . . . Blue Hour by Bohuslav Martinů . . . already shows an inclination towards decadent symbolism. It is in essence the first conscious and thorough manifestation of French impressionism in our country. Unfortunately, Martinů does not always choose the best characteristics of this style, which is borne witness by the many unison melodies . . . I would like to believe that this is a trifle by a composer who will return once again to a deep, Czech conception.26

Also showing the way “depth of expression” served as criteria to dismiss inferior works, we find the following commentary that emerged in the daily press after the premiere of Martinů’s ballet Ishtar (1921): “Much was said and written about how the work is filled with French spirit. And by this, they all had in mind something musically sinful and lacking in depth. Nevertheless, it was deemed good that a composer was found who sacrificed himself to fill in our musical rainbow with French colors!”27 In his essay “Something about that ‘French’ Influence,” Martinů explains the hypocrisy behind the Czech critics’ rejection of French music and how this had led him to leave Prague for Paris.28 If French music was really superficial and unworthy of critical thought, he argued, why was so much effort needed to show it in this light? Martinů had always seen much more in the music of France, particularly the ideals of “lightness, clarity, and a sense for pure form,” the particular characteristics he felt Prague’s “German metaphysics” eschewed.29 And the composer he felt could help him achieve these ideals was Albert Roussel, whose music he played as a member of the Czech Philharmonic, and whom he called on for instruction once he arrived in the French capital in 1923.30 Martinů’s experience as an orchestral violinist greatly broadened his horizons and inspired him to pursue his career abroad. In 1919, a representative orchestra had formed under the conductor Václav Talich that performed in several Western

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European cities, including Geneva, Paris, and London. This had been a propaganda effort by the first Czechoslovak government intended to exhibit to its Western allies the cultural prowess of the new nation. Martinů joined the ensemble for this tour, and upon his return to Prague, he became a full member of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, of which Talich had been just appointed director. As a composer, Martinů would soon win Talich’s sympathies, beginning an essential professional relationship that grew over the course of his career. Talich’s emergence as the Czech Philharmonic’s director was a milestone in Prague’s musical life, as his insistence on not necessarily prioritizing Czech works placed him on the front lines of debate. Indeed, Talich, along with Martinů, belonged to the new generation of “republican” musicians who combated isolationist tendencies.31 Talich was often challenged by the Nejedlý School for his programming decisions, and as one of the elite Czech musicians with international prestige, the fact that he accepted guest conducting engagements with foreign orchestras rather than devoting his full attention to the musical scene at home made him morally suspect.32 Nevertheless, Talich insisted on bringing Czech music into a dialogue with new works from abroad. This we can see in the Czech Philharmonic’s program for the 1920–21 season, where he brought recent works by Ravel, Honegger, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev to Prague’s public for the first time.33 The Nejedlý School would continue to project controversy onto Talich for several years to come, with the debates surrounding him reaching a climax during his nomination to the directorship of the Prague National Theater in 1935. The extremes of debate over the appointment of Ostrčil’s successor went so far that one anonymous commentator remarked: “I put forth as very distasteful at the very least—even if A. Bendová (Milcová?) was writing ironically—the notion that Talich does not beat his breast and sign himself with the cross every time Smetana’s name is pronounced.”34

Martinů on Stravinsky With this backdrop in mind, we can begin to understand why Martinů embraced Stravinsky upon his arrival in Paris, something that resulted in no less than six essays on the Russian composer in 1924, all written for Prague’s cultural press. In Stravinsky, Martinů saw a force that could disrupt and shatter the norms by which he felt the Czech critics were still guiding public taste.35 But by championing Stravinsky, Martinů soon gained the reputation of having slavishly submitted to the Russian composer, something critics generally agreed upon after hearing his Half-Time, an orchestral work bearing the conspicuous influence of Stravinsky’s Russian ballets. Challenging Prague’s public in 1924 with the leading voice of Parisian modernism was a timely occasion. First, it was the year of the monumental Smetana centennial birth celebrations, which saw the performance of virtually the entire output of

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Smetana between 2 March and 12 May, the dates of the composer’s birth and death. The Nejedlý School was out in full force promoting Smetana’s cause, producing a special volume of Smetana as well as several monographs and pamphlets, all of which were devoted to the composer.36 And presiding at the podium of the pious assemblies commemorating the patriarch of Czech music, of course, was none other than Zdeněk Nejedlý.37 Second, 1924 was the year Prague hosted the orchestral portion of the ISCM’s annual festival.38 This was seen by the Nejedlý School and others as a chance not only to familiarize foreign visitors with Smetana, but to provide them with a taste of contemporary Czech works as well. The atmosphere of these two events formed the context to one of Martinů’s earliest essays, “Along the Path to Stravinsky,” in which he criticizes the slogan “return to Smetana” as being resounded without thought or clarification.39 In an era that has changed both spiritually and politically, Martinů exhorts the Czech critics to be more specific about how a return to Smetana should take shape. For Martinů, taking the example of Smetana means coming to terms with the times in a relevant way. Very much in the way Smetana had responded to the politically liberalized situation in Bohemia during the 1860s, Igor Stravinsky has traversed the changes in cosmopolitan life to produce a corresponding musical expression.40 In Czech music criticism, however, responding to the times has been held up by a vicious cycle of re-historicizing the past, and the slogan “return to Smetana” only inspires imitation of “what has already been composed better in the past.” Facilitating a new direction in Czech music means opening the doors to experimentation, a course of action Martinů urges as follows: “This is not a time for great, isolated works, of which there were only a few over the course of history. This is a time for searching and preparing the field for those who are coming.”41 He then notes how artists and intellectuals in other fields have managed to liberate themselves from the entrenched aesthetic values: “We saw this battle in painting, literature, and philosophy. We saw that these artists desired realistic, almost life-like expression, without concern for all the wringing rules, laws, and phrases that were created over time and usually dictated by the strongest individual but never truly investigated.”42 Music, too, needs to be set free from the dogmatic rhetoric of the past, which has been in the exclusive service of romanticism. Instead, the aesthetic of the day should reflect the intensified pace of the modern age: “Life is strict, inconsiderate, and fast; it does not leave time for fumbling around in the extremities of feeling. It demands intensity—a forceful, compact form and concentrated contents.”43 And this, according to Martinů, is the very aesthetic that Stravinsky has captured in his music. What Stravinsky meant to Martinů at this time can also be seen in the way he relates the Russian composer to Schoenberg, atonality, and “German music” in general. In his essay “Igor Stravinsky,” after explaining how Stravinsky now finds himself at the divide between the “romantic, subjective era” and the one that is “new and

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objective,” he writes that Schoenberg was “the first to see the mistaken path along which music had been led astray, but it was difficult for him to overcome his deep, inborn German romanticism.”44 In his essay “Stravinsky’s Petrushka,” in which he argues that Stravinsky’s approach is based on the principles of “objectivity and dynamism,” he notes that the new style of Petrushka is facilitated “by a healthy musicality that called for the lucid expression of musical ideas amid the atonal chaos that reigned after impressionism.”45 And in his essay for a Czech Philharmonic concert program (discussed further below), he describes how Stravinsky’s new, dynamistic style has marginalized German romanticism and its worn-out musical gestures from the new musical mainstream of Europe: “Stravinsky does not like German music, reproaching it for its contrived pathos and “manufacturing” of emotions that persevere through the help of characteristic motives that are purely German. His style is the music of the West.”46

The Half-Time Affair During his 1924 summer holidays in Polička, Martinů composed Half-Time (Rondo for Large Orchestra), a work inspired by the commotion of excited crowds awaiting the results of a close soccer match. It is a composition that bears mannerisms conspicuously similar to the music of Stravinsky, so much that it triggered scorn in the Czech musical press, leading a number of critics, including the conductor Jaroslav Vogel (1894–1970), to accuse Martinů of plagiarism.47 This is somewhat understandable, as Martinů’s work has dissonant tone clusters with irregular accents similar to those in “The Dance of the Adolescents” from The Rite of Spring as well as parallel diatonic triads very much in the style of the “Russian Dance” from Petrushka.48 But Martinů vehemently denied the charges of plagiarism in his response to the critics entitled “The Case of Half-Time, or the Tragedy of a Melodic Triad.”49 With the title of this essay, Martinů was referring to the ascending triad encompassed by an augmented octave (F–B♭–D–F#) that is played by a solo trumpet at the opening of his work. This, some critics believed, was a direct borrowing of the solo trumpet motive that characterizes the puppet figure Petrushka in Stravinsky’s ballet. The polemical exchange that developed between Martinů and Vogel towards the end of 1924 sheds light on the position that Martinů was taking in the Czech musical world. For the concert program of the Czech Philharmonic’s performance on 23 November 1924, which featured Stravinsky’s symphonic tone poem Song of the Nightingale, Martinů wrote another essay entitled simply “Igor Stravinsky,” which he conceived as an informative source for an audience in Prague that was presumably unfamiliar with the composer.50 Based on this premise, Martinů refrains from treating Stravinsky’s music analytically, choosing instead to discuss the principal characteristics of his style and to show what his music “aims to do.” Describing the state of European music before Stravinsky had arrived on the scene, Martinů argues that the

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dominating influences of romanticism and impressionism had gone unquestioned and that the elements of rhythm and tonality had lost definition due to an unceasing desire for sentiment. Citing various experimental works by Schoenberg and Les Six, Martinů claims that only Stravinsky has prevailed in establishing a new direction, of which the principal traits are “a strict suppression of romanticism and subjectivism, and a return to absolute musical values.”51 Martinů’s program notes became the primary target of Vogel’s review of the same concert for the daily newspaper Československá republika.52 Vogel scoffs at how the battle over Stravinsky has been finally transmitted home by a musician “living at the very center of the cult of Stravinsky.” He states that, “there is nothing more comical and more provincial than to incite battles over artistic issues that have been resolved elsewhere long ago.” He warns, however, that Czech musicians should not take the example of “an ostrich that hides its head in the sand with the notion that its pose will be all the more astute through the expression of national spirit.” After all, Smetana and Dvořák had both reckoned with foreign influence without having damaged themselves. Then, taking a swipe at the composer who had become known in recent years as a “Czech impressionist,” he writes: “That a weaker artistic figure capitulates and becomes estranged from our national spirit through this kind of contact—should we let this distract us from the way fresh international contact enriches our strongest creative figures?”53 From these remarks, we see that Vogel believes that Czech composers should not veer from the national tradition but remain aware of new music from abroad. But in his review of Half-Time, which was premiered by the Czech Philharmonic under Talich on 7 December 1924, we see a critic ready to denounce literal manifestations of foreign style with an iron hand.54 After expressing skepticism over the concept of the work as explained by the “not always dependable commentary” of the Czech Philharmonic concert program but conceding that the work does have “an outer vigor and instrumental shine,” Vogel maintains: Everyone will get stuck by the irresponsibility with which the Czech composer copies Stravinsky, not only in his compositional and instrumental mannerisms, but also literally and motivically: the entire conclusion is based on the march theme from Petrushka . . . There is a complete difference between learning from a master and imitating him. A genuine imitation of a unique composer is to be unique oneself. But if Mr. Martinů’s understanding does not change, we can expect to have the kind of “Czech Stravinsky” like the “Czech Strauss” we already have. This opinion was shared by the public, which received the composition with an almost unanimous hiss. This is an uncommon phenomenon for a Czech audience, and this has not even happened to the genuine Stravinsky. Thus on the whole, Half-Time, after Ishtar, was a disappointment rather than a strengthening of hope in this composer.55

Martinů then made Vogel his central target in his response to the critics, where he apologizes sarcastically, “the length of this article does not allow me to address all the

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mistakes in your reviews.”56 On the issue of plagiarism, Martinů contends that the form, motivic development, and instrumentation of Half-Time is unlike anything in the four parts of Petrushka, and he recommends that Vogel carefully study the score, challenging him to point out exactly what he had copied. He writes, “I cannot torture myself with the similarity of that motive (i.e., the melodic triad) with the Petrushka motive, since, in my case, it only takes place on the upbeat and has an insignificant role in the entire composition.”57 It is the rhythmic aspect that can be linked to Stravinsky rather than those places “here or there that have a similarity to Stravinsky’s work.”58 He then cries out: If Half-Time is taken from Stravinsky, this means that you know Stravinsky very little. But Stravinsky is something new, something different, thus everything that is unusual is a copy of Stravinsky—and all the more so in my case since I defended him as a journalist. This is criticism based on assumption and deduction, a style that is in full bloom in our country. And this is why I am writing this article, because this characteristic of criticism has been disconcerting me for the longest time—i.e., making statements based merely on the most conspicuous elements.59

The Significance of Half-Time In his response to the critics, Martinů completely refuted the dependence of HalfTime on Stravinsky. And before his response, in his notes on the work for the Czech Philharmonic’s concert program, he had deliberately downplayed the importance of the opening motive that would later become a subject of criticism: “The principal motive presented by the trumpet at the opening does not play as great a role as the tiny secondary motive—derived from the opening one—which continuously drives forward the tension that increases throughout the rondo.”60 Since Martinů was already defending the opening motive before the critics even heard the work, we can assume that, on some level, he had anticipated the accusations that were to come—i.e., that he had derived the opening motive, and perhaps even more, from Petrushka. But throughout the polemic, Martinů refused to admit that the work’s sound world would invite comparison with Stravinsky, something that might perplex us today. Indeed, it is difficult for us to separate Half-Time from the composer he lauded so much at that time, regardless of the way he defended the work. The most he was willing to concede is that the rhythmical style has a link to Stravinsky, an aspect he called “dynamistic” in his Parisian Criticism, which was a stylistic idea at the center of his thought.61 But the way he suddenly distanced himself from Stravinsky’s influence—despite Stravinsky’s clear imprint on the work—and the way he so vigorously defended the work’s autonomy, makes us ask why Half-Time was so important to him and what he was trying to do. Based on his letter to Talich, it was first and foremost a defiance of

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those Czech critics who habitually listened for depth of expression and metaphysical content: “What I definitely wanted to accentuate—and what my explicit intention was—is an outright reversal of the direction that is particularly prevalent in our country, signified by the most sublime, metaphysical ideas that are completely outof-touch with contemporary life.”62 In this sense, Half-Time was clearly a challenge to the Czech critical establishment. By assimilating and (perhaps unconsciously) demonstrating an array of Stravinskian mannerisms, he was hoping to expose the “one-dimensional” nature of Czech critical opinion and raise controversy as well. But apart from this, the work held significance for Martinů in the way it was conceived. It was one of the “unexpected works” that surprised him over the course of his career, compositional milestones that made the creative process a subject of intense speculation in his American Diaries, as we will see. In his letter to Talich, we already see him attempting to depict his creative process and the way he had produced this particular work. After stating that Half-Time “does not follow any sublime idea” and that the resulting work is not in any way “descriptive or impressionistic,” he writes: “The experiences that inspired me do not become manifest during that first phase, when I am taking in these sensations, but during that second one, when I am in control of these sensations, and I create a new form from them, a new work that is independent, and I create this new work through a pure musical form, the form of a rondo.”63 Drawing on his creative process to support his aesthetic claims was not yet typical of his critical project, however. Instead, he continued his polemics with essays that shifted away from Stravinsky and focused on the issues of national bias through a much broader lens. As an epilogue to his first full year in Paris, we may turn to his letter to Stanislav Novák from 7 February 1925, which sums up his frustrations at this time. Commenting on the reviews to his ballet Who Is the Most Powerful in the World? (1922), which was premiered as the opener to Janáček’s Cunning Little Vixen in Brno on 31 January 1925, he writes: Please, tell everyone you meet that my ballet about mice is three years old, so it comes from a time I didn’t know anything about Stravinsky, or only that he had written Petrushka . . . It seems a bit stupid to me, being constantly passed off as Stravinsky. If Axman had written it, for example, it would have been a great revelation, and we would all be up-to-date with Europe. But since it’s me, I cribbed it from somewhere. I really don’t care for the most part, but I’ll get into a cage once again like I did with impressionism. No one mentions my complete submission to Debussy anymore—now I’ve completely submitted to Stravinsky. These are both along the same lines, right? They’re complete idiots. The humor comes when Černušák64 writes that it plays to my advantage to go with the times as opposed to those who have something to say from within. As if today’s times do not have something to say from within. Or that it’s a mistake for someone to be oriented “internationally” . . . So to hell with it. But if you talk to them, just tell them these things straight to their face.65

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Chapter Two

General Polemics Despite the new stereotype Martinů acquired with Half-Time, the work did have an impact on the “direction particularly prevalent” in his country, as he had remarked in his letter to Talich. For the 1925 ISCM festival, the organizers—due to the success of their festival in 1924—chose Prague once again as the host city for the performance of orchestral music,1 and Half-Time was even chosen by the society’s international delegates as a representative work from Czechoslovakia. The ISCM’s Czech delegates, however, who insisted on presenting only “their prominent figures,”2 put forth Vítězslav Novák’s Toman and the Wood Nymph and Rudolf Karel’s Sinfonie Démon,3 both symphonic poems. In the end, the foreign critics in attendance at the festival dismissed the works by Novák and Karel, with Karel’s work in particular being reproved for an overdependence on Strauss. Martinů’s Half-Time, however, received considerable praise.4 Also receiving the praise of the foreign critics was Janáček’s opera Cunning Little Vixen, which was being performed at the Prague National Theater at that time. The responses to the 1925 ISCM festival revealed the widening chasm between the conservatism of the Nejedlý School and those seeking to embrace the European avant-garde, for whom Martinů became the principal spokesman.5 The new discourse surrounding the festival prompted Martinů to write “On Music and Tradition,” in which he takes issue with Czech isolationist tendencies: “At a time the whole world is boiling over with questions, experiments, and the search for new horizons, everything flows like an evening song in our country such that it cannot get any better. We lavish praise on ourselves about how well we have come to terms with things and about how smart we are while the rest of the world is in error.”6 The reason for this attitude, he explains, is that the Czech critics are reluctant to abandon the nationalist values that were so heavily ingrained in the population before independence, when music had served as a symbol of resistance. He calls for a de-politicization of music, or an end to the paranoid atmosphere in which “deviations” from tradition can be perceived as national betrayal. Then, coming perhaps as close as ever to a direct strike at Nejedlý, he chastises the revisionist politics of the far left that have intertwined the “chosen” composers with the class struggle to the point

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of absurdity: “We know and honor our Smetana, but that he was a Bolshevik? This is a bit too much. With equal difficulty will we accept that Dvořák was a bourgeois composer and Fibich a proletarian.”7 He continues by describing how the critics have comingled a host of other concepts with music such as “religiosity,” “emotionality,” and “spirituality,” and how it has become the tendency to regard music as something sorrowful and hopelessly tragic. No one seems to care anymore that those works put forth as the models of national music are not a negation of life but an elevation of it. Everyone stands by, nevertheless, passively accepting the pretense of music as the embodiment of suffering. Once composers begin to bypass the labyrinth of passwords and prescriptions that have become necessary for creating the perfect work, the changes transpiring in European music will be able to impact national tradition. But the fear of contemporary music lies in the fact that it is believed to suppress emotion, and in Czech music criticism, “emotional content” is still paramount in the appraisal of new works. It has become customary, in fact, to filter music though a “cloud of feeling,” and if this continues, he writes ironically, attending concerts will no longer be necessary, as “we will only have to read the emotional analyses.” These tendencies, characteristic of the “reigning direction” of Czech music criticism, are closely tied to the fact that the established tastes adhere to an antiquated, German-centered aesthetic. Martinů raises awareness of this in another essay from the time of the 1925 ISCM festival entitled “Towards the Criticism of Contemporary Music.” Here he links this German bias to the critics’ unwillingness to deal with new music objectively.8 After some careful opening lines in which he asks not to be taken with belligerence, he lashes out at a valuation system that is employed to justify divisive and erroneous findings: “The unhealthiness of this phenomenon is apparent in today’s chaos, which is responsible for the many antagonisms and inconsistencies in the critical writings . . . It is self-evident that, over time, false conclusions were drawn on many matters that became complete dogma, and it was upon this basis that critical opinion was built and perpetuated.”9 Impressionism, for example, was simply condemned as superficial and inferior, without any indication of why. Since little attempt was made to determine the real nature of impressionism, stylistic responses to it were misunderstood as well. He writes that no one will ever be able to prove to him that there is an innate sense in Czech character for “German heaviness,” which can be crude in its extremes. He then makes an intriguing remark about Schoenberg, a composer he feels lacks the synthetic approach necessary for contemporary style: “Let us take Schoenberg who is defended by all kinds of people. Where is the synthesis of his expression?”10 He then lectures the critics about their habit of going to concerts simply to learn how much a work agrees with their preconception of the composer. Since the ideas of compositional practice are now supplanting the established views, we will need to give up our past preferences and come to terms with what is happening: “A new

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era is coming, one of the greatest and most beautiful in history, which will gradually correct all the mistakes of the critics and aestheticians.”11 Also from 1925 comes one of Martinů’s longest Parisian essays, entitled “On Contemporary Music,” where he shifts momentarily to a critique of Paris and the way it encourages novelty and excess.12 Now after having spent some more time in the French capital, he sees the drawbacks to perpetual experimentation, especially in terms of how quickly new styles get coined and codified: “Let us take note of how almost all contemporary music takes shape through slogans. These slogans are often quite surprising and become practically a prescription for creating new works, which, in most cases, give us only the appearance of pioneering importance and sensation.”13 As a result of this phenomenon, new stylistic movements emerge from the way a single musical element undergoes new and exaggerated treatment. The “suppression of harmony,” for example, has led to an overemphasis on polyphony, but in his opinion, to a style with careless voice leading. The “suppression of chromaticism” has brought about an overtly diatonic style, but to the extent where we can expect chromaticism to be the norm once again. A pendulum effect of this kind can also be seen in the renunciation of sound color, where we now have music for increasingly smaller ensembles and styles that avoid idiomatic sonorities. And the idea of “dynamism” has promoted rhythm from being a “simultaneous” element to one that controls the music and produces the dominating effect. This tendency has produced a remarkable result: it is now possible for the model work of a new stylistic movement to be a mere deformation by a composer who is not in control of his musical material.14 And this encourages other composers to counteract with their own deformations, just for the sake of originality. Indeed, one sign of originality is to employ dissonance as an expressive element; avoiding it altogether can also be seen as pioneering. Martinů then turns his attention to Prague, where a work that is perceived to have an emotional or philosophical program is immediately hailed as an attempt “to unravel the inner problems of spiritual life.” It is common practice for such works to be considered “unusually mighty and perfect,” but he downplays them as “very cheap novels.” He writes that a strict discipline of musical laws will soon replace the critical method by which the forces of nature can be found in the music and employed to help portray the work; on the way out, too, is the “descriptive method,” through which the work is shown to depict some inner emotional state. Indeed, the contemporary musician cannot help but lose confidence in a new work when the critic writes that it is filled with “the thunder of an emotional vortex.” He clarifies, however, that he does not have in mind new works where intense emotionality is in agreement with musical laws, but those where emotionality has been brought to the fore against the work’s inner logic. In order to realize a specific musical idea, the composer must disregard the demand for emotional display and stay within his musical parameters:

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It is harder not to write down what occurs to us—i.e., to give a composition only what it needs. This means to be in control of the context, form, style, and expression, and this is a goal that even the greatest masters achieved only after much hard work. In our country a work that seems pure and clear is immediately condemned as superficial or transparent. This is because the battle was under control and not so apparent. On the surface, nothing testified to uneasiness or heaviness of expression.15

He then remarks on the way tradition is bandied about by critics who no longer know what they mean by the word. It has come to the point where disagreements among critics can lead a composer to be considered a progressive nationalist and regressive traitor, both at the same time. He admits ironically to having heard such “beautiful phrases” about “country” and “holding fast to the soil,” but these phrases tell us little about the actual nature of the work: “When we talk about tradition, we should realize that it is not something “stable.” A new work might come that is different, but it will still be Czech. There is no prescription for how a work should or should not be.”16

Nejedlý and Musical Crisis Just before writing on the semantics of tradition, Martinů makes an off-handed remark. He writes that he does not understand all the talk about a “crisis in music,” to which he counters, “if there is a crisis, it is one of technique and craft.”17 The crisis to which Martinů refers is undoubtedly the debate on the subject that Nejedlý had been spearheading for several years. For this reason, we should take note of Nejedlý’s lengthy discourse in the 1922 volume of Smetana entitled “Today’s Musical Crisis,” which reveals the striking differences between these two figures.18 In this article, Nejedlý sees the crisis plaguing music as societal, which will be overcome only once “a new meaning for life” is found. Nejedlý shows his nostalgia for the bygone days when performances of Smetana were religious occasions. In the musical culture of today, however, “there is neither a master nor direction that can bring back the old world.” Under the influence of capitalist industry, the opera house functions like a factory, where musicians simply put in time for rehearsals and performances, which encourages composers to produce works in the same way. Combined with the passivity of today’s audience, the musical event has lost its ceremonial importance and has become the most ordinary fare. In view of Nejedlý’s later emergence in the brutally repressive communist governments, the political underpinnings of his writings from this time resound to us in a chilling way. One example is how—after reminding us of how bourgeois culture emerged only after the violent overthrow of the aristocracy—Nejedlý warns readers to not get too comfortable with the current status quo:

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These are not gradual changes, or simply the results of uninterrupted development, but real overthrows through which the old standard of life and its cultures fell and a new standard was born. If this could happen one hundred years ago when the mature culture of the aristocracy fell as a victim, we should not be so arrogant to think that our culture will never go extinct, or that it will never be replaced by one that is entirely different.19

Apart from the Marxist rhetoric that now streams through Nejedlý’s writings, we can note the following differences between Martinů and Nejedlý. Contrary to Martinů’s defense of collaborative experimentation, Nejedlý suggests the need for a strong personality to “reestablish firm ground” in Czech music and a prevailing national direction. Whereas Martinů calls for the recognition of Stravinsky and the most recent Parisian modernisms, Nejedlý makes no reference to these developments at all, restricting his perspective to “neoromanticism” and “impressionism.” Whereas Martinů feels that musical subjects should relate to the collectivism of everyday life (see his compositions Half-Time and La Bagarre),20 Nejedlý’s romantic, Wagnerian ideal holds that the musical event should transform the listener beyond everyday reality. And whereas Martinů calls on artists to develop compositional practice from the perspective of craft, Nejedlý believes that the musical work should be cast by the urgency of the artist’s will.

Settling in Paris Although his stipend from the Czechoslovak government for study in Paris was to support him for three months, it seems that by 1926, Martinů had prolonged his residence indefinitely.21 His relations with Roussel were always cordial, and he found a group of peers with whom to regularly discuss compositional matters: the Groupe des Quatre, four émigré composers, each from a different country.22 Martinů soon found himself at home in the stimulating atmosphere of the Parisian cafés, where he would meet with these and other artists. And as he became more well known in Parisian musical circles, he began to collaborate as a piano accompanist in the avantgarde dance studio of Zdenka Podhajská (1901–91), a figure who would play an important role in his legacy.23 Martinů’s ties with France were further strengthened that year by his acquaintance with his future wife Charlotte Quennehen (1894– 1978), a Frenchwoman from Picardy who was soon helping support him through her modest profession as a dressmaker. While Martinů was able to gain some exposure with his instrumental music, securing productions for his innovative stage works was a different task altogether. Of the works for the stage that he completed during his early Parisian years— which numbered no less than eight by the end of the decade—only his comic opera Soldier and the Dancer (1926) and his ballets Revolt (1925) and Kitchen

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Revue (1927) received productions. His bold and confident use of new media in his stage works from this time is striking: his ballet scene Action! (1927), a puppet show and film animation in one, calls for a divided stage revealing the action of the worlds both underwater and above; his one-act “mechanical ballet” Amazing Flight (1927), which deals with the tragic attempt at a transatlantic flight by the French airmen Nungesser and Coli, demands an airplane on stage and kaleidoscopic images of land and sea; and his three-act “film-opera” Three Wishes (1929), filled with the jazzy sounds of the Parisian cabaret, intermeshes stage gestures with cinema as a film production unfolds. Unlike the audacious atmosphere of Paris that gave rise to these works, the inhibited one of the Czech capital, to which he planned to return, continued to instigate his criticism. The refusal of the Czech critics to recognize the role of experimentation is one of several subjects in his essay “On Contemporary Melody.”24 Here he describes the “two sickly paradigms” of Czech music criticism that look only to the future or the past without being able to build on the most recent efforts. Composers who experiment deserve more recognition, as they are actually “unknown servants” whose works are helping clarify the stylistic movements of the day. Drawing a comparison between the critical stalemate in Prague and the spirit of experimentation in Paris, he remarks: As far as I know these struggles from abroad, from outside of our circle, these questions no longer preoccupy and delay creative artists. This is because the era of revolutionary and excessive works, or those that were ostensibly revolutionary in intent, has already passed, and the composers of the new era are already building upon the substantial returns of that musical period which—despite all of its dubious and imperfect attempts—was extremely interesting in its own right.25

The reason experimental works failed to flourish in the Czech lands, he explains, is that they were appraised too much through the norms of romanticism. On the contrary, Martinů sides with the “collectivism” of new music, which has lost an appetite for romantic sentiment. It is important to note, however, that Martinů is not simply “anti-romantic,” as he respects compositions in which romanticism is a guiding element and realized within the integrity of the work. What he takes issue with instead is the hyperbole of romanticism, which has elevated music that is unworthy: When we look back at the romantic era, we see very clearly that works that were guided by and accepted genuine musical laws—despite a program of romanticism—have withstood the test of time, while works that were based merely on romantic slogans have suddenly shown their weaknesses and have come down from their high positions, and those works with little musical potency that were propped up by romantic ideas have completely disappeared.26

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He warns, however, that contemporary responses to romanticism should not be taken to an extreme. These responses, which have acquired designations such as “dynamism” and “constructivism,” should all be viewed simply as characteristic elements within the larger coherence of the musical work. The same holds true for melody, which, in its present form, often falls on deaf ears. Pointing out that melody was also misunderstood with “Mozart’s cantilena style” and later in its early romantic incarnation, he writes: “Melody has changed in character. It does not represent anything pathetic, it is not romantic, nor is it congested with poetry and sentimentality. It is concise, exact, expressive, a musical thought—the expression of a musical theme upon which it is necessary to build a work within specific musical laws.”27 He then describes the kind of melody that contemporary music needs while making an allusion to the elongated melodic character of late romantic works that makes contemporary musicians nauseous: “The modern work demands a quick flow, conciseness, and clarity. It rejects dragging out unnecessary emotions. It rejects long, protracted melody that has a specific term in the musicians’ dictionary that I cannot present here.”28 What has created the greatest change in melody is the fact that the new rhythmic idiom has become intertwined with it. One of Martinů’s works from this time that corresponds to the brevity in melodic style that he outlines here is his Second String Quartet (1925). Here he juxtaposes austere polyphonic textures in a slow tempo with the brisk, rhythmically driven passages that form the work’s most salient feature.

Dialogue with Václav Štěpán Martinů’s last polemical essay from the 1920s, “On Contemporary Music,”29 was inspired by two articles he had recently read in the music journal Listy Hudební matice. Particularly impressing him was “The Aesthetic Problem of Contemporary Music” by the multifaceted Václav Štěpán (1889–1944), a high-profile musician who had stood in opposition to the Nejedlý School since the Dvořák debates; apart from his activities as a critic and composer, Štěpán was most well-known as a concert pianist.30 Since Martinů tried to ally himself with this prominent figure, we should take a quick look at Štěpán’s article and see how Martinů responded. In this article, Štěpán discusses the historical shifts between form and expression and notes how—after the most recent period, when “poetic expression” was in the mainstream—the younger generation of composers will do almost anything to be identified with the contemporary response. But Štěpán reminds readers that— throughout the entire period until the revolutionary break with the poetic-expressive idiom—there were composers of eternal value such as Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Dvořák who were still guided by form. Thus we should realize, too—even if it seems counterintuitive to the times—that there are composers today such as Honegger

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and Bloch who are succeeding with styles that lean more towards expression. Štěpán argues that the greatest challenge facing contemporary music lies in recognizing how the new aesthetic differs from the one of the recent past. Once it is better defined, the new aesthetic “should not become a religion that refutes everything from the past in a sectarian way . . . it is only a new tendency that helps indicate new methods of work and how we should listen and appraise.” Martinů agrees with the moderating voice of Štěpán, who, he believes, is “quite alone with these views.” He then sets out to add perspective on the way composers have worked to meet the demands of the new styles. Martinů notes how the responses to romanticism and impressionism during the century’s first decades were often driven to an extreme simply “for the glory of resistance,” but the principal works from this time showed that “it was not possible to extricate oneself from certain musical laws.” What prevailed during that time was a return to musical logic, but we should realize that the resulting idiom was not simply “unemotional.” The reevaluation of aesthetic values that took place over the previous decades was necessary because the music of the “philosophical composers” had become increasingly removed from life’s new realities. It was a false sense of musical realism that needed to be challenged, because those works that were proclaimed to reflect everyday life were actually a contradiction of it; such works, he claims, were nothing more than “a lofty dose of ideological opium.” What sustained the need for suffering and redemption in music was the fact that the critics had continued to view works through the tragic-heroic ideal and could accept little more than the stereotyped musical gestures. There are other ways to depict heroism than through a fanfare of trombones; the same holds true for reconciliation, for which there are other solutions than muted violins in the higher register. Today’s hero has lost his elevated status and does not need this kind of affect. Whether his fate ends in triumph or tragedy, today’s hero is more commonplace and humane.31 Martinů praises Štěpán for stressing the need to recognize “how” new musical works are created. But he gently challenges him on one issue: a too formulaic concept of expression that relies on fixed semantic values. He is otherwise severe with the vast majority of Czech critics for this same tendency—i.e., for perpetuating an implausible system of semantics to manipulative extremes: A certain brand of phraseology created an entire system of mutually supporting values. If “a” was said, then without thinking, we got a plethora of set ideas that were intellectualized to infinity, yet no one attempted to verify whether or not they are true . . . It took every effort to rescue a good many works with this system, but in reality, they were only rescued for a short period of time. It seemed that this system would get struck down any day. But it has still not been struck down, and we find the elements of this critical style in virtually every review and essay.32

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It was through this system of values that the critics placed musical works into either “higher” or “lower” categories. The next step was to qualify those higher works as necessarily tragic, elevating, cleansing, and sorrowful, while everything else was considered joyful, only for pleasure, and less worthy. And those lesser musical works were seen merely as “muzikanství,” a pejorative among the Czech critics employed to denote “music for music’s sake.” In general, muzikanství became a suspicious attribute for anything that sounded good without a professed deeper intent.33 Taking Štěpán’s lead, Martinů provides his own thoughts on the “Battle over Dvořák” and the misguided attempt to impose a correct conception on national music. The composers actually defining this period were Suk, Novák, Janáček, and Ostrčil, but we can recall how these figures were viewed at that time: no one yet knew if Suk’s works were good or bad; Novák was under the suspicion of impressionism; Janáček was still considered an ordinary musician; and the modern gestures of Ostrčil were received with emptiness. With these composers, the idea of Czech music as set forth by Smetana and Dvořák had effectively reached its fulfillment. Martinů names Ladislav Vycpálek (1882–1969) as the only real continuator of the Smetana–Dvořák lineage. Since the critics left no place for discussing what should succeed the idea of national music, few realized that—everywhere else in the world—a battle for new expression was taking place. In other words, the provincial debate on Czech music had left the greater aims of experimentation misunderstood: “An experiment, which expresses the desire for something new, or embodies an attempt to capture something new, or to assert oneself, was deemed incorrect . . . I realize very well that it is easier to proclaim the principles of a fine work at the expense of an experiment, but works of this kind were not being written while experiments came pouring in to us from everywhere in the world.”34 As a result, the younger Czech composers were technically ill prepared to make contributions to the new musical styles. Attempting to dispel the notion that composing has become easier in an age when the old norms have been shattered, he writes: We must realize that a far greater knowledge of craft will be needed for modern music, much more than the style that involved extramusical content . . . Modern music cannot allow for everything, the way it is claimed. The increased number of means and possibilities does not mean an increase in latitude. The more freedom there is, the more discipline is necessary. It is clear that everything did not go so smoothly at the beginning of this period. This was due to the newness of the problem—i.e., the newness of expression, gesture, and technique. Everyone had to learn it, and nothing was as apparent as it is now. There were mistakes and crises, and the battle persists. But I do not remember any battle in our country. Instead, what I remember is something that I dislike recalling.35

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The Wozzeck Affair At one point in “On Contemporary Music,” while remarking on how contemporary audiences now see through the inflated semantics of criticism, Martinů writes satirically: “The audience no longer believes it anymore when the critic writes, “we leave the theater miserable and downtrodden from the magnitude of the tragedy” (in the case of Wozzeck), etc. This is because they know that the critic does not leave miserable or downtrodden in any way. Instead, he leaves calmly for dinner.”36 This was a reference to one of Prague’s most important musical events of the time: the tumultuous 1926 production of Berg’s Wozzeck at the Prague National Theater under the direction of Ostrčil, which foddered debate between the factions of the Czech music scene.37 Leading the far right was Antonín Šilhan of the daily newspaper Národní listy, who points out that by staging the opera, the National Theater has seemingly taken the example of the Marinsky Theater in “Bolshevik Leningrad,” which, although it had not programmed a single Slavic work that season, had no problem in “parading” Wozzeck there.38 As a tireless opponent of virtually all modern music, Šilhan states that Berg “throws a bomb of nausea on stage and spreads anarchy . . . just so he can mask his creative impotence.” And on the work’s hyperexpressive vocal style, he contends that the singing “gives the impression of alcoholics erupting with screams of delirium” and that “everything stinks of hard liquor.” Šilhan’s case against Wozzeck was not improved for posterity when the ultranationalist, anti-Semitic periodical Čech joined ranks with him, attempting to link the work’s “degenerate” nature to Jewish influence.39 Defending the left, of course, was Nejedlý, who praised the social value of a work that elicits sympathy for the poor and makes visible the spiritual poverty of the privileged classes: “Even though Wozzeck is the model of the defenseless poor fellow, it is through Berg’s music that we feel how strong he really is, stronger than everything around him, and how, on the contrary, the doctor and captain, in their vanity of class—it is they who are wretched and crippled in feeling and spirit.”40 He praises the boldness of Ostrčil, who programmed a work revealing the mindless trifles with which the Czech bourgeoisie prefers to amuse itself. And in his regular column for the communist daily newspaper Rudé Právo, he writes that Šilhan “has apparently gone mad” and ridicules the idea of a larger leftist conspiracy in Prague’s musical scene of which the production of Wozzeck was just another manifestation: But there is something else that has occurred to poor Mr. AŠ. And these are Bolsheviks. Everywhere he looks, Mr. AŠ only sees Bolsheviks, thus it is no wonder that he has lost his mind. Even at the National Theater, as it has been rumored, with the exception of Mr. Šafařovič,41 there is nothing but Bolsheviks. But get this: even in the music department at the academy there is nothing but Bolsheviks, and not only are they there, they are the ones making the decisions!42

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As a result of the public backlash over Berg’s opera, which came to a breaking point after a third performance during which whistle-blowing, catcalls, and barking from the back of the hall formed part of the organized disruption, the production of Wozzeck was quickly closed.43 The closure of Wozzeck was seemingly a defeat for Nejedlý, but it placed him in a situation that might have surprised him. Although most subscribers to the National Theater were revolted by the work and glad to see it go, Prague’s leading musicians were fascinated by it and by Ostrčil’s outstanding interpretation.44 And many of these musicians, some of whom had fallen victim to Nejedlý’s attacks in the past (e.g., Suk and Novák), even congratulated Ostrčil in writing and expressed their sympathies about a decision they viewed unfair. Thus instead of being the figure holding the most extreme point of view, Nejedlý was now leading the attack against the fringes of critical opinion with the performing musicians on his side of the debate. The following passage from A History of Czech Musical Culture 1890– 1945—although clearly biased towards Nejedlý with its socialist point of view— provides a provocative commentary on the new atmosphere of debate that emerged after the short-lived production of Berg’s opera: “The Wozzeck affair proved very instructive historically. It revealed the potentially intrinsic shackles binding together reactionary movements both artistic and political and confirmed the reality to progressive artists that the social-revolutionary function of a new artistic work is sufficiently effective only if the new artistic form is resolutely connected with an adjacent programmatic endeavor for society.”45 In other words, better political organization is needed for socialist works to succeed. And this was achieved some twenty years later with the Czechoslovak communist state, which would demand socialist works as propaganda. Yet this went against the interests of one musician who vigorously defended himself against external, ideological forces: Martinů would never return to work in Czechoslovakia during the communist dictatorship. Despite his strong showing during the Wozzeck affair, Nejedlý’s influence over Czech music declined over the following years. This can be seen in the discontinuation of Smetana in 1926 and Talich’s rise to the helm of the National Theater in 1935—a decisive defeat for the Nejedlý School. Before poking fun at Nejedlý for his monumental but incomplete endeavors, yet praising him for his productivity, Hubert Doležil46 describes his diminished influence upon the critic’s sixtieth birthday in 1938: Yet the center of Nejedlý’s lifelong work for Czech music and his influence on our musical development falls only into the first three decades of the new century. This is apparent in the way our musical modernism and our most recent work has already distanced itself from his one-time directives and how the theoretical way of looking at music has set out in new directions. For the most part, it is not even possible to speak of some kind of musicological school in the case of Nejedlý, even

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though he trained during that long period of time many talented students at the university and in a musical seminar that he expanded into a complete institute for musicology with a large library and other resources. But Nejedlý never strove towards founding a “school” in the common sense of the word, where he gives his students complete freedom of opinion and methods for work.47

Had his career come to an end at this point, Nejedlý would not warrant so much attention today. However, several twists of fate affected his later years that worked to his advantage. With the occupation of the Czech lands by the Nazis, Nejedlý took refuge in the Soviet Union and the prewar debate over Czech music was suspended.48 But with the strong foothold the communists established in Czechoslovakia upon the Soviet liberation, Nejedlý returned to Prague as part of the interim communist-led government, in which he served as Minister of Education and Culture. Then, with the establishment of the communist dictatorship in 1948, he returned to this position, allowing him to begin rewriting the Czech cultural heritage on a new official level (see fig. 17).49 One of the results of Nejedlý’s rise to power is that the strains of his postromantic, nationalist ideology are found throughout the communist-era musicological literature in either explicit or subtle forms. From the communist state’s early years we can look to Miroslav Barvík’s speech from 1950 to the Union of Czechoslovak Composers, Composers Go with the People, in which Nejedlý’s values are pronounced triumphantly but are now intermeshed with the rhetoric of Soviet socialist realism.50 But the more subtle passages are particularly worthy of note because they can go easily undetected. One example is the commentary on Nejedlý’s one-time associate Emil Axman in the Czechoslovak Music Dictionary (1963), which represents the exact bias that Martinů had attempted to overturn. Here Western (i.e., Parisian) modernism is viewed as “anti-expressive,” or a “negation of life,” whereas true musical realism was to be found in the romantic idiom of the past: “Of Axman’s compositions, the following were influenced by Western European modernism: Piano Sonata no. 3; Sonata for Cello and Piano (1924); String Quartet no. 2; and Piano Trio (1925), yet even these works are lyrical and have a direct connection with life.”51 Martinů and Talich were among those most affected by Nejedlý’s rise to power. Nejedlý’s role in the first post-war government affected Martinů’s nomination to the Prague Conservatory in 1945,52 and during the years of about 1949–55, Martinů’s music was officially banned from publication and performance. What is more, the communists’ hostile stance against Martinů and the fact that he took American citizenship in 1952—with a clause prohibiting him from visiting the Eastern Bloc— meant that he would never return to Czechoslovakia, either to work or simply to visit. Talich, meanwhile, in the weeks after the liberation, was first stripped of his position at the Prague National Theater before being incarcerated for alleged collaboration with the Nazis. After the 1948 communist coup, Talich was dismissed once again from the Prague National Theater, becoming the conductor of the Slovak Philharmonic in Bratislava, temporarily out of sight and out of mind.

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Summary In my study of Martinů’s Parisian Criticism, I have made Nejedlý a part of the discussion not only due to his importance in the history of Czech music criticism, but also due to the fact that—as a cultural politician and a critic of socialist creed— he formed a complete antithesis to Martinů’s music and thought. As we have seen, Martinů had a vested interest in transforming the Czech musical discourse, and the Nejedlý School was among the primary factors that compelled him to establish his views. Despite his decision to relocate to Paris, Martinů continued to see himself as an exponent of the Czech musical tradition, representing lines of thought that were misunderstood; this, in fact, was what had led him to engage so vigorously as a critic himself. We should stop and note some of the principles that Martinů has established thus far: (1) new musical styles and synthesis should be achieved in composition through the practice of musical craft; (2) romantic, nationalist, and political thought should not substitute for working with the musical medium on its own; and (3) more precise semantics are needed in the discussion of musical works and styles. Martinů’s concern for these issues never changed over the course of his career. Yet as he matured as a composer while producing numerous new scores, he began to look more closely at his creative process with the desire to clarify what really happens as a musical work emerges. This, we will see, was a central theme in his American Diaries, thus we should begin to fast forward to this time in his thought.

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Chapter Three

Until 1943 After his polemics with the Czech critics during the 1920s, Martinů’s career transformed a number of times. The more he prolonged his residence in Paris, the more he became torn over the timing of his return. Early in the 1930s he declined an offer to teach at the Brno Conservatory, and with his sights set on Prague, a second, more emphatic offer could not lure him to the Moravian capital. A stylistic shift occurs in his music at this time. As the elements of jazz, pastiche, and imitation disappear, he began to balance the rhythmic dynamism of his previous years with polyphony in a more purely neoclassical style; the milestone work in this transition was his Piano Trio no. 1, Five Short Pieces (1930). For larger ensembles, the concertante techniques of the eighteenth-century concerto grosso became his new point of departure: crowning achievements in this style took form in his Concerto Grosso (1937), Tre ricercari (1938), and Double Concerto for Two String Orchestras, Piano, and Timpani (1938). Forming an independent stream to his instrumental works was an ambitious project for the Czech theater. Here he continued his polemics with the Czech critics, insisting that national opera was still appraised too much according to Wagnerian aesthetics. For Martinů, disentangling the Gesamtkunstwerk meant working with the various parameters of the music and stage individually rather than dictating sentiment by unifying forces; that viewers gain greater freedom in interpreting the work on their own was key to his ideal. In his “singing-ballet” Špalíček (1932), for example, where he employed the folklore captured in albums from Counterreformation Bohemia, he worked without a central narrative, allowing the scenes to unfold in continuous fluctuation. And in The Plays of Mary (1934), an operatic cycle of medieval miracle stories, he decentralized the narrative by circulating it through the main characters, dancers, choral numbers, and spoken narration. His moral victory on the domestic scene was the production of his surrealist opera Julietta, or the Key to Dreams (1937) at the Prague National Theater under Talich in 1938, which received great critical acclaim. However, vocal opposition to this work came from the Nejedlý School, which was beginning to take Martinů much more seriously and laid out extensive grounds against his theatrical project in general.1

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Through his correspondence with Talich we learn that, by the mid-1930s, Martinů had grown weary of his uncertain status as a freelance composer abroad and wanted to secure a permanent position in Prague.2 The big opportunity came in 1936 at the Prague Conservatory, where the position of head of the compositional master class became vacant with the retirement of Vítězslav Novák (1870–1949). But despite Martinů’s appeals for Talich to influence the matter, the position went to Jaroslav Křička (1882–1969), who had long been established at the institution and in Prague’s musical circles in general.3 In 1938, the year of the crisis over the Czechoslovak Sudetenland, Martinů became involved with his brilliant composition student Vítězslava Kaprálová (1915–40), who had come to study with him in Paris. That summer he also composed his Double Concerto, which stands out in his oeuvre as a definitive masterpiece. Although he writes that “a sense for the collective” played a role while composing the Double Concerto—or, as it seems, the way the Czechs experienced the Nazi threat during the summer of 19384—his numerous letters to Kaprálová from that time reveal his manic obsession for her and his frenetic state of mind. We might look to his life circumstances for what led him to produce a work of such raw power. Yet in his American Diaries, as we will see, he insists that any attempt to trace creative inspiration will only obscure our view of how the work functions on its own.5 After the Munich Accord and the full occupation of the Czech lands in March 1939, the Czechoslovak army was disbanded, but a number of its patriotic soldiers reorganized in France. In a show of support for the brigade, Martinů composed his Field Mass (1939), which also placed him on the Gestapo’s black list. With the German army about to enter Paris and unable to realize the gravity of the situation, he narrowly escaped incarceration by fleeing to the south with his wife Charlotte; it was just one day later that the Gestapo broke into his apartment. Then, taking refuge in Aix-en-Provence, the Martinůs began a lengthy procedure to gain paperwork for resettlement in the United States, a transit visa for Portugal, and funds for steamship travel from Lisbon across the Atlantic. Upon his arrival in New York City, Martinů was met by Frank Rybka (1895– 1970), a musician from Moravia and a one-time student of Janáček. They soon became close friends, and the Rybka family began playing an important role in his life. Beginning with his summer appointment at Tanglewood in 1942, teaching composition became a more regular part of his professional activities; by the time of his permanent departure from the United States in 1956, he had also held teaching positions at the Mannes Music School, Princeton University, and the Curtis Institute of Music. The availability of several well-organized orchestras made symphonic composition immediately relevant for him; this resulted in his five symphonies from the years 1942–46 as well as a number of other orchestral works. His symphonic movement Memorial to Lidice (1943)—a requiem for the Czech village razed by the Nazis—won the sympathies of American audiences, and his meteoric

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rise to fame even sparked discussion of Martinů as the fourth great Czech composer in the line of Smetana, Dvořák, and Janáček. Stylistically, his instrumental idiom at this time becomes more lyrical—sometimes quite romantic—in contrast to the more austere, dissonant approach of the previous decade; for his American, neoclassical synthesis, he would now draw on nineteenth-century sources as well. Under the influence of Renaissance polyphony, he developed the legato, ametrical style that we hear in the first movements of his Second Cello Sonata (1941) and First Symphony (1942).6 Another new element is a cadential progression from his opera Julietta, which he deployed in numerous works throughout the rest of his career. This progression, often called the “Julietta Chords,” is a kind of plagal cadence from a dominant thirteenth chord on the subdominant to the tonic, which he often restates right away a whole tone lower.7 Some of his finest chamber works came from these years, including his Piano Quartet (1942), Madrigal-Sonata (1942), and Trio for Flute, Cello, and Piano (1944). This summarizes Martinů’s development until the summer of 1943, when interest in his life and work was so great that Šafránek had been able to secure a contract with Knopf for a biography.8 This led Martinů to sketch a number of ideas on musical creation, marking the inception of his American Diaries. But as we will see, Martinů’s diaries went far beyond what Šafránek could use at the time, which brings into question what motivated him to engage in this speculative project. Undoubtedly, his new role as a composition teacher accounts for the pedagogical stream that we so often find in these writings. But with his voracious appetite for reading—and perhaps with his eyes set on a university position in the United States—it seems that by his summer holidays in 1944, he was having serious ambitions to publish a book of his own with his own thoughts on music and culture. This, in fact, might have been the book that he wanted to represent him rather than the more standard life and works that Šafránek released.9 With the severance of communications between America and the European continent, the politics of Czech national music—which had so often formed the backdrop to his Parisian Criticism—had largely receded from his mind. But linking his earlier writings to his diaries was his distaste of romantic criticism. In his Parisian Criticism, if we recall, he had attempted to expose a manipulative rhetorical system through which purely musical content became secondary due to the higher status that programmatic works enjoyed. And this system, he argued, was a relic of the romantic past that no longer had relevance to the times. In his diaries, however, his concern first and foremost was to show how the psychology of romantic criticism falsifies musical experience. For this reason, he attempts to redefine commonplace notions such as “inspiration” and “emotion” through an account of what actually happens when we compose, perform, or listen to a work. And it was his own experience in these areas that formed the basis of his testimony, which provides us with numerous insights about his personality and music.

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Chapter Four

Martinů’s Creative Process Martinů’s one substantial essay from his Notebook from Darien (1943), “On the Creative Process,” features his account of the “initial impulse” at the inception of a musical work and how the composer responds. One of his goals is to refute the idea that the composer transmits meaning concretely, or that the listener can retrace the composer’s emotional world in the music. At the opening of his essay, he describes the state by which the composer realizes the initial impulse as “subconscious concentration,” a premise having wide-ranging implications on his thought. Although his idea of subconscious concentration is based on his own practice as a composer, he provides only a few examples of how this came into play in his works. Thus to shed light on this idea, we can take note of two experiences from his youth that he relates to Šafránek in a letter from 7 June 1958, which comes from a time the two men were corresponding at length over drafts of the second biography.1 Employing the term “open mind” to describe a certain state of freedom from conscious thought, Martinů clarifies the import of what he had once observed from taking part in a dictation exercise at the Prague Conservatory: Here you do not explain that dictation clearly. I did not mean that all of my dictations were flawless. The point is that in that one dictation, I stopped following the notes consciously. I became lost in thought after the fourth note, but continued, even though I knew I was lost, just so I could finish the dictation. This means that I lost control of myself, that I was working without conscious involvement, or with an open mind. What resulted was a flawless dictation, and it was the only such one in class. You can imagine my surprise. And a still greater surprise was my realization of what had happened, but ex post facto.2

He then revises another account by Šafránek about how he had suddenly found himself working in a similar state. In this case, it was while producing the sketch to what he considered to be a conceptually complete work. The sketch in question was to his unfinished orchestral work Toilers of the Sea (1910; see fig. 14), named after Victor Hugo’s novel:

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About those Toilers . . . The facts are that I was not surprised when I found the sketch in Polička after thirty years. Instead, I was extremely surprised when I was writing it. It was the first time in my life that I had conceived a work completely finished, and I was astonished with what intensity and definitiveness it came out on paper under my hands. This is something that is probably called inspiration— i.e., that very open mind of which I was still capable as a young man, where I did not refrain myself intellectually . . . That I distinguished in it a sense for orchestration is beside the point; each sketch already contains some sense of the orchestration—even though it often ends up quite differently. It is easy to say the trumpets come in here, etc., but this has little to do with that impression I had while I was working, a kind of illumination, a revelation of which I was too young to understand but astonished me and even scared me a bit—i.e., the speed with which the music evolved under my pencil, so fast that I could not get it all down on paper. If the composition is good or bad, this is irrelevant; it was merely a glimpse into the mystery of musical creation. I have not deduced anything from it, but that brief moment became ingrained in my memory, and I must admit that it has never happened again with such intensity.3

These experiences were important for Martinů’s early development as a composer, because they suggested that generating a work involves a kind of subliminal state with which the composer needs to have an interface. And as he matured as a composer, gaining a greater control of this interface became one of his primary goals. He gradually established a dichotomy between musical creation, where creation deals more purely with the subconscious, and musical composition, where—on a more conscious level—the composer transmits the work into the media in the form of the full score. Before addressing the implications of these issues, we should first explore how he describes the creative process and the idiosyncratic language he employs to make himself clear. Martinů writes that an indefinable impulse lies at the foundation of the work. He defines this impulse as a “sensation-attitude,” an abstract conception that the composer can harness through “subconscious thought.”4 Once the composer has established the work’s conception, or has allowed it to enter the conscious mind to a certain extent, he begins sensing the entirety of the work, or begins having a “feeling for the whole.” At this stage, it is necessary for the composer to “see” the work from all sides at once. In this sense, the creative process is analogous to viewing a landscape in three dimensions, or as a cohesion of elements. But when the same landscape is viewed through a number of random details, it amounts to a different value. This is part of the lesson he stresses throughout his diaries: any attempt to employ musical elements before a holistic conception has been sufficiently secured leads to a faulty framework and a confused result. We have noted that—with his depiction of subconscious concentration— Martinů intends to prove that the composer’s emotional world cannot surface in the work. But we might ask, what actually inspires a composition once we realize that it

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cannot be traced back to any emotion or event that the composer experienced? His answer to this is that inspiration occurs as a result of the creative process, and not before. The process of securing the abstract sensation often takes place over a lengthy battle during which the composer’s emotional state—or what he calls the “emotioncomplex”—is in constant flux. This means that an emotional stimulus cannot be sustained for a sufficient length of time to have a defining impact on the work. Instead, through subconscious thought, the composer processes the entire summary of his emotional experience from the time of the initial impulse. Thus inspiration occurs only after the composer has sustained the initial impulse for a sufficient period of time such that some form of writing can begin: “Here we are at the moment called ‘inspiration,’ a very mysterious thing. But inspiration is the very result of this subconscious thought-work and not some perfectly clear idea that comes all at once. It is the result of labor, straightening out direction, and relaxation, like something that easily emerges in the morning that we had been searching for earlier with great effort.” He does note, however, that a momentary emotional stimulus might trigger inspiration, leading to work on the sketch or score. But what is important to realize is that an emotional stimulus of this kind simply elicits a solution to the compositional problem and might have a different characteristic affect from the one embodied in the work.5 He supports this by citing works from the classical period in the sonatacycle format, where convention called for several changes in affect over the course of a movement or the work as a whole. It would be nonsense for the composer to be constantly changing his emotional state each time there is a contrast in musical affect. What we should realize, too, is that a strong emotion that occurs while the work is being scored can disturb the “subconscious plan” that the composer needs to sustain, which ensures a sense of consistency in the music. As an afterthought to this essay, he summarizes the essence of subconscious concentration as follows: “I would almost say that we continuously think subconsciously and that we become aware only when we focus our attention or interest and that our conscious thoughts bring into circulation an entire complex of unknown, deeply subconscious operations and ideas that are unknown to us and inconcrete.”6

Insights In this essay, Martinů gives considerable emphasis to the internal creative process, but he describes the compositional process that follows more as a manual task that relies more purely on craft. The process that follows is actually a “battle with the materials,” where the composer—through skill and technique—selects what is consistent with the work’s underlying design: “Here the moment comes when the composer is busy with just his medium, his craft. The entire process that took place before this becomes fastened in his consciousness and becomes part of the

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composer, part of his gesture, his essence, his point of view. It has crossed over to a daily order and cannot get lost, and I think the composer forgets about everything that occurred beforehand.” Here Martinů is concerned with writing out the score. But we should consider how he sketched, because it seems that, for him, the sketch embodies (1) the actual moment of inspiration; and (2) a conceptually complete representation of the work. From his efforts on Toilers of the Sea, he realized that he could capture the idea of a complete work in the form of a sketch. And in his sketches from his mature years, where the linear component is often completely worked out, we see his tendency to produce conceptual wholes rather than reworking basic motivic or thematic materials. That he worked holistically is substantiated in his retort to a question once posed to him about how he works with themes; to this he replied, “I don’t work with themes!”7 But specific evidence that he considers the sketch to embody the work as a whole can be found in the case of his Second Symphony, where he transferred the date of completion from the sketch directly to the end of the full orchestral score: “July 24, 1943” (see fig. 15). And the close proximity in time of his Second Symphony to this essay forms an exact parallel of practice with thought. It is interesting to note that his sketch to his Second Symphony reveals an efficient method of musical shorthand, where he employs vertical series of horizontal lines for instrumentation and chronological markings for time elapsed at different portions of the work (see figs. 15 and 16).8 Indeed, one of his students remarked that being taught how to sketch was among his greatest contributions.9 But by the end of his career, it seems he could forgo the paper sketch entirely. This caused aggravation in one of his students from the 1950s who was apparently taught little about sketching and was dismayed to see a composer appearing aloof while writing out his music—in ink, directly into the score, in reference to seemingly nothing at all.10 Apart from his working methods, his Darien essay also provides insight into his attitude towards his collective output. The vast compass of his output has been a common point of discussion in the Martinů literature, serving both positive and negative appraisals of his work.11 But with an output so large that few can fully grasp it, questions arise as to how we should categorize and appraise it, or what different methods of categorization might reveal. The second edition of Harry Halbreich’s Werkverzeichnis cites 384 works chronologically, whereas the two other significant catalogs, by Jaroslav Mihule and Blanka Červinková et al., categorize his works by genre.12 Martinů, however, who lost track of many of his works over the course of his career, seems to have thought of his output quite differently, and he suggests this while attempting to prevent misunderstandings about the creative process. Writing that the creative process is not some kind of “mysterious ritual,” or that the composer has a “system of contemplation,” he states: “What I am describing here is the battle for the idea, which often takes place without the direct intervention of the composer! And there is nothing in this entire process that is different from what happens

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in other fields of creative endeavor . . . What is more, the composer need not reestablish this process for each work ; it may suffice for more than one composition.” That the creative process can serve more than one work shows that—at some level—Martinů thought of his output in terms of a number of groups, or as Werkgruppe. For those familiar with a larger portion of his output, the relatedness of certain compositions is readily apparent. Striking similarities can be found in the case of his Symphony no. 6 (“Fantaisies symphoniques,” 1953) and his oratorio Gilgamesh (1955), and the frequency of the “Julietta Chords” in compositions ranging over almost twenty years seems to suggest a common point of departure.13 That he could sustain a creative state over the course of so many years might seem farfetched, but less so when we see that he describes his creative process as an ongoing evolution, where he stops from time to time to capture a specific musical design, or produce a new compositional solution. That Martinů thought of his creative process as one that extends over a series of works is supported by a passage from his 1941 Autobiography, particularly his fifth and final point in a list of errors he felt composers were making in the wake of romanticism: “a discord in one’s own development, haste, solving disparate problems from composition to composition and always with different technical means.”14 In other words, Martinů recommends that composers work through single compositional issues by means of a series of works, the way that he himself had developed as a composer. Unfortunately, Martinů does not provide us with a full Werkgruppe categorization of his compositions, but he does write a partial outline. This takes form in his 1941 Autobiography, where he notes his “unexpected works,” compositional milestones that had been in preparation in a latent state and appeared to him with no forewarning. Writing about himself in the third person, he raises the subject of his unexpected works in connection with Half-Time: With this composition, it is as if his entire past of impressionism is excised and forgotten all at once. It is something that occurs more frequently in Martinů’s work: without preparation—but only seemingly—a complete work emerges of a new character, of a new, clear-cut technique. It is as if somewhere in his subconscious, a composition that is not a logical link in his development becomes an abrupt and intense departure into a sphere that is not possible to predict. Other compositions of this kind include his Piano Trio no. 1, Five Short Pieces; Second String Quartet; Julietta; and Double Concerto; and these unexpected compositions are both in form and technique more perfect than those that are prepared, thought through, and substantiated by development. But he never continues right away along this newly discovered path and returns to an earlier technique, and the results of these works that branch out come much later; often, it is only after many others that they bring forth a specific benefit.15

Here Martinů enumerates five compositions, but to these we can add two further works belonging to the unexpected category that he cites elsewhere—i.e., Toilers

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of the Sea and Symphony no. 6 (“Fantaisies symphoniques”).16 Thus with these works, and perhaps others—if the evidence is found—we can fashion a Werkgruppe periodization: Toilers of the Sea (1910) = Debussyian impressionism Half-Time (1924) = Stravinskyian dynamism Second String Quartet (1925) = constructivism Piano Trio no. 1, Five Short Pieces (1930) = neoclassicism Julietta (1937) = surrealism Double Concerto (1938) = hyper neoclassicism Symphony no. 6 (“Fantaisies symphoniques,” 1953) = neo-impressionism Of these seven works, particular questions might arise with Julietta, since it stands out in his oeuvre stylistically as sui generis. In other words, within a Werkgruppe approach, we might find it hard to relate Julietta to other works. But in terms of its surrealist subject matter and the influence on him of the surrealist movement in general, we might find the greatest significance of Julietta in the impact it made on his philosophy of creative practice. Indeed, it was the surrealist poet André Breton who described the idea of Automatic Message—a kind of writing without conscious involvement—that forms a direct parallel with Martinů’s ideas on subconscious concentration.17 I would propose, therefore, that it was while exploring the story of Julietta and its uncanny situations18 that Martinů’s creative process crystallized like never before—something substantiated by the string of masterworks that he produced over the very next years. The fact that he quoted from this opera in the form of the “Julietta Chords” throughout much of the rest of his career shows how deeply the opera remained etched in his mind. It was clearly his favorite work, and revising the French-language version of the libretto was among his final creative acts.19 The Double Concerto, too, might elicit questions, since it has few partners. But in terms of its hyperexpressivity, the work with which we can pair it most clearly is his Fifth String Quartet (1938), which he never saw through to publication due to what he saw as a loss of control over balance and order. Later, he revisits the dense and dissonant polyphonic writing of the Double Concerto in his Third Symphony (1944). Returning to an earlier period, to the time of his Second String Quartet (1925), I propose “constructivism”—a term Martinů uses in his Parisian Criticism at this time—as a designation for his works from after his Second String Quartet and his instrumental works from that time in particular. My rationale for this also comes from the fact that the term Les Constructeurs was ascribed to the Groupe des Quatre by Roussel, though the literature is still unclear about what he meant by the term. What is missing from his unexpected works are compositions from the 1940s, or works from after his 1941 Autobiography. A possible milestone might be his First Symphony (1942), where—in the first movement—he employs the legato, ametrical

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style we hear in numerous works from his early American years, and where—in the third movement—he quotes the “Julietta Chords” for the first time. This we might call his “American lyricism.” A later demarcation might be his Fifth Symphony (1946), his first major work after his atypical, five-month pause in composing that resulted from the numerous new circumstances he faced after the war. Thus for a lack of a better term to define this time stylistically, we might simply adopt “postwar period.”20 With these additions, we can suggest the following, more complete sketch of Martinů’s milestone works: Toilers of the Sea (1910) = Debussyian impressionism Half-Time (1924) = Stravinskyian dynamism Second String Quartet (1925) = constructivism Piano Trio no. 1, Five Short Pieces (1930) = neoclassicism Julietta (1937) = surrealism Double Concerto (1938) = hyper neoclassicism First Symphony (1942) = American lyricism Fifth Symphony (1946) = postwar period Symphony no. 6 (“Fantaisies symphoniques,” 1953) = neo-impressionism Martinů’s essay from Darien also reveals a key axiom that he expands upon the next summer at Ridgefield: that the composer does not speak through the work, but that once completed, the work is autonomous and speaks alone. In other words, the composer was a conduit through which the work came into being and affected style through the transmission of ideas, but upon the completion of the score, nothing can be traced back to the composer in personal terms. He articulates this at the end of the following statement: “We cannot specify what the listener feels, and even if we could, each listener would respond differently. And much less can we specify what the composer feels (not what he expresses!).” Also compelling him to remark on the autonomy of the musical work was the misguided romantic convention of searching through a work for revelations about the composer’s personal life. To this he responds, simply, “we listen to the work and not the composer.”

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Chapter Five

On the Ridgefield Diary The Ridgefield Diary (1944), Martinů’s largest literary endeavor, consists of a complex of themes that circulate and overlap. Unifying his discussion is the idea that a musical work functions as a composite of organic relations. These relations, he shows, often get disturbed by romantic myths and faulty musical practices, and the distorted forms that musical works take lead to misconceptions among composers, performers, and listeners. In order to illustrate how musical relations function properly, he draws on the composer’s creative process, building on the ideas he had established the previous year at Darien (see chapter 4). In his defense of musical relations, he also cites the experiences of performers—in particular, how they resolve technical issues in an effort to bring a musical work to life. A related theme in his Ridgefield Diary is what I call his project for music education. Here Martinů’s goal is to bring the common listener closer to the principles of musical craft from the perspective of the musician. A necessary step in this project is to debunk the notion that a composition embodies an emotional value that can be agreed upon universally, or that any two listeners can experience a work in the same way. In place of the romantic ideas about emotion that he found commonplace in musical culture, he suggests a new lexicon for emotion based on the technical decisions that composers and performers make. Some of the most remarkable prose of his Ridgefield Diary comes in his discussion of how we listen to music and come to know musical works. He refutes the notion that a musical work has a fixed value, or that it can be defined in some kind of absolute terms. By contrast, he describes how each one of us acquires a unique knowledge of the work over time based on our individual experiences with it. His passages on listening, reception, and musical knowledge were probably influenced by the streams of phenomenology that were current during his time. Reading through this substantial collection of essays from Ridgefield requires a fair commitment on the part of the reader. Thus I will provide the following synopsis, narrating his thoughts from his point of view in 1940s America. Then I will discuss some of the key insights about the composer that these writings yield.

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Musical Knowledge The intent of his opening essay, “Musical Knowledge,” is to reveal how we come to know a musical work, or what operations are in play when we listen and appraise. Appraising a musical work depends on numerous variables, such as the number of times we hear it, whether we refer to the score or just listen, and whether we focus on the work’s structure as opposed to listening to the work as a whole. Musical writers fail to take into account these infinite variables in listener perception and present musical works through a number of erroneous methods. One such method is by relating individual works to the classical models of form. Indeed, these forms are often shown to have a kind of absolute perfection, yet we fail to realize how practical factors might have determined their shape. In sonata form, for example, the recapitulation might have been merely a means by which the composer could save time and does not represent the composer’s effort to achieve some kind of “higher organic symmetry.” Musical writers also mislead audiences by providing readings of musical works in an effort to reveal details about the composer’s life. Martinů refutes this hermeneutical approach by stating that each work comes into being “at a ‘specific’ time and under the ‘specific’ conditions of the spiritual state of the composer,” or “under the specific conditions of his surroundings and the many elements that we will never come to know.” Thus Martinů’s basic premise holds that our knowledge of musical works is relative, and that we can never gain a definitive knowledge of the underpinnings that were responsible for a work’s design. For this reason, we should not view the work as a fixed entity, but gain a greater awareness of the way that we ourselves relate to the work. Helping us gain such an awareness is the function of time. Over time, we realize that our response to the same work constantly changes, or that we remember it after each hearing through a different array of elements. Time, in fact, has an organic effect: it straightens out “mistakes” and inconsistencies in older works such that they gain a certain perfection, something we are reluctant to concede in the case of certain celebrated works. Another aspect of his musical epistemology concerns the fact that a work’s emotional content—another element used by musical writers to train us to listen—cannot be defined. We are never left with a definitive emotion after hearing a work, but merely an impression that relies on the particular details that each one of us absorbs. Nevertheless, listeners still go along with the emotional analyses found in concert programs and other forms of popular writing on music rather than giving an honest appraisal of how they experienced the work. After making the entry “Ridgefield, June 1944,” Martinů continues to challenge our capacity for musical knowledge in a discussion that stresses the profusion of information within a single work and the variables in perception from listener to listener. Over the course of a performance, the listener is presented with many levels of

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operation that are linked not only to the way the composer conceived the work, but also to the entire “material of ideas” that the composer assimilated over the course of his lifetime. What is more, listeners with and without musical training absorb this material in different and entirely personal ways. It is folly to believe that a musically trained listener can transfer his perceptual experience to others through the logic of analysis, which will always be extraneous to the composition at hand. Thus since our perceptions are personal and analyses misleading, he asks what sort of change may come about in our dialogue with music such that our experience as listeners can become more immediate and enhanced. To answer this question, Martinů looks to ancient musical practices in his essay “The Mysterious Change in Mental Reaction.” What appeals to him in older musical genres is the fact that, before the emergence of public concerts, listeners could experience the “magical” element of ritual. This leads him to describe the “otherly” quality of medieval liturgical worship, where music was just one of several collective elements. It is the state of “self-forgetting” that has become lost to us since the musical performance is no longer the extraordinary event it once was. The radio, which has immersed us in music around the clock, has nullified its special nature, while regular concerts provide us merely with repertoire, or music for music’s sake. And we are not allowed simply to listen to this repertoire, we are called on to become “experts” and grasp the work’s technical details at the expense of experiencing the work’s spiritual effects. The question of organic relations comes to the center of his thought in his essay “Our Solutions Occur in Time and Space.” Here the mechanical nature of analysis takes the brunt of his criticism. Analysis, he claims, is often restricted to linear measurements and does not reflect a work’s full gamut of relations. This becomes evident when a musical structure is defined as “formless,” or “shapeless,” showing that we have merely encountered an entity that is unfit for “our linear system of contours.” He asserts that “form is functionally connected with the entire organism of tonal material and dependent on it,” and he shows how certain musical materials function correctly only in combination with genres and media that are consistent in conceptual design. Romantic musical material cannot be employed in a fugue, just as a melody for solo violin will suffer a loss when played by an ensemble of strings. The several other examples he notes demonstrate how “feeling for the entire organism can be found.” From these pages onwards, he provides examples of the ways critics, performers, and composers fail to sense organic relations and bring damage to musical works. In writings designed to educate the public, he has seen the addition of singable verse to musical excerpts that are completely foreign to the score—just to help the listener remember the melody. He notes ballet productions, where dancers focus on rhythm and meter to the detriment of the other musical elements, and where tempos are manipulated simply to befit the abilities of a single dancer or a choreographic idea. In performances of vocal music, he has heard works brought out of proportion by

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singers who overstress declamation, prosody, or the text’s content or atmosphere. And from his experience as a composition teacher, he describes how one student had forced a theme of dance-like character onto the schema of sonata form and how he watched the work-in-progress fall apart.

The Question of Rhythm Providing a unique look at his work as a composition teacher is his lesson “The Question of Rhythm,” where he examines how bar lines are deployed in the score in modern musical works (see fig. 11). Here he takes issue with the way rhythm, meter, and melody are often taught as separate elements at the expense of training a natural sense for musical phrasing. In particular, he notes how primitive forms of musical education encourage us to lock onto a work’s regular meter. Regular meter, however, is not inherent to our musical psyche, he contends. Even though the composer might choose to write a regular meter in the score, it often has little to do with what it suggests: that the music itself is based on periodic alternations of strong and weak beats. He illustrates this first with a few basic rhythms in the context of changing meters. Then he explores a more “psychologically complex” rhythm written in 83 meter. In this case, the meter serves as a notational scaffolding but has no relation to the musical phrasing. Here the composer might wish to represent the musical phrasing with changing meters, yet he chooses a 83 meter throughout to meet the pragmatic needs of performance. Thus the student must be taught that the meter has little to do with what he hears, even though the conductor underscores the metrical divisions with the entire weight of his gesture. Martinů’s admiration for Renaissance polyphony and its freedom from bar lines undoubtedly inspired his lesson on rhythm.1 On a number of occasions, he laments the fact that we lost our ability to understand ancient polyphonic genres once bar lines became standard in musical notation. Earlier, in his essay “The Mysterious Change in Mental Reaction,” he had turned to certain sociological factors that had led to the development and decline of polyphony, and he found it curious that the first embellishments to liturgy took shape polyphonically rather than in a more “understandable” homophonic style. Ancient polyphony, he contends, was actually understood by the listeners of its time. But with the loss of its original sociological context, it is now an artifact that we can no longer comprehend. Our incomprehension of ancient polyphony can be linked to the “mysterious change in mental reaction” that took place, which spawned a number of problems that have yet to be resolved and have left musical experience weaker as a result. Martinů readdresses this theme in a later passage he captions “Public Opinion of the Composer.” Here he remarks on the checkered nature of the composer’s social status. After listing a bewildering array of characterizations that the composer has

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acquired, he writes that, socially, he “is neither worker, nor bourgeois, but some sort of parasite that cannot be categorized.” Misunderstandings about the composer emerged once the genre of opera gained dominance and music in turn became linked with extramusical ideas. As extramusical ideas played a greater role in musical culture, the true nature of the composer as craftsman became harder to see. The public began forgetting that the composer creates music as a functional response to society, no less than craftsmen of earlier times. The public, Martinů feels, is still reluctant to abandon its romantic notions of composers, who are seen to exist on a higher plane, creating music in the service of great art. This can be seen in the disappointment listeners feel when they learn that a work was commissioned, even though most works throughout history came into being this way. In his next sequence of pages, he continues criticizing romantic notions of the composer. Here he refers directly to Van Loon’s Lives, a book mixing serious insight with satire during the author’s fictitious dinner encounters with renowned historical figures.2 In particular, Martinů notes Van Loon’s description of Descartes as a scientist concerned with how to solve specific problems rather than how to bring benefit to humanity. Martinů sees the composer in a similar way: not as an emissary with some larger agenda for society, but as a craftsman working to resolve the stylistic issues of his day. The idea that there must be some kind of mission at the center of a composer’s work has been disseminated by romanticism to such an extent that audiences still expect him to produce compositions that will somehow bring about salvation. And under the pressure to meet this demand, composers work out their compositions through predetermined ideas that only interfere with their natural creative state. After a number of pages of unrelated material, Martinů returns to the issue of predetermined ideas but now draws on Van Loon’s discussion of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel. What caught Martinů’s attention was the idea that Rabelais’s work did not have a message, which might surprise us, since, in the words of Van Loon, “our age is too conscious of its social obligation towards its fellow countryman.” Martinů contends that social obligation of this kind drives composers to place a message of redemption at the center of their works, leading to overblown musical statements. As sources of this phenomenon, he cites “Wagner,” “German metaphysics,” and “bad interpretations of Beethoven,” to which he adds “sentimentality,” “self-pity,” and the fact that many writers of the romantic era “needed to write about art but did not know what to write.” Of course composers realize that one of their works might communicate a profound message. Yet if one of their works succeeds in doing this, it happens through a natural creative force and not through a conscious procedure of some kind. Going deeper into the origins and effects of this problem, Martinů summarizes the recent history of music in Central Europe, where the battle between form and content resulted in the demand for programmatic expression. This battle produced a divide between “ordinary musicians” and “spiritual creators,” the latter needing to

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prove themselves through the personal message in their works. And this message was often a variation on the theme “victory over fate,” and through the sheer repetition of this romantic ideal, the form, media, and content of musical works swelled to increasingly greater proportions. Martinů claims that heroic musical statements are still in demand and continue to affect how composers create. For example, the contemporary composer cannot come to a pause over the course of a movement lest he deprive the audience of a victorious musical statement. And the composer is prohibited from working out his conclusions naturally: instead, he is forced to bring closure by means of an apotheosis, or through “an allegory with great commotion.” Finding the correct content and form hinges on a composer’s ability to assume a natural attitude and sense the inherent musical relations with immediacy. Addressing the problem of overblown conclusions, Martinů writes, “a musical idea is already exactly expressed in the form of the themes and motives, and if the composition is constructed organically, it must come to an end where it organically must come to an end, without the need of making some kind of fuss about it.” It was through craftsmanship rather than extramusical ideas that composers of pre-romantic times were able to achieve a “closed whole.” In Bach’s preludes, for example, which are often “a calm, non-dynamic largo,” we find conclusions that are intense but devoid of the kind of “dynamic intensification” and “dramatic summary” that listeners of more modern works expect. And whereas Bach and Mozart came to a natural pause when they needed to, the contemporary composer must be dramatic throughout the entire course of the composition.3

Music Education After his thoughts on romantic psychology and its effects on form and order, Martinů’s entries become quite diffuse. He revisits his argument from his Darien essay that the listener cannot experience the composer’s emotional state through a performance of a work. And he remarks on the phenomenon of “irreversibility,” the idea that a composition becomes fixed in time and space as a perfection and cannot be changed. The next theme he settles upon, however, is a critique of music education. Here he complains that we can no longer be satisfied with the natural pleasure of listening since we must focus on the work’s technical details. What is more, the means for understanding these details are dictated by a “circle of experts” whose “erudition is never explored.” He describes a kind of corrupt musical bureaucracy that creates increasingly greater demands on composers and listeners who are left with no recourse than to return to the same experts for advice on musical practice. Resulting from this are composers who work out their materials based on technical inventiveness and an audience that narrows due to the demands of specialization. An audience

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that participates in this system, he notes ironically, is comprised of observers rather than listeners, and that the music is “not alive, but a calculation.” After a number of unrelated entries, he returns to this subject, which becomes a larger objection to the inscrutable nature of the specialized literature. He notes the paradox that—at a time when music has become available to the widest classes—the demands placed on understanding it have become almost impossible to fulfill. This reflects the unreasonable premise of “universal education,” which holds that everyone must be versed in each and every subject in order to be educated or intellectually up to date. He laments the lack of an element he feels existed in earlier times, a “common denominator,” or a mutual point of understanding that would allow us to convey humanistic ideas without the need for so much explanation. Towards this portion of his diary Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West becomes the new catalyst for his ideas, particularly the chapter “The Meaning of Numbers.” In this chapter, Spengler discusses a culture in terms of its “number world,” or the particular system of signs through which that culture came into being. Before reflecting on this idea, Martinů makes the point that our classifications of the musical past are based too much on social paradigms rather than the one-time technical and pragmatic needs of performance, which would better explain why a new musical style emerged. But like Spengler, Martinů is fascinated by the way a “world feeling,” or a period’s particular sensibility, can produce works of “a definitive, perfected, and specific form” through which the work’s spirit and details grow into a “living, organic, and definitive whole.” Reflecting on a past musical style in this light helps us realize a number of things. We realize why, for example, we are unable to employ the characteristic musical material of a past style, because spiritually, our training is in complete variance and does not allow for it. We also realize why the musical material of the past sounds natural and spontaneous to us, whereas during its own time, it was often merely a cliché. And we also realize why, with seemingly no thought for the future, a composer of the past could produce a brilliant work for a single occasion— something incomprehensible to us in a world of repertoire that functions on the basis of the printing press, multiple performances, and an organized music market.

Redefining Emotion In his essay “On the Aspect of Emotion,” Martinů recalls an anecdote about an English horn player who tried depicting the waves in Debussy’s La Mer but was told by Toscanini simply to play the music and not worry about the affective idea that the movement title “Jeux des Vagues” suggests. This triggers the last major theme of his 1944 holidays: how a musical work projects emotion, and how emotion might be redefined outside of the romantic, psychological approach. His first task, however, is to breech the misunderstanding that emotion exists as an element idly awaiting interpretation. For this reason, he makes the distinction between “local” sentiment,

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or any affected response that can get “detached from the emotional will of the work,” and the work’s “total” sentiment, which is projected naturally when the work is “brought in tune with the intentions of the musical material.” Martinů’s distaste for the way musical writers overly interpret local sentiment has surfaced in his essays several times. But here, the conductor becomes his target, as he has seen this figure in the role of a showman attempting to depict musical emotion through an absurd repertoire of gestures. This is a bizarre game that has nothing to do with the sentiment that emerges naturally when the performer has respect for the work’s organic relations. Since the true nature of emotion does not lie in psychological interpretation, Martinů begins to explore alternative ways it can be discussed. Emotion has more to do with the “inner order” that is primary to a work’s conception and necessary to sense for a successful performance to occur. For this reason, he notes famous musicians such as Marcel Moyse and Pablo Casals who testified to lengthy searches through a work’s inner order to find correct solutions to problematic passages. Searches of this kind testify to the fact that an inner order is responsible for a work’s specific but ineffable emotional quality that can get easily violated by undiscerning performers. Another rarely considered element that Martinů links to the work’s inner order is “self-forgetting.” Paradoxically, it is when the composer loses an awareness of himself and tunes into the work’s inner order that the emotional quality of the work gets generated. Having the character of an epilogue is his reflection, “Why Do We Have So Few Good Composers?” Here he synthesizes many of the ideas that he had explored over his summer holidays—i.e., the composer’s unfavorable place in society, the demand for the work to convey a great message, how the creative process becomes disturbed by affected ideas, and how craftsmanship forms the real essence of compositional practice. Perhaps sensing an end to the European conflict and being able to reestablish his ties with Prague, he suddenly recalls the old biases of Czech music criticism, where a work with a national program was immediately hailed to have great spiritual depth. He also decries the way a composer’s life circumstances are still commonly invoked to help portray inspiration, or the way critics extract and project biographical details onto the composer’s creative state. And regardless of the fabrications that result, many composers embrace this deceit for the romantic image they gain, which helps bring them publicity and thus advances their careers.

Insights The Ridgefield Diary offers numerous insights into Martinů’s personality, and it allows us to redress a number of misunderstandings. First, we can challenge an inaccurate depiction of him in the first edition of the New Grove. Written by Brian Large, it holds that Martinů—who infrequently made revisions to his scores—was

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indifferent to the performance and reception of his works, and this accounts for the varying quality of his output: “Martinů composed very rapidly, rarely revised his work and suppressed nothing; so the quality of his output is uneven. And he was strangely indifferent to the performance and reception of his music, being interested only in producing new works.”4 From the evidence in his Ridgefield Diary, “a strange indifference” to his output can hardly be the case. On the contrary, Martinů shows with great conviction that a work originates as an organic response to the specific conditions in which the composer finds himself that fix the work in time and space. In other words, the work becomes an “irreversibility,” and for this reason, it is virtually impossible to make revisions to the score without inflicting serious damage on the work’s original material. Thus it is not surprising that on two rare occasions when he felt compelled to modify his scores, in the case of his Concerto for Piano Trio and String Orchestra (1933) and the first version of his opera The Greek Passion (1957), he chose to create entirely new compositions rather than reworking a basic torso.5 What is more, his revisions to both of these works were triggered by external forces: Schott rejected the Concerto for Piano Trio and String Orchestra, leading him to offer the publisher the completely different Concertino for Piano Trio and String Orchestra, while his original version of The Greek Passion was turned down by two different opera houses, leading him to produce the more tonally and dramaturgically conventional version that went into general circulation. Thus, if there is variance in the quality of his output—which is a matter of opinion—it certainly did not come from any indifference or neglect on his part.6 Apparently, earlier biographers such as Šafránek and Large were unable to grasp the full nature of his thoughts on musical creation and reception. But we now know that Martinů’s thoughts in these areas were formulated in relation to his extraordinary abilities for composition, which, I believe, helped shape his personality. The subject of his personality is the focus of the study by F. James Rybka, who—as the son of Frank Rybka, Martinů’s best friend in America—came into close contact with the composer in casual situations and gave great thought to his idiosyncrasies.7 James Rybka argues that Martinů was afflicted with the neurological condition now known as Asperger syndrome and that this was responsible for his “compulsion to compose.” But along with this affliction, Rybka explains, came a number of serious aberrations to his personality such as a failure at social reciprocity; “zoning out” when walking about obsessed with music; stolidity; poor coordination; extreme shyness; slow, terse answers; a lack of sympathy; and a collection of anxieties and phobias.8 Rybka’s posthumous diagnosis is a compelling argument that offers a new interpretation of the composer’s life. Yet we might also ask if it was a preexisting condition that drove Martinů to compose at such an intense rate, as Rybka contends, or if Martinů’s incessant composing brought on these aberrative traits, which I tend to see more clearly from my reading of his diaries. Indeed, in these writings, Martinů relates that he worked on his scores at all times of the day, even at some level during

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his subconscious hours of sleep. In other words, composition was an activity that engrossed him completely. Thus it seems likely that—through his relentless processing of music—a wall fell down around him that made him obtuse to his environment. From reading his letters and essays, where he expresses himself with such immediacy and candor, it is surprising to learn that he appeared so uncommunicative in real life. Concerning his characteristically reticent interactions, we have the following amusing reminiscence by the renowned musicologist Joseph Kerman, who had studied at Princeton during Martinů’s years there on staff: “My one recollection is a story that was told about his first visit to Princeton where he confounded everybody by saying nothing at all until the very end, when he said ‘Martini.’ Was this a reference to the celebrated eighteenth-century pedagogue? Then light dawned and they all went to Lahiere’s Restaurant and consumed some.”9 Other observations by Rybka about Martinů’s personality have a direct link to the composer’s diaries. For example, Rybka states that Martinů was unable to express himself externally. Rybka shows this through several examples, such as witnessing Martinů play through popular dance music at the piano with virtually no animation, or the fact that early in life, he ruled out a career as a solo violinist or conductor due to the public display that such roles require.10 Forming a parallel to Martinů’s phlegmatic exterior was his insistence that the work speaks alone rather than being a personal expression of the composer. This point of view helps explain his hypersensitivity to musical works being “read,” either his own or those of others. Other grounds for his silent exterior were due to the misunderstandings about compositional practice that he so often encountered. Since composition was so engrossing for him yet a subject about which he could relate with so few, his proclivity to avoid conversation came as a matter of course. The same holds true for the fact that he was unable to bear inauthentic remarks about musical experience, even if they were made out of social courtesy, or simply for a lack of better words.11 Thus in terms of his relationship to musical experience, Martinů was the incarnation of the anti-romantic soul.12 This, too, we can see in his disdain for the romantic conductor, who presents himself as a “showman” by conducting spectacularly for the audience. Martinů’s notable point here is that the rise of the showman-conductor coincided with the need to provide audiences with poetic literature about music to facilitate appreciation. Although he sees both phenomena as organic elements of romanticism, both overstepped their bounds and affected musical practice in ways that have yet to be recognized or resolved. Martinů’s writings from Ridgefield also show his interest in contemporary science. This interest was inspired by his friendship with his countryman Antonín Svoboda (1907–80), who had also emigrated to the United States during the war and had come together with the Martinůs on social occasions in New York City and on summer retreats (see figs. 6 and 7). A mathematician and physicist, Svoboda became invaluable to the US war effort for his work on antiaircraft weapons, and among his later achievements was the creation of the first fault-tolerant computer,

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which received its first successful test in Czechoslovakia in 1951.13 During the war, Svoboda helped satiate Martinů’s curiosity in debates about the dimensions of the universe, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and why distance and space become altered by movement—something Martinů claims he felt intensely as a boy in Polička while observing the town and landscape from his perch in the church belfry that served as his family’s home.14 Martinů and Svoboda also took steps towards creative collaboration in their plans for synthesized musical composition, and their discussions undoubtedly played a role in Martinů’s only work for an electronic instrument, the Fantasia for Theremin (1944), composed at the end of his stay at Ridgefield.15 In the Ridgefield Diary, we see Svoboda’s direct influence in the essay “Our Solutions Occur in Time and Space,” where Martinů recounts a dialogue he had had with him. Here—in a discussion over physics—Svoboda challenged the semantic values for inquiry to the point of destruction: I once asked Ing. Svoboda: “What would happen, if light did not land on me, if it were not caught by any object?” He responded: “You see, those are the questions! What would happen = time, if it did not land = space. Formulate your question differently.” I asked him: “Are those particles, or waves?” He answered: “and what is ‘are?’”16

Discussions of this kind were part of Martinů’s effort to better define musical phenomena. Documenting the real nature of the creative process was essential to this project, and by exhorting other composers to do the same, he hoped that change might come about in our dialogue with musical creativity. Yet to arrive at this stage, a necessary step is to overturn the subjective assumptions in musical instruction that confound definition and can have no place in the discourse. To begin speaking in more concrete terms, we must focus more rigorously on the principles of musical craft. As examples of craft, Martinů notes the decisions the composer makes while writing out the score: indicating dynamics, choosing instrumentation, determining the rhythmic and metric notation, establishing the tempo, and shaping a phrase according to what is idiomatic for an instrument. Placing these details precisely will further unify the work and enhance its synergy, yet the smallest inaccuracy might conflict with the composer’s holistic idea. Just as instructive are the experiences of performers and how they isolate and resolve technical issues according to a work’s inherent relations. Raising a greater awareness of these nuances would help us understand how a musical work functions. Yet since these nuances inherently rely on the senses, Martinů realizes that any attempt at defining them—even though this would be a great improvement—will remain inherently false. The several postulates he notes by physicists such as Einstein, Planck, and Bolzmann that take into account sensory perception show him trying to come to terms with this dilemma.

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Until now, our view of Martinů in relation to scientists has been restricted largely to his meeting with Albert Einstein in December 1943, when he personally dedicated to the renowned physicist his Five Madrigal Stanzas (1943).17 But his diaries reveal that he actually saw scientists as peers in creative endeavor. In a number of places, Martinů compares the composer to a scientist—as someone who creates based on the need for a consistency of materials rather than a mission or poetic intent. And the way he describes establishing a holistic conception of the work and finding solutions in the score forms a direct parallel to the way a scientist proposes a theory and establishes a proof. Thus for Martinů, composing was a kind of scientific activity, where the disciplined practice of musical craft allows for new discoveries to be made.18 Another notable theme from Ridgefield is his battle with the “music experts,” who—through their overly technical and inscrutable analyses—were bringing damage to musical experience. Here part of his discontent was that composers were catering to specialist desire, which was leading to an emphasis on technique rather than organic musical function. While this was his view in 1944, he would grow even more disenchanted once serialism—a new domain of the specialist composer—became widespread in both Europe and America after World War II. Unlike other composers in the United States such as Copland and Stravinsky, Martinů never embraced serialism. And—although we have yet to see the evidence—this may have been the reason for his termination at Princeton after three academic years (1948–52), at a time many younger composers were eager to participate in what was seen by many as the new standard practice.19 An historical irony to this is that Martinů’s tenure at Princeton was eclipsed during the 1950s by the arrival of Milton Babbitt, the pioneer of American total serialism. Babbitt, in fact, would gain the reputation of an esoteric who encouraged composers to free themselves from the incomprehension of critics and the general audience by taking sanctuary in the universities.20 This, however, was contrary to Martinů’s views. Although Martinů was greatly discouraged by the habits of ordinary listeners, bringing them into a dialogue with musical creativity was among his primary goals. Another irony regarding the rise of total serialism is that, during this time—the late 1940s—Martinů was producing some of his most conservative scores, both tonally and stylistically, including his Three Madrigals for Violin and Viola (1947), Seventh String Quartet (1947), and Third Piano Concerto (1948). Although these works are all well crafted, they probably left some in the younger generation feeling perplexed, giving the impression that the aging Czech master was falling desperately behind the times. In these pages we have dealt with Martinů’s thoughts during the war. Being cut off from Europe—and Prague’s cultural world in particular—had allowed him to reflect in new ways. During the summer of 1945, while vacationing on the Cape Cod Peninsula, his contact with Europe gradually resumed. But the idea of returning

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to visit Paris, Prague, and Polička was still a moot point: virtually all transatlantic routes were reserved for military personnel, and he still needed to deliver a string of commissions. Yet as the world reorganized, he began to think more seriously about his future role in Czech music and where he would work over the next part of his career. It is to this time in his life and thought that we will now turn.

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Chapter Six

1945 After four years of toil and numerous premieres, Martinů had built up an enviable position in the American musical world. Yet with the end of the war, his plan was to return to Prague, where he expected to be received with a new level of respect. Once in Prague, he knew things would be different personally. With the reopening of postal communications in August 1945, he learned of his mother’s death the previous year and that the previous month, his best friend Stanislav Novák—who had dealt with unspeakable tragedies during the war— had also died.1 In September 1945, he received a telegram from Václav Holzknecht (1904–88), then the director of the Prague Conservatory, asking if he would be interested in a teaching position in the master class for composition. Seeing his lifelong goal finally at hand, he replied right away that he would be prepared to accept such an offer and returned to New York City from Cape Cod to make plans. He anticipated that things would move quickly from this point forward, but he became discouraged as he received no further news.2 What he did not realize was that—as part of Nejedlý’s house-cleaning measures as the interim Minister of Education and Culture— Holzknecht had been relieved from his position as conservatory director.3 Also contributing to the silence from Prague was the reorganization of the music education system, resulting in the launch of the tertiary level Musical Academy of Performing Arts (HAMU) the next academic year. An anomaly in his career was the fact that, after returning to New York City, he took a five-month break from composing before beginning work on his Fifth Symphony in February 1946. By this time, he had received an offer to teach at Tanglewood for the coming summer, and—unwilling to jeopardize his musical standing in the United States—he accepted the offer. Now, to protract his residence in America, he needed to change his status from endangered intellectual to immigrant, which required him to exit and reenter the country. This he resolved by traveling to Quebec in March 1946.

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Notebook from Cape Cod Needing to fulfill several commissions and resuming correspondence with family, friends, and colleagues in Europe left him with less time for his diaries during the summer of 1945. For this reason, his Notebook from Cape Cod is filled mostly with reading notes. But after jotting down “June 26th, 1945,” he revisits a theme that he had sketched at Darien that relates the creative process in music to scientific discovery. After describing how a composition takes shape “through a subconscious accumulation of impressions, conditions, perceptions, and will in one direction, in one character . . . as a field of relations,” he remarks on how a simple realization, thought, or insight can allow us to grasp a complete entity that we had just vaguely sensed until that time. Thus the value of scientific inquiry lies not merely in gaining a better understanding, but in eliciting new discoveries, showing how crucial it is that we constantly challenge ourselves with new ideas. Then, questioning the knowledge we can have of composers and their musical works, he notes how seemingly banal factors such as environment, food, and hygiene make a defining impact on a composer’s creative state. Yet we rarely learn about such things in the composers’ extant letters and memoirs, which we employ nevertheless as an exclusive means to shape our opinions. He also remarks on how we gauge the world according to our personal priorities, leading us to such chaos that we are forced to reevaluate our logic. He then asks if the peoples of the different nations can really understand each other, bemoaning the fact that few could see the dangers of “German metaphysics and propaganda” before the outbreak of World War II. Upon the unconditional surrender of Japan, he notes, “August 14th–1945. The war has ended today.”4 Also from Cape Cod comes a notable document he called “Proposal,” which shows him attempting to position himself in Prague’s postwar milieu as a kind of benefactor of national music.5 Here he outlines the merits of establishing a domestic publishing house in Prague, either state-run, or private. Establishing a domestic publishing house, he argues, would relieve native composers from needing to rely on foreign publishers and save Czech agencies from having to send money abroad in order to perform Czech works at home. What is more, having the world turn to Prague to license Czech works would generate interest in emerging and lesser known Czech composers. He offers to reserve publication of all of his future compositions to the new publishing house, suggesting that his name would bring it attention, and that he could even serve as an intermediary between America and Prague. Šafránek relates that he had typed up Martinů’s proposal, yet he is unclear about whether it was ever sent on to the Czech government ministries.6 In any case—with the political tide turning against Martinů—nothing would ever come of the project.

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Essays from Fall 1945 From September 1945 comes Martinů’s essay “Something about that ‘French’ Influence,” where his frustration with the Czech critics became rekindled with an intensity that we have not seen since before the war (see fig. 12). I believe that this essay and the ones that follow—which I call collectively his Essays from Fall 1945— were inspired by the invitation he had received from the Prague Conservatory and that the prospect of resuming his discourse with the Czech critics had put him deep in thought. And these concerns were justified, giving him much reason to rant and rave. This we can see in Štěpán Lucký’s review of the first Prague Spring International Music Festival in 1946, where a number of Martinů’s works received their Czech premiere: “The many years that Martinů spent in exile has changed little in his compositional profile. His music remains ‘Czech biscuits in French mayonnaise,’ which was observed correctly some time ago.”7 Although plainly a smear, Lucký’s remark was grounded in the idea that French music is incompatible with Czech style. But in “Something about that ‘French’ Influence,” Martinů contends that French music is completely in tune with Czech style and that the real foreign influence is “German metaphysics,” which had elevated certain works through excessive pontification. Drawing a dichotomy between French and German aesthetic identities, Martinů asserts that one is more likely to find in the Czechs “strictness,” “sobriety,” and a sense for “simple explanation” rather than “emotional, mysterious, messianic romanticism.” Characteristics of each pole had been embraced by different parts of the Czech cultural world between the wars, and he sides with figures such as the journalist Ferdinand Peroutka, who had sought to expose national aggrandizement and myths about national identity.8 He also notes how the dangers of German metaphysics are all too clear, since this had led to the destruction of the First Czechoslovak Republic at the hands of Nazi Germany. One aspect of this essay concerns his indignation with the idea that his focus on Czech themes during the 1930s had resulted from his “isolation” in France. That certain Czech critics had held this opinion is corroborated by the synopsis of his work in Vladimír Helfert’s Czech Modern Music (1936).9 After discussing a number of Martinů’s Parisian works in which he had employed the most advanced techniques of the European avant-garde, Helfert writes: It was through these compositions that the expressive and tectonic realm of Czech music became enriched with new, unexploited possibilities, even though, in the meantime, he could only gradually break free from these eagerly absorbed influences. But his development did not end here. As of approximately five years ago, we see Martinů’s greater isolation. Through this repository of appropriated influences now shines an increasingly independent personality who employs the folklike characteristics of his native Bohemian-Moravian region regularly and with greater

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emphasis. This we see in his dramatic works Špalíček (1931) and particularly in The Plays of Mary (1934), but also in his radio-opera Voice of the Forest (1935).10

On the contrary, Martinů argues that his embrace of Parisian modernisms had actually helped him find his place in the Czech musical tradition. He had also clarified this point in his 1941 Autobiography, where he writes: “And the several years he spends in Paris, where he enriches himself with universal values, actually bring him closer to his own Czech expression on a universal level such that his compositions remain on local soil but project outwards into European culture as a Czech element.”11 Martinů’s Essays from Fall 1945 continue with several topics he had established earlier in his diaries. In “An Orchestra is Not a Machine,” he notes how—when writing a work for a particular orchestra—a composer gains a sense for that orchestra’s particular mannerisms and technical abilities and that these factors determine how a work takes shape. Realizing the importance of such practical considerations would bring us more accurate appraisals of musical works—as he explains in “For a Better Understanding of Music”—and should replace the antiquated, romantic psychology that is still employed in the critical writings. In “Advice to the Composer,” he encourages students to resist forcing themselves into a mood for composing and strive to fulfill the technical needs of the composition at hand. Once the composer has come in tune with his materials, the organism of the composition effectively “fills itself in on its own.” He then warns about how the models of musical form seem to prescribe correct ways of working with themes. Instead of following these models, the composer needs to realize the implications of the given material; then a theme will become elicited instinctively and develop as part of the organic whole. Also addressed to student composers is “The Influence of Dynamism on Form,” in which he compares and contrasts two ideas of dynamism. First he discusses dynamism as an organic element, which—if the composition calls for it—intensifies the musical material, and then as an element that can be added mechanically, which results merely in an accumulation of sound. Deploying dynamism in the second sense, he warns, can quickly tire the listener and reveals “an absence of substantial musical ideas.” In “Reliving the Creative Process,” he comments ironically on how—according to certain forms of music education—we are supposed to relive the composer’s emotional state in order to truly appreciate the work. Revealing the folly of this notion, he shows that this is impossible even for the composer while he listens to his own work. This is due to the many depersonalizing elements that the composer experiences, such as the rehearsals and the chaos of the premiere that make him lose touch with his original frame of mind. In short, he means to demonstrate that the creative state that enabled the composer to produce the work has been lost for good. Then, in his segment “Theory and Facts,”12 he gives a stream-of-consciousness account of

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the many distractions he has faced while listening to a work live. Even though he writes that this is “not written for fun,” meaning that he wrote his account in order to establish empirical data, his confessions about the extraneous thoughts that he has experienced while listening—of a kind we all experience while listening—certainly provide for a good laugh.

Notebook from New York From the opening of his Notebook from New York (December 1945) comes his valuable lesson to student composers, “The ‘Pastoral’ Symphony: What Are Invariable and Variable Conditions?” (see fig. 13).13 In reference to Beethoven’s work, Martinů applies his principles of musical creation to show how a work is born. He overturns the typical premise of sonata form, where the exposition, or the movement as a whole, is centered on two contrasting themes. In effect, by encouraging us to view Beethoven’s structures as ones that take shape through spontaneous invention, he provides an alternative to the idea of Beethoven as a “supreme architect of form.” Before addressing the details of Beethoven’s score, Martinů makes a number of remarks about musical creation. In a description of what happens before any writing begins, he attempts to rectify a common misconception about composition that he had seen among his students and in the pedagogical writings on composition in general: that the initial motive, or “theme,” gives rise to the rest of the work. Viewing a work in this way might reveal something about a work’s consistency, he concedes, but this is merely an illusion that veils how the composer really selects his materials. The illusion springs forth due to the fact that all of the work’s material, including the initial motive, is derived from the abstract conception that the composer establishes in advance. To help us grasp this phenomenon, Martinů proposes that we think of the work’s conception as a “compositional wavelength.” He suggests a conceptual exercise: that we take a work that we know well and envision its flow “without notes.” In other words, we should let the work play in our minds but gradually fade out its musical material and leave only the compositional wavelength, which he also describes as “an emotional quantum of time.” His idea with this exercise is to show that a compositional wavelength can elicit numerous possibilities in the score. In other words, the work that we know is just one of many possible solutions that the composer might have offered.14 In his search for terminology that is consistent with these ideas, he describes the different passages in Beethoven’s work as “invariable” and “variable” conditions. With these terms, he wants to show that certain passages—i.e., the invariables—are conceived in relation to the compositional wavelength and have a defining impact on the work’s structure. Whereas the other passages—i.e., the variables—are written in relation to both the compositional wavelength and the emerging invariables.

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Thus in Beethoven’s work, the first invariable, or what we might call “Theme 1,” occurs in measures 1–5, while the first variable occurs in measures 6–16. Breaking with sonata form, he denotes measures 16–28—commonly seen as a transition due to the introduction of the dominant leading tone—as a new invariable. In the context of sonata form, this passage might be deemed secondary, yet Martinů views it of primary importance since Beethoven repeats it several times, creating an anchor that needs to be lifted. Then—in a more definitive break with sonata form—we find a restatement and elaboration of the opening melody in measures 29–52. This, according to Martinů, is no longer “Theme 1,” but a variable that Beethoven works out through spontaneous invention and momentary mood. Here Martinů notes how Beethoven creates tension and anticipation through the gradual diminution of this material, which had been initially stated in four-measure groups. Beethoven resolves this tension through the introduction of the triplet passage at measure 53, which, in sonata form, we might mark as the transition to the exposition’s contrasting key area, or secondary theme. According to Martinů’s system, this triplet passage would represent a new invariable, but he does not reach this detail in his analysis. Regarding the triplet passage, though, he does note the simple brilliance of introducing triplets at this moment in the score since the rhythmic texture had been based thus far on duple subdivisions exclusively.15 Parting with the creative idealism of this essay, Martinů’s Notebook from New York continues with discontent coming largely from his experience as a concert hall composer. First, he takes issue with the public’s dismissal of commissioned works. Someone—either publicly or in private circles—had criticized Martinů for being a kind of factory for musical works, which he paraphrases ironically: “that I wrote the work the way Mr. Kaiser produces ships—i.e., one a day.” This was an allusion to the record-breaking, wartime production of the Kaiser Shipyards. He also comments on the widespread distrust among critics in the principles of craft. Here he argues that a composer works like an engineer or architect, whose craft can be seen in the safety of the structures he builds. Indeed, the composer, too, cares about the audience’s safety by producing a solid structural design. Instead of engulfing the audience with pathos, contrived emotion, or masses of sound for effect, the composer maintains a measure of balance and restraint in order to make sure that the work does not “collapse” on the audience. Afterwards, he remarks on the program notes for a concert of the New York Philharmonic that he had attended on 20 December 1945. Here he expresses dismay about the inappropriate commentaries being written for audiences that have little to do with the music they are hearing. This particular concert had featured performances of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony and Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto.16 Martinů takes issue with the decision of the program annotator—who relies on the writings of a certain John N. Burk—to describe Mahler’s final works as “a parting with life” and to cite the “doomsday” remarks that Mahler had inscribed in the draft of his Tenth Symphony. Regarding the commentary to Beethoven’s concerto,

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Martinů scorns the decision to relate the story of how Beethoven’s star student, Ferdinand Ries, had witnessed Beethoven rushing to complete the score in the early morning, and how, during the performance later that day, Ritter von Seyfried turned pages of “invisible writing” while Beethoven played the solo part. Indeed, Beethoven did not have time to write out the piano part, but by focusing on this story instead of providing a proper discussion of the music, a distracting mystique gets placed on the composer and his work. Then, in a general discussion about the inept culture of music criticism, Martinů makes a revealing remark that relates to his holistic view of musical creation. Refuting the notion that the development section of one of his movements is insufficiently developed, he responds parenthetically, “My works have no development section at all.” This foreshadows the theme that dominates the last part of his discussion: how we are ensnared by our preconceived ideas, and how by embracing the work as a gestalt, we might free ourselves to have a more immediate musical experience. He first notes the paradox that musical analysis teaches us to go from the whole to the parts: this is, in fact, what occurs during the composer’s creative and compositional processes, but since we cannot retrace the composer’s original creative state, we are prone to embellish certain details about the composer and his work and produce a distorted image of the composer’s intent. As a result, a vicious circle takes hold because the composer feels compelled to accept and even adopt this view, which affects his craft in his next compositions. Furthermore, the composer himself is not even fully aware of the gestalt while he works, showing all the more why it is futile to probe into his creative state. Thus to better deal with a work’s constitution, we are left with no other recourse than to go from the parts to the whole. To support this idea, he relies on Ruth Benedict’s anthropological study Patterns of Culture.17 In particular, he focuses on Benedict’s chapter “The Integration of Culture,” where, through gestalt psychology, she shows how single cultures function based on individual traits working collectively. Retracing his thoughts to her book, we can see that he took note of her example of gunpowder, which, when abstracted into its individual ingredients of sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter, we learn nothing about its real nature as a compound.18 From Benedict, it seems, he also appropriated his maxim of “not knowing all the elements,” which—in the case of musical analysis—reveals the futility of trying to reconstruct the forces that inspired a composition. He also finds agreement in Benedict’s assessment of the way teleological function is falsely assigned to style periods when artists actually create out of commonplace need. In other words, artists create without “conscious choice” and “purpose,” something we are reluctant to concede because this would seem insufficiently “spiritual” and “deep.”19

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Chapter Seven

A Return to Prague? As the 1945–46 concert season progressed, Martinů began to realize that there was something wrong in Prague’s musical life. Although he was still in the dark about his status at the Prague Conservatory, he became greatly alarmed by Talich’s situation. Talich had remained in the Czech lands during the Nazi occupation and considered it his patriotic duty to continue performances at the National Theater. But after Heydrich’s assassination in 1942,1 Talich—along with several other luminaries from Czech cultural life—was forced to give a public oath of allegiance to the Protectorate and Hitler’s regime. And in spite of his protests, Talich was also named a member of the Anti-Bolshevik League, which was used against him by the communists who came to key positions after the war. In the days after the liberation, Talich was relieved of his position at the National Theater, and when he openly asked Nejedlý about the grounds for the decision, he learned that “he had behaved badly during the war and that it would have been more appropriate to close down the National Theater than to hold performances under German occupation.”2 Then, on 21 May 1945—as part of the volatile wave of national retribution—Talich was handcuffed and hauled away by armed guards to the Pankrác Prison, where he awaited trial five weeks later. Although he was acquitted, his reputation was tarnished, making it difficult for him to fully resume his career.3 Talich’s situation and other bad news from home made Martinů reevaluate his situation in the United States. Now emerging in his letters to family and friends in Czechoslovakia were regular explanations about why he was prolonging his stay in America along with reassurances that he would indeed arrive once the time was right. Also notable about his correspondence from this time are his positive depictions of American life.4 Perhaps he was beginning to realize that his return to Prague was not meant to be. But his enthusiasm for life in the United States was probably sparked by his acquaintance with Rosalie Barstow (1907–75), a Jewish-American woman who had been an admirer of his music and introduced herself to him in New York City sometime in 1944–45. Much of our knowledge about Barstow comes from Martinů’s letters to Frank Rybka, who was kept regularly informed about the

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relationship and helped keep it secret from Charlotte.5 From our sketchy details, we know that Barstow was an independent, culturally conversant woman who was at ease in diverse social situations and even served as a guide for Martinů in certain segments of American society that he would never have known. It was an affair that lasted for some seven years before Charlotte—in the summer of 1952—surprised them by appearing at a Parisian railway station upon the illicit couple’s arrival from the United States; this forced Martinů to choose whether or not to preserve his marriage. These things are necessary to discuss because, in the biography by Large, Martinů is depicted as almost desperately unhappy in America, whereas these were more the feelings of Charlotte, who was certainly uncomfortable there and wanted to resettle in France as soon as possible after the war.6 Šafránek, on the other hand, tends to depict Martinů through his homesickness alone—even though Martinů had been living abroad by this time for well over twenty years.7 There is little doubt that Martinů wanted at least to pay a visit to Prague and Polička at this time, yet the forces of circumstance proved overwhelming. While Charlotte represented him at the inaugural Prague Spring International Music Festival in 1946 and vacationed in France, Martinů completed his Fifth Symphony and set off for Tanglewood, where he had enrolled Barstow as his student so she could live nearby. Then, on 17 July 1946, three weeks into the summer session, tragedy struck when, at night, he stepped off the unprotected terrace adjacent to his living quarters, resulting in an awkward three-meter fall: it was a near-fatal accident that left him partially deaf in one ear for the rest of his life (see fig. 9). Although Henderson suggests that the fall was related to Barstow’s presence at the festival, Rybka maintains that leaving his apartment that night was nothing out of the ordinary, for he was simply setting out on another one of the solitary, nocturnal walks that he had been taking for years.8 Remaining in the care of Barstow and the Rybka family until Charlotte returned from Europe, his agonizing convalescence was filled with depression and dizzy spells that lasted for several months. Suddenly the confusion he faced upon the war’s end from being pulled in three different directions—to Prague, Paris, and New York City—was tempered for the time being, putting any major decision-making on hold.

Writings from 1946–47 Martinů’s accident at Tanglewood during the summer of 1946 was responsible for the lacunae in his diaries from that year. But his philosophy of creation remained intact. This we see in his essay from November 1946, which was apparently commissioned by Yale University Press for a proposed collection of writings by contemporary composers.9 Written during the difficult months of his recovery, he answers the initial question, “What makes for a good work?” Martinů turns this question into a discussion of musical analysis, in which he employs his ideas from physics and gestalt

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psychology. He states that the musical elements that are often scrutinized individually in analysis are actually directed by the composer towards a collective “field.” Form, for example, is often shown as a work’s totality, yet once it becomes dissociated from the other musical elements, our conception of the work gets skewed. In practice, form takes shape through the force of the composer’s creative idea and his ability to coordinate and direct all of the musical elements organically. Form is a “sensation” that unfolds over the course of the creative process, and the audience— when it openly embraces the work—has the chance to experience this sensation in a performance. Regarding analysis, he writes that, “if you simply compile all the elements, you will not account for the whole—something will always be missing.”10 And citing Benedict, he remarks, “the whole is not merely the sum of all its parts.”11 In the way Benedict describes a culture as a myriad of elements—all of which we can never come to know—we, too, realize the futility of isolating musical elements that come to life only when they work together. In the second part of his essay he remarks on the joys of composing chamber music, noting how the individual voices do as they please; at that time he was working on his Sixth String Quartet. In conclusion, he voices contempt over the propensity of the day to “amplify” music and reach a climax at all costs. The following year, Martinů attempted to reinvigorate his theoretical pursuits. In his Notes from 1947,12 we find him writing more in English, readdressing topics he had discussed earlier in Czech. Here we find another account of the listener’s attention span, which is in essence a variation on “Theory and Facts” from his Essays from Fall 1945.13 Also, regarding compositional pedagogy, he makes the notable remark: “As a teacher, I do not judge my students’ compositions, which are never perfect. I judge their attitude towards the composition.”14 There are three passages from his Notes from 1947 that I have translated for this book. The first is his anecdote about his pedagogical work with his composition student Earl George, entitled “An Unwritten Law.”15 George had been one of his students at Tanglewood during the summer of 1946, and Martinů received regular visits from him at the nearby hospital in the weeks after his accident.16 In his anecdote, Martinů discusses George’s progress on the Introduction and Allegro for Orchestra and recalls how they had both found a “mistake” in the score that had set the work on the wrong track. What Martinů found intriguing is the fact that they had both realized the nature of the mistake independently, or after the lesson, and how, upon their next meeting, he was able to confirm that they had both located the same problematic place in the score. This was evidence for Martinů that the musical material will dictate what is appropriate for the work and that the composer must subordinate himself to the will of the functioning organism. The next passage that I include here, what I call “The Limits of Musical Knowledge,” consists of four statements about music criticism.17 Here Martinů brings forth some new ideas in his third and fourth statements. In his third, he builds on a concept he had discussed a number of times: that a work’s creative idea emerges

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as an “immediate conception” that the composer needs to sustain while producing the score but quickly forgets about due to new experiences. This phenomenon has profound implications on the kind of knowledge we can gain of musical works, and he encourages us to give this more attention. The basic dilemma is that the composer works with this immediate conception in order to produce the work, whereas the listener acquires his knowledge of the composition only over a period of time. What is notable are the different ways he describes this immediate conception in various places in his diaries. In “Advice to the Composer,” he depicts it pictorially in the sense of an “image” that the composer needs to keep in focus in order to sustain an awareness of all the elements.18 And in his essay “The ‘Pastoral’ Symphony: What Are Invariable and Variable Conditions?,” he refers to it as an “event” of which we can never retrace all that was involved.19 Here, in 1947, he remarks that, we cannot imagine a work “in a single glance,” or what the composer “sees” as a reference while producing the sketch and the score.20 In his fourth statement, he notes that the score—due to its primitive means— cannot be considered a complete record of the work. The limitations of musical notation had been on his mind before. Through the reminiscences of Antonín Svoboda, we know that their plans for “synthesized musical thought” involving a rhythmic processor, sound bank, and new system of abstract signs for notation went no further for what was a lack of technology at that time.21 And in his Ridgefield Diary, he had remarked on how folk songs have been passed down to us in a modified form due to our inability in the past to transcribe certain stylistic elements, for example rhythm.22 Here, in 1947, he remarks on how the score does not completely personify the work, since the work’s conception was present to the composer only during his creative state. Raising awareness of this point is part of his ongoing critique of musical writers who, rather than conceding that there are certain matters that we cannot know, contrive various details that have no basis in reality. The third passage from his Notes from 1947 that I translate in this book is his autobiographical reminiscence “My Latin Origins?,” in which Martinů reflects nostalgically about his early aesthetic development. This essay is notable for what it tells us about his personality, in particular, how he became so detached from the people around him. Speaking primarily to a Czech audience, he reiterates a number of issues he had addressed earlier in “Something about that ‘French’ Influence” concerning his embrace of French musical styles and the difficulties he faced in being accepted. What he focuses upon here, however, is why, exactly, he had reached out to the French cultural world in his quest for clarity while the Czech critics had insisted on the need to philosophize in music; this, once again, is something he attributes to the influence of “German metaphysics.” He notes that, “many of the people who played a leading role in life at that time were grounded in this German culture. And some of them are still alive today and continue to play an important role, which is really quite astonishing.” Was this a reference to Zdeněk Nejedlý, whose lifelong work in cultural politics had now brought him to the Czechoslovak government

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ministries? About this we cannot be certain. But in terms of his personality, we can note the intense feeling of isolation that he experienced during his youth, even a kind of trauma that he endured from having broken with the norms around him. Unable to find a solution to the enigma of his French inclinations, he ends his reminiscence playfully by speculating that his family might have been of Italian, French, or Spanish origin, even suggesting that long ago, his surname might have been “Martini,” “Martin,” or “Martinez.” His surname, of course, is a distinctly Czech form and—with its genitive ending “-ů”—denotes that he is descended “from the family of Martin.” In the fall of 1956, Martinů gave his Notes from 1947 to Miloš Šafránek in Paris, where the two men met for the last time.23 Šafránek relates that this was the last installment of diaries that Martinů felt might have some literary value, which suggests that the composer worked little on any further speculative essays for the rest of his life.24 One reason Martinů stopped writing his diaries in 1947 is that his musical thought had been largely a response to the values of Czech music criticism and that he had always intended to return to Czechoslovakia to help train the next generation of musicians according to his ideals. But after the communist seizure of power in February 1948, he probably had little reason to think this way any longer, as his plans to return to Prague were now permanently suspended. Thus we will end our narration of Martinů’s diaries here. In the next chapter, we will turn our attention to the new communist state and how Martinů became ensnared in its socialist ideology.

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Chapter Eight

Banished and Revived In late 1946, Martinů finally received the official offer to teach in Prague, now coming from the newly established Musical Academy of Performing Arts. Yet his precarious state of health prohibited him from making any commitment through the next year.1 In February 1948, the communist coup put to an end any plans to work at home. Thus, in June 1948, he accepted an offer to teach at Princeton University, which—along with his position at the Mannes Music School—offered him financial security for the time being. These changes in fortunes made any offers from Prague—past, present, or future—unworthy of consideration. Now, in the “new Czechoslovakia,” under the direction of a number of zealous and opportunistic young musicians, the Sovietization of music began in earnest.2 Directing the purge of noncommunists from musical institutions was Miroslav Barvík (1919–98), who—as counterpart to Tikhon Khrennikov in the Soviet Union—would come to the helm of musical life as Secretary General of the Union of Czechoslovak Composers (see fig. 18). Barvík also served as Editor in Chief of the Party music journal Hudební rozhledy, which— with all other music journals discontinued—would help to show the path for creating the new socialist repertoire. Becoming the Dean of Prague’s Musical Academy of Performing Arts was Antonín Sychra (1918–69), who released what is perhaps the most notorious guidebook for composing socialist music under the title Party Music Criticism.3 Finally, becoming the new director of cultural programming at Czechoslovak Radio was Jaroslav Jiránek (1922–2001), who became the most eminent musicologist of the communist period and remained active as a party ideologue until the fall of communism and even beyond.4 These figures were all part of a third generation of the Nejedlý School, which would now mesh Nejedlý’s ideas with Soviet socialist realism. Part of the new politicization of music meant calculating measures against perceived opponents according to the needs of a country that had become part of the Soviet Bloc. Martinů, by this point, was seemingly a permanent resident of the United States, considered the leader of the “bourgeois West,” thus his censure came as a matter of course. In his review of Martinů’s Fourth Symphony, Party music critic Bohumil Karásek5 helped

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articulate the official view of the composer, who was now to be seen as a formalist and emigrant traitor: He seems to feel at home in today’s America, the land of the darkest reaction. Apart from a few minor exceptions, we will not find in Martinů’s work from the war years and not even from the immediate period after the war—indeed this symphony emerged in 1945 and was finished during the summer months of that year—anything reflecting the real discord in American life. And except for a few peripheral compositions, we will not find anything in his work illuminating the great struggle of our people at that time. Thus his Fourth Symphony leaves you entirely cold and unengaged. Bohuslav Martinů is a composer who, without a doubt, knows how to do many things, but the compass of his great artistic technique has no value because his music has nothing to say. It is music that is completely unengaged in terms of what is happening in the world; it is absent of ideas and purpose and—consistent with all art of the Western capitalist countries—illuminates nothing more than the decline and marasmus of bourgeois society . . . His slow movement, too, is an abstract meditation that is unengaged and tells us little. It is empty music that is willing to pleasantly arouse the senses of the empty, impotent, bourgeois audience to which Martinů presents his music, which is incapable of feeling any great human emotion.6

Under the communist practice of cultural politics, public censure was the step to formal decree.7 The publication and performance of Martinů’s music was banned, and—although we have yet to see the evidence—we know that this was committed to writing and enforced. This comes to us through the account by the composer Jan Hanuš (1915–2004), who—while attempting to publish a piano reduction of Martinů’s Špalíček—was shown a directive by Barvík that forbade the proposed action.8 The formalist argument that Martinů’s music “does not say anything”— as articulated in Karásek’s review and Barvík’s directive—brought bewilderment to outsiders of the political process for whom Martinů’s music was especially meaningful. Yet the grounds for Martinů’s censure and banishment was a cover for the fact that his music failed to say the right things. This—according to the socialist realist point of view—meant celebrating the Soviet Union and the new socialist homeland, honoring the proletariat’s struggle against the bourgeoisie and fascism, and rejoicing in the proletariat’s final victory over both. One might think that Martinů’s Double Concerto, Field Mass, and Memorial to Lidice could all be read as part of the struggle against fascism. But any such thoughts could play no role for the communist cultural politicians, who simply needed to remove him from the Czech musical canon. In 1953, decentralization measures in Czech cultural life empowered musicians to begin parting with Party policy. This we can see in the official music journal Hudební rozhledy, where articles of a non-ideological nature began to supersede the socialist-realist tracts. In 1954, the journal even devoted an entire issue to commemorate fifty years since Dvořák’s death.9 Paying homage to Dvořák was especially

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meaningful since Nejedlý, who had become part of the official communist criticism, had expended such an effort to stain his repute. But now, as an elderly and demoted “Minister without Portfolio,” Nejedlý was virtually powerless to prevent change.10 Part of this change meant a reluctant tolerance of Martinů, who was even asked to submit his thoughts on Dvořák for the commemorative issue; this, in fact, marks the beginning of Martinů’s Czech revival.11 Next to Mozart and Debussy, Dvořák had been one of Martinů’s most important early influences, which we hear in his unnumbered String Quartet in E-flat Major (1917): here, in the slow second movement, Martinů convincingly emulates the sound of Dvořák’s “American” style. Focusing on the subject of human character, Martinů writes that Dvořák had been his model in the way he had expressed his Czechness so sincerely and that his music is imbued with a rare endearment, humanity, and healthiness. Dvořák’s humor, Martinů notes, is always healthy, and his music—whether happy or sad—is always positive. Dvořák lives in anecdotes, and the way people tell their stories shows how much they care about him. Here Martinů recalls Dvořák’s maxim, “The pencil is an important and original invention, but the eraser even more so.” Along with his tribute, Martinů enclosed a flower to be placed at Dvořák’s grave. This was a symbolic, heart-warming gesture that became the talk of the musical community, which—by then quite weary of the cultural politicians—was clearly swayed in Martinů’s favor. A further moment in Martinů’s revival came in the form of Barvík’s internal report from the Ministry of Culture in May 1955, which officially lifted the ban on Martinů’s works (see appendix 2).12 Barvík’s action had been prompted by a letter Martinů sent through legal counsel to the nationalized publishing house for cultural publications. Here Martinů requested—on account of the ban—a transfer of all rights to his music out of Czechoslovakia. This, Barvík informs, had been averted through negotiations, and since it concerns a native composer of such international repute whose works earn considerable royalties, Martinů’s music has been restored to circulation. But regarding those works that could be published and performed, Barvík makes the striking stipulation that “the Ministry of Culture recommends only those works that are not typical of his creative output between the years 192113 and 1936, when he submitted for the most part to French bourgeois modernism.” Since Martinů’s music was already being performed since late 1953, Barvík’s report was in part a meaningless gesture. But it was important symbolically. First, it shows that Barvík and his Party colleagues were now on the defensive and that— unlike his authoritarian position during the first five years after the coup—Barvík could only moderate control over political undesirables. Second, the criteria through which Barvík exercised his control over Martinů shows that, in the end, Martinů’s decision to embrace French musical styles during his earlier career would have a defining impact on his reception in Czechoslovakia through to his last years. Ironically, just a few months later, in July 1955, Martinů composed his cantata Opening of the Springs. With its folk color and homage to his native region,

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this piece would become the linchpin in his revival and acceptance at home. The piece reenacts a ritual of the Bohemian Highlands, where—in a gesture symbolizing rejuvenation and renewal—the springs are cleared after the post-winter thaw. Conceived in a simple idiom, it proved ideal for class recitals, and soon after its premiere in Czechoslovakia in December 1955 and its publication the next year, it became a staple repertoire item in schools throughout the country, thus embedding the perpetual exile into the consciousness of a new generation. One cannot help but wonder if Martinů conceived this piece—convincingly native on the surface and ostensibly absent of French influence—in response to Barvík’s report. While this is highly improbable, the rapid dissemination of this piece suggests that, as a political matter, performances of it were encouraged. Indeed, for the Party politicians, presenting Martinů through this piece created an image that they could more readily accept. No longer was he to be seen as that modernist musician who had engaged in heated aesthetic debates during the interwar “Bourgeois Republic,” or that traitorous émigré who was unwilling to return to his country to help build the new socialist homeland. Now Martinů was the composer of this innocuous, nostalgic hymn that symbolized his heartfelt desire to return home all along. So thoroughly did the piece embody this new image that its final lines were inscribed on Martinů’s tombstone in Polička, “All the men and women of old, singing as they freed the waters, from them I spring and to them I return, from one to another, we hand down the heavy key opening the doors of home.”14 Another milestone in Martinů’s revival was František Hrabal’s concise but penetrating essay in Hudební rozhledy: “Bohuslav Martinů: A Sketch of His Development and Significance in Modern Czech Music” (1957). Here, rather than echoing canonical biases against Martinů, Hrabal synthesizes an in-depth knowledge of Martinů’s essays and stylistic development in an effort to situate him in Czech musical history.15 It was one of the first signs of a new generation of Martinů scholars that would also include Jaroslav Mihule and Iša Popelka. But by embracing a composer who was never unequivocally accepted by the communists, these figures would never advance to important positions, for by specializing in Martinů, they were also demonstrating a kind of quiet dissent to the totalitarian regime. At a time many thought that Martinů’s assault in the press had finally come to an end, Ivan Vojtěch (b. 1928) released his article “Martinů and Contemporary Czech Music” (1958).16 This article touched on particular sensitivities due to Vojtěch’s affiliation with the Communist Party, notwithstanding his membership during the Stalinist years on the Central Committee of the Union of Czechoslovak Composers. Since Vojtěch’s article was a bitter ending to Martinů’s lifelong struggle with the Czech cultural press, we should examine it in some detail. Opening with the question of synthesis, Vojtěch states that—in terms of the Czech composers of the post-Janáčkian generation who strove to merge national and international styles—Martinů was clearly in the lead. He makes a distinction between Janáček and Martinů regarding how each draws on folk music: whereas

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Janáček sought to capture its psychological import while generating and enriching musical content, Martinů employs its characteristic features in the context of clear forms that he enlivens through invention. Turning his attention to Martinů’s oratorio Gilgamesh, which was one of five large-scale works by Martinů that were performed that year at the Prague Spring International Music Festival, Vojtěch is dismissive. Remarking on a discord in the work as a whole, he argues that the first two movements—in a way that is typical of Martinů—rely on descriptive orchestral accompaniment in a vocal-dramatic style, whereas the climactic third movement integrates the voices and orchestra symphonically. Overall, he claims, Martinů’s setting of the Mesopotamian epic lacks the inner expressive means that are necessary to convey the fate of individuals over the course of so many years. Vojtěch’s rationale is clearly grounded in a preference for content over form, showing some level of agreement with both Nejedlý and the socialist-realist aesthetic. But his review cannot be seen simply as Party music criticism. In fact, it is entirely free from the rhetorical tropes of socialist realism, and he even contradicts the state’s official ideology in his use of the term “progressive” in the musically modernist sense rather than as a means of signifying political engagement. What shocked Martinů’s advocates, however, was the conclusion, where Vojtěch pays homage to the younger generation of Czech composers whose works had also been performed at the festival. These composers, in fact, had shown a richness of synthesis that is on a par with Martinů. Yet Martinů, Vojtěch adds discreditingly, suffers from “a limited scope of ideas” and “stands on the sidelines of Czech musical development.” For many, these remarks showed Vojtěch’s willingness to throw Martinů overboard in favor of the composers of his generation, who were his colleagues in the Czech cultural world at that time. In other words, it was nepotism in the worst sense of the word. Due to the checkered role the press had played in Martinů’s Czech reception, and the fact that being censured and banned by the communists ultimately determined whether or not he would ever set foot in his native land again, Vojtěch would deal with resentment against him in the Czech musical community that lasts to the present day.17

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Chapter Nine

Final Years While Martinů’s esteem in Czechoslovakia was on the upswing, his reputation internationally fell into decline. This was triggered in part by his decision to uproot himself several times over the course of his final years. In 1952—with no reversal in the communist regime’s stance against him—he took American citizenship, and the following year he left New York City for Europe, where he and Charlotte would eventually reside in Nice for two concert seasons. Despite the picturesque setting of the town on the French Riviera, Martinů was without intellectual contacts or friends, a situation that often left him lonely and in despair. He turned his attention to opera, first working on a number of trifles before discovering the value of adapting Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel Christ Recrucified. This resulted in The Greek Passion, the work that occupied him throughout his final years. His return to the United States in 1955 for what would be his last concert season there was marked by discord with Frank Rybka, with whom he and Charlotte resided, and a brief and problematic teaching engagement at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.1 His one-year fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, which he received so he could fully engage on The Greek Passion, formed the pretext for him to leave the United States permanently in 1956. During his final stylistic period he developed a neo-impressionistic orchestral idiom. His breakthrough work, featuring an expanded orchestral palette and more rhapsodic forms, was Symphony no. 6 (“Fantaisies symphoniques,” 1953); other works for orchestra in a related style include Les Fresques de Piero della Francesca (1955); Fourth Piano Concerto (“Incantation,” 1956); Parables (1958); and Estampes (1958). Apart from the sonic transformation, these works also demonstrate a modified embrace of program music. In his Symphony no. 6, for example, he integrates material from his opera Julietta, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, and Dvořák’s Requiem Mass, offering rich opportunities for extramusical interpretation.2 This he attempted to deny, however, which we see in his program notes to the work for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where he focused exclusively on his principles of autonomous musical creation.3

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Seeing The Greek Passion through to its premiere was the major setback of his late years. Despite the support of conductor Rafael Kubelík to have it premiered at London’s Covent Garden, a number of arbiters recommended against it.4 Thus he offered the work to the Zurich Opera House, which raised objections as well. So much did he believe in the story’s universal message—where the morals of Greek villagers are tested by the appearance of poor refugees during preparations for the annual passion play—that he reworked some seventy percent of his setting, resulting in the more conventional version he finished during his final year.5 Also from his final year comes one of his chamber-music gems, his Chamber Music no. 1, in which he employs an atmospheric harp, clarinet, and churning violin double stops in a style similar to those in Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat. This he composed at his final residence, the Paul Sacher Estate in Switzerland. Paul Sacher, the conductor and pharmaceutical tycoon, had been one of Martinů’s most important supporters, having commissioned and/or premiered several important works by the composer, including the Double Concerto, Toccata e due canzoni, and Gilgamesh.6 In July 1959, after succumbing to stomach cancer, Martinů was laid to rest on the very grounds of the Sacher Estate. In 1979, Martinů’s remains were transferred with great ceremony from the Sacher Estate to Czechoslovakia for reburial in his hometown of Polička.7 Before her death in 1978, Charlotte bequeathed the rights to his music to the Czech Music Fund, from which the Martinů Foundation was extracted after the 1989 Velvet Revolution. The Martinů Institute—the foundation’s academic branch—has promoted the composer ever since. Led by musicologist Aleš Březina, the Institute has assembled the most comprehensive collection of autographs, scores, recordings, and scholarly literature on the composer. The restoration of the first version of The Greek Passion is among its most important achievements.

A Composer’s Legacy Another important contribution by Březina and the Martinů Institute is the documentary film Martinů and America, in which several figures who had direct contact with Martinů provide their recollections.8 Particularly valuable are those by the American composer David Diamond, whose friendship with Martinů dated back to the 1930s. One of Diamond’s statements, which concerns Martinů’s thoughts on Béla Bartók shortly after the Hungarian composer had died, testifies to Martinů’s significance in America during the 1940s: One thing I do remember about Bohuslav is that he never complained about a lack of performances. Whereas Bartók complained a great deal and he was right— there were no performances until after his death, I mean except for now and then.

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But Bohuslav once said to me, “You know, I feel very, very unhappy that I am having such a big success in America”—and Bartók had died recently—“Mrs. Bartók was very unhappy that his music is completely ignored and my music is played all the time.”9

Diamond’s recollection suggests a complete reversal in our understanding of which composers are important, when, and why. Today, we would never question Bartók’s significance in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet with Martinů, whose works were performed more often than Bartók’s during the 1940s, we see his gradual disappearance from the history books. Thus, we can ask, why did Martinů fail to gain some form of enduring, historiographic treatment? An answer to this, simply, is that many of Martinů’s key principles about music never entered the academic discourse.10 Several external factors account for this, including the fact that the sources on him were scattered throughout several countries and were written in a number of different languages. Furthermore, Czechoslovak communism impeded Czech scholars from presenting a more accurate picture of him, especially in relation to the national musical debate. Thus by the time the Martinů Institute began its work in the 1990s, many of the key decisions about him had already been made. But all along his diaries held the answers. Throughout these writings, we see Martinů’s need to show that the creative process occurs on a subconscious level. This, of course, was nothing unique to Martinů, as the idea of “automatism,” or the “free expression of the subconscious mind,”11 was a basic principle of the surrealists, and it was shared in some form by numerous twentieth-century artists in their effort to make a definitive break with the romantic past.12 In Martinů’s case, we see this in his three aphoristic passages from his Ridgefield Diary entitled “Self-Forgetting,” where he writes that “artistic creation is not consciousness, but becomes consciousness,” followed by his statement that it is only once the composer “forgets himself,” or releases himself from conscious thought, that emotional content is generated and authentic creation begins.13 Also linking him to the surrealists was his interest in how the work is created, which he considered just as important as the finished work itself. This we see in his thoughts about his Double Concerto in his 1941 Autobiography, where— instead of remarking on the work’s exceptional rhythmic-textural sound world—he notes that it was “felt intensely and thrown down on paper with spontaneity.”14 Martinů’s need to engage the subconscious had its roots in his experience as a student composer in Prague, when he sensed that the critical demand to philosophize in music was impeding musicians from making the conceptual shifts necessary to contribute to new music. But while his skill of tapping into the subconscious became a powerful force behind his creative abilities, it had a detrimental effect on his reception. For example, if Martinů suggests that we cannot genuinely “know” a work—and that the score is an imperfect means to transmit the creative idea—was he discouraging us, at some level, from examining his own scores? And regarding his

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criticism of analysis: since he advises us against isolating individual musical elements lest we lose our grasp of the work’s relations and gestalt, was he suggesting, in fact, that we not analyze his works at all? Martinů found that speaking about a musical work and its possible inspirational sources misrepresents the subliminal state that was needed to create it. What is more, he felt that the proper tools needed to appraise the completed work—which would take into account the technical parameters of craft and the variables in listener perception—have yet to come into practice. His search for solutions to these issues is at the core of his diaries, and we will soon read what he has to say. But for now, we will summarize the forces that led him to this line of thought. What is more, we will see how his preoccupation with these issues played a role in how he came to be viewed as a composer, or how—as a formidable musician of great intellect—he did not come to be viewed in any substantial way at all.

Summary Bohuslav Martinů came of age at the end of the Czech National Revival, when several decades of work in politics, art, and education suddenly came to fruition with Czechoslovakia’s independence in 1918. Musical production was essential to this process, in which composers such as Smetana, Dvořák, and Fibich made vital contributions but also instigated vigorous critical debate. According to Martinů, the impact of German philosophical thought on Czech musicians had led to excessive pontification about the national musical tradition, thus distorting its development and diverting it away from its true origins in spontaneity and craft. Raising an awareness of this in the post-1918 era was especially important since music no longer needed to play such an explicit role in nurturing national and social conscience. Yet for the Nejedlý School, this kind of work was just as important as ever before. For Nejedlý, music was to continue serving as a means of political persuasion, and in order for it to have the greatest influence over the masses, composers were to continue employing the proven idioms of the romantic past. As we have stated at the opening, we cannot say that Nejedlý was the exclusive reason for Martinů’s discontent with Czech music criticism. But Nejedlý’s exacting influence and his need to politicize the decisions that a composer makes certainly played a role in how Martinů established his ideals.15 According to Martinů, drawing on the romantic past was impeding the development of younger musicians so much that he sought “liberation” in France. In Paris, he continued his dialogue with the Czech critical world by presenting to Czech audiences the gamut of French anti-romantic modernisms, from Stravinsky, jazz, and Dadaism during the 1920s to neoclassicism and surrealism during the 1930s. In response to Prague’s neoromantic polemics, Martinů launched a critical project of his own, where his music, he contended, would respond to collective experience in a way that each listener would be free to interpret the work on his own.16 What is

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more, his embrace of Parisian modernisms was part of his own idea of a Czech musical tradition that is flexible and can adapt to stylistic change. Yet when he launched his critical project during the 1920s, his appropriation of the new modernist styles in his music proved to be somewhat in haste, and he failed to provide a sufficient answer for the imitation in his scores. For example, in his letter to Stanislav Novák about his ballet Who Is the Most Powerful in the World?,17 he is outraged by the idea that he had copied Stravinsky, even though stylistic references to Stravinsky (and Richard Strauss) are clearly a part of his score. Indeed, stylistic quotation and pastiche are important elements of his music from the 1920s, yet he never used these terms in his own self-defense. Nevertheless, these techniques remained vital to his development, and they would continue to shape his sonic repertoire through to the 1950s in increasingly refined forms.18 At the same time, his resistance to ideological forces bearing down on creative artists led him to focus on the role of the subconscious in musical creation, something that intensified while he worked on his operatic setting of Georges Neveux’s surrealist play Juliette ou la clé des songes.19 Indeed, the story of his opera—where the traveling book dealer Michel becomes lost in his dreams—was an ideal place for him to explore the role of his own subconscious while producing the score. Once exiled in America, he began to note down his findings in his diaries, where he describes how musical creation occurs through a careful negotiation between subconscious and conscious states. Emerging simultaneously was his unique synthetic sound of the early 1940s, or his “American lyricism,” which, as it seems, was toned down somewhat in its modernist content due to the conservative forces then in play in the American musical world.20 Yet his philosophy of creation remained primarily one of practice rather than theory, and academicians were unable to learn more about his ideas. The complicated circumstances of his immediate postwar years made him shift his attention away from his theoretical writings to the pragmatic decisions of how and where he would continue his career in a greatly changed world. Šafránek’s permanent departure for Czechoslovakia in 1946 left him without a devoted exponent in the United States, and his accident that same year further hindered him from presenting his thoughts. Also affecting his postwar prestige was the fact that American compositional thought was undergoing a radical shift in aesthetic priorities, with serial technique ascending to new levels.21 Serialism, however, was anathema to Martinů, and he did not take part in this development. What is more, the tonally conservative nature of many of his works from the late 1940s probably cast him further aside. Finally, due to a lack of reliable sources, scholars would have a hard time assessing his full creative output, which was made all the more difficult due to his late peripatetic years.22 Only with the work of Hrabal (1957) do we see for the first time an accurate reflection of his full aesthetic and stylistic trajectory. Yet as this work was published in Czech from behind the Iron Curtain, it would fail to have an impact on the vacuum that was emerging around him at the end of his career.23

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I believe that Martinů’s diaries hold the key to his aesthetic nature and that we should continue searching here for insights. An appreciation of how he selects his musical materials will be gained by his thoughts on the creative process, and we can already begin applying ideas such as “invariable” and “variable” conditions to his own scores.24 What is more, Martinů’s creative aesthetic brings him into a direct dialogue with other composer-theorists such as Schoenberg and Reti, who, in their own way, also grappled with the “chicken and the egg dilemma” regarding the origins of the work and the issues of musical unity.25 In terms of performing his music, his diaries are of great significance as well. Here we learn, for example, how much his works were conceived for specific performers, suggesting that a greater understanding of those performers will bring to light certain dimensions of his works. Also, his principle of dynamism—where the dramatic content of a work should surface on its own based on the work’s inherent relations—might be seen as central while rehearsing his scores. Finally, his views on renaissance polyphony might help us appreciate his ametrical style of the 1940s, or what I call his “American lyricism,” which, as it seems, calls for the most singing legato, without any traces of syncopation. His musings on ancient liturgical polyphony also relate to his larger project for musical culture. His idea that this lost art form functioned not as a centerpiece of attention but as part of a ritual is clearly linked to the way he wants us to have a more immediate musical experience.26 This was his response to the “experts,” as he liked to call them sarcastically, who train us to extract technical and emotional detail while listening but only lead us astray. But it is curious, once again, that he did not say exactly who these experts were—similar to the way he blamed the Czech music critics in the most general terms for virtually all that was wrong in Czech national music. Nevertheless, he does make a number of observations about everyday musical life in America where he found composers and their works misrepresented for effect. Thus his critique, it seems, was directed not only against the misinformed ideas of ordinary listeners, but also against music critics and concert program annotators who wrote popular essays about music—and possibly against radio commentators as well. Here we might take the aloof path and claim that Martinů was not in a dialogue with the serious academic community, which would ordinarily dismiss such things as trivial. Yet providing better guidance for the general audience was central to his concerns. What he suggests, in fact, is a new kind of music education, where musicians relate what actually happens during artistic creation, composition, rehearsal, and performance, and where listeners testify to the real nature of their musical experience. Only this way, he contends, will we better appreciate this field of human endeavor—where we are able to produce a synergy of sonic relations in writing that communicates an emotional quality of its own. In this study, I have attempted to provide a springboard to Martinů’s intellectual world. I realize that Martinů would disagree with some of the elements that I have merged with his story. Indeed, rather than the political overtones that I have

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sometimes stressed, he might have narrated his creative development through certain commonplace events he experienced, such as an encounter he had had at one of the bookstores he loved to frequent, or even a change in weather or diet. For this reason, we should allow him to speak for himself. Thus, I will turn the discussion over to Martinů, who, although he appeared silent on the outside, was seldom without something profound to say about music and the human experience.

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Part Two

The Composer Speaks

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Chapter Ten

Editorial Remarks In the following pages I will clarify the steps that I took to produce my translations of Martinů’s diaries. I will also comment on Šafránek’s Czech-language transcription of the diaries in DHS, because their faulty presentation, I believe, was a genuine factor in why Martinů’s ideas have remained obscured for so long. As much as DHS proved to be a stumbling block in my initial efforts, I should acknowledge the tremendous benefit of having had Šafránek’s work available to me since it transmits essential details about the original manuscripts; it also served as my primary reference for learning how to read Martinů’s handwriting. My work on Martinů’s diaries began when I was a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, during the late 1990s. At that time I was awarded a small stipend from the Martinů Institute in Prague, which helped me relocate to the Czech Republic and begin an in-depth study of the composer. After realizing the aesthetic value of the diaries, I decided that they should form a central part of my doctoral dissertation.1 I made copies of the original diaries at the Bohuslav Martinů Memorial (now the Bohuslav Martinů Centre), located in the composer’s hometown of Polička, but began translating from DHS to become more familiar with the content. After producing a number of drafts based on the DHS transcription, I was unable to gain sufficient coherence, which gave me no other recourse than to begin comparing DHS with the originals. At that time I began regular consultations with Iša Popelka, who had expertise in Martinů’s manuscripts from his work as a curator at the Bohuslav Martinů Memorial. My sessions with Iša soon took a distinctly intellectual tone, as we discussed the import of Martinů’s writings on numerous levels, proposing interpretations and offering counterinterpretations to certain problematic passages. These discussions were essential in helping me come to terms with Martinů’s ideas. What Iša and I found was that—despite his best intentions with DHS— Šafránek had left matters quite confused. First there were the transcription errors, which began appearing in droves, some of which seriously contradicted Martinů’s thought. In his essay “On the Creative Process,” for example, while describing how a composer attempts to harness a work’s abstract impulse, Martinů writes, “It is not

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searching, for you can only search for something you want to find . . . It is a kind of probing, or stabilizing. In essence, it is looking for what you want to look for.” In DHS, in what fails to realize the basic paradox of this thought, the last words are changed to “looking for what you want to find.”2 In the same essay, while remarking on the necessity of sustaining the work’s abstract conception while producing the score, Martinů remarks, “Here a sudden emotion can disturb the work if it is foreign to the subconscious plan” (Martinů’s emphases). In DHS, this reads as “conscious plan”—a devastating error that contradicts with Martinů’s central premise of subconscious concentration (see fig. 10).3 A humorous error comes in the Ridgefield Diary, where—while describing how we perceive older musical works—Martinů makes an analogy with the composite picture we gain of a town comprised of architectural elements from different periods in history. Here Martinů writes, “When I was in Italy, a friend of mine drove me to Bergamo near Milan.” In DHS, this reads, “When I was in Italy, my friend I. Bergam drove me to Milan . . .” Then, in the index to DHS, this same nonexistent person is listed, but as “J. Bergam.”4 Another curiosity with DHS concerns Martinů’s notes from his English-language reading. Apart from his desire to improve his academic English, he wrote out these notes in a search for ideas upon which to elaborate. In some cases, large portions of these reading notes are translated into Czech but have no direct link to his essays. In other cases, his reading notes are omitted, even though they provide the context to his essays or take the form of quotations; a notable omission of this kind concerns his quotations from Van Loon’s Lives.5 The confusion from DHS mounts as some of his reading notes are presented as his own formulations. In one case, I was able to corroborate that Martinů speaks a precept by the noted American genetics researcher and antinuclear activist Hermann Joseph Muller.6 Through a comparison with the originals, I also realized that many passages were omitted or shuffled around, which broke up the contiguity of Martinů’s original text and obscured how he had developed his ideas. Šafránek explains his editorial practice of “membra disiecta”—i.e., his decision to sort out fragmentary passages into thematic groups. Resulting from this is a potpourri of statements stripped from the original context and brought together in various places in DHS.7 These discoveries made it clear that no worthwhile translation of Martinů’s diaries could be made based on DHS. Thus based on my copies of the original manuscripts, I embarked on creating a primary source translation, where I reproduced entire contents of entire pages in translated form, graphically simulating them as closely as possible in order to discern what was there and in what form. This proved essential because, often, Martinů did not indent his paragraphs. In some places, he would write masses of formulations in a single breath, while in others, he would write individual sentences separated by a blank line. Thus my graphic simulation helped me determine what content belonged to which essay. In an attempt to capture his characteristically florid style, I tried to match his original syntax and punctuation as closely as possible. Some of his sentences,

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completely coherent, could go on for well over eighty words. I chose the most literal translation of phrases and matched all of his repetitions, despite the amount of redundancy that resulted. In order to keep track of the original’s polyglot texture, I used square brackets to indicate all of the words in English and French that he had infused into his Czech-language prose. My only liberties at this stage were to add missing question marks where he was clearly posing a question, or other items of punctuation where the intent was strongly apparent. At times, I needed to reconstruct fragmentary passages, which I marked with square brackets; these reconstructions were often the result of my discussions with Iša. On a number of occasions, my reconstructions disagreed with the changes or additions that were made to Martinů’s text in DHS. Although I indicated many of the anomalies that I had discovered in DHS in my footnotes, I began to lose track of them once I had gained more confidence in working with Martinů’s originals alone. Along with a draft of my study on Martinů’s Parisian Criticism and American Diaries, I submitted my primary source translation—which I still considered raw material and not intended for publication—as part of my doctoral dissertation.8

The Present Translation Several years later, after publishing a number of articles on Martinů’s aesthetics, I realized the need to create a more reader-friendly translation that could gain wider circulation. The results of this work are here in this book. Based on my primary source translation, my goal was to produce a version that left Martinů’s most original and coherent content in the main body and move what remained into the endnotes. The material that immediately went into the endnotes included his sketches for further essays, his reading notes, and his extraneous commentaries to himself. In the end, I chose to summarize or delete much of this material, which I felt had little meaning for the researcher or general reader. Regarding Martinů’s reading notes, however, I documented what I could about their origins, sometimes making lengthy searches through Google Books for more details. For passages from his reading that he clearly conceived as quotations, I retained these in the main body and present them in the usual manner. Frequently, Martinů wrote substantial commentaries in parentheses, showing him in a dialogue with his subject matter on multiple levels.9 These, I found, were vital to his thought process and needed to be retained as clearly as possible. Yet there were other kinds of interpolative material that brought much confusion and required editorial work. The first kind was his interpolation of complete sentences that were related not to the topic at hand but to one that he worked out elsewhere.10 The second kind of interpolative material consisted of his short parenthetical reminders to himself to follow up on a related point or topic later on. In both cases, I dropped this material into endnotes, which greatly enhanced the readability of the text.

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I employed a number of other editorial practices in this translation. Martinů regularly uses the word “artist” (Cz. “umělec”) when referring to a musician; this I usually replace with the word “composer.” My rationale for this is that, first, Martinů is obviously talking about a composer, and second, in English, the general association of the word “artist” is with someone who paints, draws, or is involved with the visual arts. Martinů’s regular use of the word “artist” when he talks about a composer is not typical of Czech. My guess is that his use of the term comes from the influence of French (“l’artiste”) and his many years of interface with the French intellectual milieu.11 For those words that Martinů underlined, I applied italics instead. Other words that I italicized include his Italian-language tempo and dynamic markings as well as the titles of the artistic and scholarly works that he cites. Further edits that I made include the removal of repetitions and redundancies; breaking up certain sentences for readability; and dividing up certain passages into paragraphs for better thematic organization. Apart from a few exceptions, I have left the thoughts of any given text in their original order.12 Martinů wrote most of his diaries in Czech. I have translated everything into English, marking in my endnotes those passages that he wrote in French or English or have a polyglot texture. I found that converting his idiosyncratic language textures to more colloquial English was necessary or else they would have seriously distracted from his ideas. The titles that he ascribed to his essays take the form of a descriptive title, the first words of his essay, or a hypothetical statement that he poses to investigate or contradict. When he provided nothing of this kind, I created a title myself based on a primary theme and marked it with square brackets. As much as possible, I created these titles from key words of the essay that capture the particular subject at hand. In my endnotes, I provide remarks on the derivation of his conceptual terminology, possible interpretations where Martinů has not made himself entirely clear, and other commentary that I felt might be useful to the reader. In the end, my goal was to produce a text that reads with maximum efficiency and one that can be read by the widest audience. This much said, I should make clear that I do not consider this to be a critical edition and that it should not be perceived as such. I am certain that some of the most devoted scholars will be dissatisfied that my main body does not reflect a full picture of the composer’s original manuscripts. That kind of work, I believe, would be appropriate, even essential, in a critical edition. For present purposes, however, reproducing in the main body each of the composer’s false starts, reminders to himself, and non-sequiturs would risk losing the general reader’s attention. Naturally, one might ask whether a body of writings that was never properly edited by its author and requires so much editorial work is even fit for publication. But the fact that his diaries are so problematic in the sense of unfinished thoughts, polyglot formulations, and redundancies indicates that Martinů was challenging himself intellectually, and this is why these writings have so much value to us. As the translator and editor, I found the fact that there was so

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much repetition actually came to my advantage since it allowed me to crosscheck his ideas. Apart from this, when he wrote his musical journalism and program notes through which he was presenting a more official version of himself and his work, he usually wrote more coherently and in a single draft.

The Sources Martinů’s 1941 Autobiography consists of sixteen handwritten pages that he wrote at breathtaking speed, much as he did when composing.13 I do not consider this text a part of his diaries, but it requires some commentary since I present it here. Šafránek probably asked Martinů to write this text for the article on the composer that he published in the 1943 volume of The Musical Quarterly, where its content is paraphrased throughout.14 Having written this text for Šafránek’s purposes would explain why Martinů wrote it in the third person. Martinů’s enumeration of works is problematic in terms of accuracy, probably because he lost track of much of his output from his earlier years.15 On the one hand, he does not cite his significant First Violin Concerto (1933), which he evidently forgot about.16 Then, after listing a number of works from his late Parisian years, he cites a work enigmatically as “Symphony.” In DHS, Šafránek dates the autobiography to spring 1941, and since Martinů does not cite his Second Cello Sonata—one of his most significant works from that year—I am led to believe that Šafránek’s date is correct and that Martinů is referring to a symphonic work that he had not yet composed. His First Symphony, for that matter, was commissioned and composed in 1942. One peculiar feature of Martinů’s 1941 Autobiography is his preference for narrating his aesthetic development in the historical present. Here we should note that using the historical present for a biography is just as unique and uncommon in Czech as it is in English. An explanation for this feature, once again, is the influence of French on his Czech. We should remember that Martinů wrote this text merely weeks, if not days after his arrival in New York City, after spending eighteen years in France. What is more, the influence of the French-language milieu was constantly alive for him since he was regularly speaking in French with his wife, Charlotte, a native of France, who had moved with him to the United States. My decision to observe Martinů’s use of tense comes from my feeling that he employs it for dramatic effect. In particular, he uses the historical present to relate the way he sees his lifelong aesthetic development as an ongoing process. As I stress in my opening study, engaging in the creative process naturally and correctly was of paramount importance to Martinů, so much that he seems to care about the creative process as much as the finished work itself. In other words, if the composer engages in the creative process correctly, works of merit will emerge. In his 1941 Autobiography, we can note that after a few opening lines in which he employs the simple past—where he states his place of birth and a few basic facts about his early

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life—he switches to the historical present once he arrives at his teenage years, or once he became aware of his cultural environment and began formulating the point of view that launched him along his creative path. In other words, he switches to the historical present once the process of his aesthetic development begins. Martinů’s essay “On the Creative Process” comes from what Šafránek calls the composer’s Notebook from Darien, a spiral-bound, grammar-school notebook of some thirty-two pages.17 Šafránek freely expanded on this essay for chapter 21 of his first biography.18 His extant correspondence with the English-American composer Rebecca Clarke, who had been hired to edit the manuscript, reveals that this chapter was deemed incoherent by the editors and turned back for revisions.19 From my own work on this text, I found the first paragraph especially troublesome, where Martinů jumps back and forth between his points on subconscious concentration and the work’s realization in the form of the score. In order to achieve coherence, I found no other recourse than to remove from the main body his interpolations on the latter point, which he readdresses later on. This essay, it seems, was his trial run at articulating his thoughts on musical creation, which he continued to flesh out over the course of his diaries. In his essay “The ‘Pastoral’ Symphony: What Are Invariable and Variable Conditions” from his Notebook from New York, he reiterates many of the same points on the creative process, often in a more certain and coherent form. Martinů’s Ridgefield Diary, which I present virtually complete, comes from the first thirty-one pages of a forty-one-page collection of loose leaves, all of which Martinů paginated in the upper right-hand corner on each recto.20 I do not present pages 32–41—found in DHS as the composer’s Notebook from Cape Cod—as they consist mostly of reading notes interspersed with only a few original essays.21 As I note above, I dropped most of Martinů’s sketches for further essays into the endnotes. Yet there is one passage from his Ridgefield Diary that has a “sketchy” flavor that I needed to retain since it clearly ties to the rest of the essay. This concerns the opening to “Our Solutions Occur in Time and Space,” which is probably linked to the discussions on semantics that he had been having with Antonín Svoboda at that time (see chapter 5). What I present here, virtually complete, as Martinů’s Essays from Fall 1945, is a collection of nine pages with handwritten text on both sides. These writings caused confusion in terms of chronological placement, particularly the first eight pages.22 Although Martinů did not date any of these first eight pages in his own hand, my conclusion is that he wrote them sometime between September and November of 1945. The confusion comes from the fact that Šafránek presents these eight pages in DHS as the opening of the Ridgefield Diary, which would suggest that Martinů wrote them between 1 May and sometime in June 1944, or between the dates of the composer’s arrival at Ridgefield and his first entries in the forty-one-page collection of writings that he began there (see above).23 Possibly contributing to the misplacement of these eight pages in DHS is the fact that they share the same paper type as the forty-one-page collection. However, these eight pages do not bear any

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pagination like those forty-one pages, and Martinů’s handwriting, on the whole, is slightly different. What helped me date these eight pages is a passage that comes directly from them. This passage reads: “I have often been asked what I was searching for and what I gained in France. I laid out an entire novel about this, and it really is a substantial chapter. But in short, I would say I found what I was looking for—i.e., a sense for proportion and this in every way.”24 In his first biography, Šafránek quotes this passage and dates it to September 1945.25 What is more, “1945” can be found written lightly in Šafránek’s handwriting at the top of the page that contains this passage. Finally, the ninth page of this collection contains a dated reference by Martinů to November 1945, suggesting a succinct chronology to the nine pages as a whole.26 Unfortunately, the original order of these first eight pages is unclear. But this proved secondary since each major essay forms a cohesive whole. My decision to place “Something about that ‘French’ Influence” first comes from the clue that Martinů gives in the passage I cite above, which he wrote just after “Advice to the Composer.” The “novel” to which Martinů refers is undoubtedly his essay “Something about that ‘French’ Influence,” which would place this essay earlier in time and certainly before “Advice to the Composer.” Martinů’s final, ninth page of his Essays from Fall 1945, which begins with the passage I call “A Ruined Accompaniment,” contains more diffuse entries. Based on the dated reference to a periodical on this ninth page, we can deduce that its contents come from sometime between 17 November and 5 December 1945. By the latter date, Martinů had begun typing his letters and essays in order to save the strength of his hand for composition. This was a practice he continued for much of the rest of his life.27 Martinů’s Notebook from New York, not a notebook in the true sense of the word, consists of sixteen typewritten pages; I present this text virtually complete.28 On page 12, Martinů refers to the program notes of the New York Philharmonic’s concert that he had attended on 20 December 1945, which he refers to as “today.” Since he began typing his letters and essays by at least 5 December, we can surmise that the entire contents of the Notebook from New York until the reference to the program notes come from December 1945. My feeling is that the entire text comes from the last weeks of that year. What Šafránek calls Martinů’s Notes from 1947 refers to a substantial collection of typewritten pages.29 Although these writings show some resemblance to his Ridgefield Diary in scope and style, I felt that, on the whole, Martinů did not achieve the same level of synergy with his sources. Furthermore, many of the topics in this collection are variations on ones that he had written about earlier.30 For these reasons, I have only excerpted “An Unwritten Law,” “The Limits of Musical Knowledge,” and “My Latin Origins?” In appendix 1, I present a bibliography of sources that Martinů cites in the writings that appear here in translation; it represents merely a fraction of the books

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that passed through his hands.31 In appendix 2, I present the report on Martinů by the Czech cultural politician Miroslav Barvík from May 1955 (see chapter 8), which I consider essential to an understanding of Martinů’s status in communist Czechoslovakia; it is published here for the first time in any language. Related to Barvík is the separate study that I present as appendix 3, “On the Literary Reception of Kaprálová and Martinů: Jiří Mucha’s Peculiar Loves and Miroslav Barvík’s ‘At Tři Studně.’” I have separated this study from the rest of this book since it deals with matters that are entirely posthumous to Martinů, in which he no longer plays an active role.

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Chapter Eleven

1941 Autobiography (Spring 1941) Written by the composer in the third person He was born on 8 December 1890 in the small mountain town of Polička (geographically in Bohemia, but in essence a part of Moravia). He displayed musical talent in his youth, already performing as a violinist at the age of 8. At 16, he enters the violin department at the Prague Conservatory and then becomes a member of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra (1913–23).1 In composition he is self-taught: he begins composing right away without any technical knowledge. His first composition, at 10, is a programmatic string quartet.2 His first big orchestral performance, Czech Rhapsody for Orchestra, Baritone, Mixed Choir, and Organ, is composed under the impression of Czechoslovakia’s liberation in 1918. In 1922–23, he makes his debut at the Prague National Theater with his three-act ballet Ishtar and in 1924 with his one-act ballet Who Is the Most Powerful in the World?3 In 1922–23, he attends Josef Suk’s class in composition, which he does not finish4 because he leaves for Paris to study with Albert Roussel. He remains in Paris from 1923 until 1941,5 making a trip to Bohemia each year. Paris makes a decisive impact on his work, but even before he arrives—as far back as his earliest compositions—certain characteristics of Western culture emerge instinctively: lightness, clarity, a sense for pure form, an economy of means, rationality, and an avoidance of sentimentality. These are the elements that he considers in agreement with Czech character. During his early period (1910–24), the cult of Smetana is in favor in Prague, as well as the great influence of German music (Bruckner, Mahler, Strauss) with all the merits and deficiencies of its metaphysical apparatus. This comes into direct conflict with his intuitive expression, and he searches for the correct recourse. Since he is not yet in control of his expression, neither technically, nor in terms of maturity—and

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with performances of Debussy becoming a great revelation—he fixates on the aspect of sound.6 This is his impressionist period with his choice of exotic themes (Chinese texts, the oriental Ishtar) and atmospheric compositions (As Midnight Passes), but this excludes Czech Rhapsody, which emerges spontaneously under the influence of the time: the liberation of the nation, the rallies, and the movement of the masses. Later, this sense for the collective plays a great role in La Bagarre (the movement of the masses during Lindbergh’s landing in Paris); Half-Time (the masses at a soccer stadium); Military Symphony (commemorating the consecration of the Czechoslovak flag in Darney, France, in 1918);7 later in stage works such as The Plays of Mary; more recently in the Field Mass (composed in 1940 for the Czechoslovak Army in France); and to some extent in the Double Concerto. Already at this time (1920–24) he is virtually alone with his musical expression in an environment that places the greatest emphasis on the work’s extramusical content, leaving the question of form aside. But for him, form is the biggest issue—i.e., the organic control of expression and a complete agreement of contents with form. This is the most difficult time in his creative process because everything around him suggests he is in error; that he is not following the correct path; that his ideas are only instinctive, vague, and lacking in definition; and that his expression is burdened by an insufficiency of technical skill and an inability to fully express what he feels. He is aware, nevertheless, that there is something false in the philosophical interpretation of extramusical ideas in music8 in an environment where the direction is determined not by musicians, but by aestheticians and university professors. His works from this time are not taken seriously because he does not heed these demands, and from this time forward—long before he has even left for France—he is classified as a French composer, or Western, as these elements are considered inferior to the deep content of the musical expression of the time, which is not as deep as it seems. This becomes the cause of many intellectual conflicts because he feels that his expression emanates from the pure and independent nature of Czech character. Even later, during his residence in Paris—where he embraces a kind of universal expression—his music remains characteristically Czech to the core.9 It is with these great inner conflicts that he leaves for Paris in 1923, to an environment that is new and special. He feels completely lost because he finds that few works correspond with the ideas he had had in Prague about contemporary Western music, and he realizes that his “French” expression is nothing like what he hears around him. Only his moments with Roussel confirm to him that he is on the right path and that his expression—even if it is flawed in certain respects—is and remains Czech. After arriving in Paris, he realizes that its musical environment is quite confused. The city is in the grip of a musical upheaval: the group of Frenchmen “Les Six,” Igor Stravinsky, and the Russian ballet surprise and unsettle him. Many of the works he hears have a purely Parisian character that he does not understand, and he does not find them serious and respectable enough for his view of the composer’s mission.

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Likewise, he is dissatisfied with the relaxation of artistic discipline, and he often finds the compositional subjects and means of delivery undignified and unacceptable. What encumbers him the most is the desire for novelty at all costs, thus he adapts to Parisian musical life very slowly, through difficult intellectual battles, and under difficult living conditions. Most of the works that he hears do not convince him, but those that do—like certain works by Stravinsky—have a strong effect on him, because they confirm much in his efforts until this time and in his intuitive search for new paths. Since he is still unsure of himself, he works based on his talent alone without attempting to bring about something new through hard work. But this does not last long, and he continues in the style of his earlier compositions—i.e., impressionism and homophonic harmony—and he maintains an absolute distrust in the conventional contrapuntal practice. On the whole, he works very little, and he does not even present his compositions to the public. In the end, he destroys them or sets them aside. In 1924–25, he suddenly responds to his environment with Half-Time: a soccer stadium, the movement of the masses, a composition based exclusively on a short motive that is rhythmic in character and thrown down on paper with great force. It awakens a storm of resistance in Prague during its premiere in 1924. The next year, it is performed once again in Prague as part of the International Festival for New Music.10 With this composition, it is as if his entire past of impressionism is excised and forgotten all at once. It is something that occurs more frequently in Martinů’s work: without preparation—but only seemingly—a complete work emerges of a new character, of a new, clear-cut technique. It is as if somewhere in his subconscious, a composition that is not a logical link in his development becomes an abrupt and intense departure into a sphere that is not possible to predict. Other compositions of this kind include his Piano Trio no. 1, Five Short Pieces; Second String Quartet; Julietta; and Double Concerto; and these unexpected compositions are both in form and technique more perfect than those that are prepared, thought through, and substantiated by development. But he never continues right away along this newly discovered path and returns to an earlier technique, and the results of these works that branch out come much later; often, it is only after many others that they bring forth a specific benefit. Then comes La Bagarre, premiered in Boston with great success under Serge Koussevitsky (1927).11 Also receiving its premiere in Boston a year later is his Military Symphony; for its Parisian premiere its title is changed to La rhapsodie (Allegro symphonique).12 In his works from this time the impact of Half-Time disappears, leaving a greater sense of lyricism, but these works retain a strong rhythmic character. In his next compositions, rhythmic definition continues to play an important role, but polyphony gains an equal footing with a sudden and unexpected change: the pure, new polyphonic style of his Piano Trio no. 1, Five Short Pieces. After these compositions, he abandons the large orchestra (with the exception of Julietta), to which he does not return until most recently, and he chooses small ensembles; a small

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orchestra (for stage works as well); solo instruments (concertos for piano, cello, harpsichord, 2 violins, flute and violin, string quartet, piano trio—all with woodwinds and brass à 2);13 and small chamber ensembles (duo for violin and cello, piano trio, string trio,14 Bergerettes, Promenades, Fifth String Quartet,15 String Quintet, Piano Quintet, and Sextet, the last of which won the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Prize, etc.).16 After the last three of these compositions,17 he returns once again to subtle lyricism in his Serenade, Partita, and Inventions,18 where the sonic aspect of impressionism returns but is worked out both polyphonically and vertically. Here the sonic element is not calculated and comes as a result. His Piano Concerto,19 premiered in Paris, is of this nature. In Paris, he gradually notices a difference between his compositional technique and what he hears around him, and he becomes more aware of his Czech origins. After Half-Time, dynamism, and the partial influence of contemporary jazz, he returns to Czech national expression and directly to folklore, and he prepares himself to write works for the Czech stage.20 He suddenly deviates in style from his chamber and symphonic works, setting aside the technique he has acquired to this time. The result is a new, direct, national lyricism, without all the orchestral embellishments and complications of modern music. Through ordinary means, he fashions music that links directly to Czech classical production. With his new theatrical works, he intends to create an audience of his own and gradually prepare it for modern Czech opera. He projects his plan for over the course of several years and establishes a group of young collaborators in Prague (director, set designer, conductor, choreographer) who, in his absence, would perform his works according to his intentions. Despite the distance between Prague and Paris, he succeeds through tireless correspondence, commentaries in his scores, and exact indications regarding virtually all details. With his project for the theater, he intends to fill the gaps that arose in Czech opera due to circumstances either political or cultural. Until this time, Czech opera had been restricted to scenes from village life or folk stories, but he now wants to offer experiences from the entire history of the stage. In Špalíček, for example, a ballet for the general public, he employs folk texts, customs, dances, legends, and even carnival skits and children’s games. Notable about this work is that he places the chorus in the orchestra. Taking the form of a revue, the scenes change quickly, and the national tales that serve as the foundation of the action are interspersed with games and customs from folk poetry. In the meantime, he formulates his operatic principles, which are very different from those in common practice or the Wagnerian school. His first product is the opera-ballet Plays of Mary, which consists of three medieval mystery and miracle stories: “Mariken from Nimégue” on a text by Ghéon, “The Birth of the Lord” on a folk text, and “Sister Paskalina” on texts from folk poetry. Here, in what departs from convention, the chorus comes on stage at certain moments to substitute for the narrator and the supporting roles.

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His next stage work, the opera-ballet Theater behind the Gate, is a pure commedia dell’arte. Here the story is derived from Italian comedies but adapted for the Czech theater, with the players Harlequin and Columbine taking on Czech characteristics.21 Notable about these works is that the libretto is comprised merely of a series of folk texts that are grafted roughly onto the scenes and merely relate to the situations on stage. He adapts the texts himself, and each work has an explicitly folkloric character. The same holds true for his two one-act radio operas from this time, Voice of the Forest and Comedy on the Bridge, which are written in essence for amateur ensembles. He then arrives at his first full-length opera on a single text: Julietta, or the Key to Dreams, which is based on the play by Georges Neveux. Here, however, he abandons his native folklore and creates a great symphonic poem. From his earliest compositions, Martinů emphasizes clarity of themes and melody, and his goal is to produce exact expression based on absolute musical elements. He does not search for effects, but immediacy. He does not strive for abandon, but constraint and discipline, choosing means that are often simple and even primitive. He does not consider individual elements such as harmony, polyphony, rhythm, and color the most important, but subordinates these to the organic development of the whole and to the overall effect. From this comes a clear sense for formal construction and a definitive, organic character to each movement and work. The melody is often rugged, constructed with precise care, and those compositions that avoid the emotional abandon of romantic music might seem austere and anti-sentimental. He avoids any kind of exaggerated emotional outbursts and pathos, and he always contains the composition within absolute musical possibilities that function according to inner musical relationships. One characteristic of his compositions is that he does not state the theme complete at the beginning of the movement such that—as in classical music—it may be subject to variations and imitation. Instead, he gradually develops the theme over the course of the movement, creating an uninterrupted musical stream that is integrated into the whole. Often the permutation and development of a theme suffice for an entire movement, without the need to deploy a contrasting secondary theme. Here a constructive element plays a great role, along with a richness of rhythm, which is a Czech, Slavic element. In his more recent works, this becomes less important, and his compositions acquire a much greater melodic and formal scope. His orchestral writing is natural and nearly flawless thanks to his time studying the orchestra while playing in the Czech Philharmonic. The sonic aspect is always clear, never clouded over, or merely thunderous, and his sonic discoveries often surprise him. He distinguishes exactly between genres, may it be chamber, symphonic, theater, or film, and he never mixes the character and style. His quartet is never an orchestra, but always only chamber music. Likewise, his stage works are never a symphony, but always only theater. Among the musical forms with which he finds the most affinity is the concerto grosso. His melody, rhythm, and sonic character is derived directly from Czech character and forms a direct link

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to Smetana and Dvořák. And the several years he spends in Paris, where he enriches himself with universal values, actually bring him closer to his own Czech expression on a universal level such that his compositions remain on local soil but project outwards into European culture as a Czech element. His goal is to arrive at a new form of expression and an agreement of content and form within the new possibilities and demands of pure music and contemporary feeling. To make the aim of his searching clear, it is necessary to analyze the state of music during the years 1910–40, when music develops in response to romanticism. The consequences of this are as follows: (1) the accentuation of one element—rhythm— to the detriment of others; (2) the sudden, absolute liberalization of harmony, almost without discipline, from which emerges only chaos or noise; (3) a distaste for impressionist tone-painting, with the aspect of sound consciously suppressed; (4) the fragmentation and disintegration of the overall work into single, individual, and personal compositional issues, or a loss of unity, both collectively and in coherence; and (5) a discord in one’s own development, haste, solving disparate problems from composition to composition and always with different technical means. Emerging from this is a desire for novelty and originality at all costs. This brings positive results, but many negative ones as well. A positive result is the destruction of technique, but in a way that impedes the gradual creation of new technique for new expression. The desire for novelty plays an important role, but it impedes the much needed liberation from the traditional forms, which are inappropriate for modern expression in terms of contents and technique. This can be seen most clearly in works for larger forces, where we now have new forms with old expression, or old forms with new content, both of which are unconvincing and imperfect; these issues are best resolved in works for smaller ensembles. Positive results can also be seen in the response to the extravagance of romanticism and the streamlining of musical function in society. But the emphasis on music that is anti-sentimental goes too far, making it necessary to distinguish between romantic, unhealthy sentiment and sentiment that is healthy and uplifting. The music during the transition from the romantic period elicits great richness from the new spirit of life, but it also accepts an intermixing of genres and other foreign elements that will be difficult to eradicate entirely. In the output of the past thirty years, there is little agreement in the work’s design, idea, and realization. In response to the delicacy of impressionism, we arrive at thunder and noise in the orchestra. Despite these problems, Martinů finds specific solutions to expression, first in chamber music (Piano Trio no. 1, Five Short Pieces), then in his latest orchestral works (Tre ricercari, Double Concerto, Concerto Grosso), and also in opera (Julietta). In his stage works, he stands against Wagnerian principles. As much as he can, he restricts musical dramatism and dynamism, which is typically expressed through the superficial, rumbling force of the orchestra. He also limits pathos—which he often finds deafening and empty—and replaces this with logical thematic development that is controlled musically. For him the theater is theater, or a work that is acted

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out, and he does not attempt to arouse the impression of reality. He accepts the fact that the work is to be performed in the theater in order to leave the laws of the stage undisturbed. He also shuns the merging of the arts, leaving each theatrical element to develop on its own. He employs neither “leitmotifs” nor “moods” for painting scenes. Instead, he has a musically constructive design for the entire opera. He chooses the texts himself and regulates them such that they prohibit the actors from employing conventional gestures, attitudes, and means of singing. Often, the individual texts are not even connected. Everything depends on the musical content and construction, which he works out according to the libretto’s design (see The Plays of Mary and Theater behind the Gate, where the libretto is merely a series of texts from folk poetry). He takes great care to bring intelligibility to the text, which is not declaimed in the style of recitative. Instead, he creates “melopée,” or melody that is based on the overall sense of the phrase. Most important for him is the stage and not the orchestra. With the chamber-like quality of his stage works, he comes close to the theater of Mozart. His goal in each composition is to arrive at a perfection of immediate expression and to work with the musical means exclusively. In his more recent works (Julietta, Tre ricercari, Double Concerto, Concerto Grosso, Cello Sonata, Symphony22) he achieves a new lyricism, something quite special in modern music. The Double Concerto, written during the time of the Munich Accord, brings forth great lyricism—almost desperation—and makes its effect on the listener with immediacy and power. It is one of the great new forms of modern music: a construction and ferocity that is felt intensely and thrown down on paper with spontaneity. The same holds true for his Cello Sonata.23

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Chapter Twelve

“On the Creative Process” (Summer 1943) One of the composer’s most basic skills is concentration. What I mean by this is that the composer must have the skill to concentrate not only consciously, but also subconsciously: to be able to focus one’s attention on the purely abstract, primary impulse in the subconscious. From a logical point of view, focusing our attention is conscious, but this does not happen concretely, because the impulse of a work is often given by a conception that you cannot define.1 It is a kind of “sensation-attitude”2 that can be exact, despite the fact that its nature and significance are unclear.3 For me, this conception is often plastic, and I am still unable to define a shape, form, or proportion; it is something I can somehow merely touch. It is a feeling for the whole, which I would describe like trying to capture a broad stretch of landscape in our sight. As long as we do not focus on a specific point or detail, we see nothing altogether. But with a multitude of details, we are able to reconstruct the landscape concretely and retain it and etch it in our memory. And with the help of memory, we can fill in other landscapes, but it is always the detail from which we start and onto which we focus our attention. Even though the entire horizon is visible from our point of view, only that part upon which we focus our attention is visible; everything around it is worked out visually through habit, memory, and experience. Thus the question is whether we can really grasp the whole as such, or if we can only put together the parts in our minds. This feeling for the whole is at the foundation of the musical work. But this does not mean that I already know or feel what the entire work will look like, not even the form, much less that I have found a motive—all of this is on the path to realization. We can ask ourselves, why did composers look for a specific motive, change it, or discard it? Because they were looking for what corresponded with their conception of the whole.

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To approach this indefinable conception, a skill for concentration of a certain kind is needed, which is special and perhaps a question of practice. It is not searching, for you can only search for something you want to find. Nor is it something you can know, for you cannot look for something and not know what it is, may it be it an object, conception, or thought. It is a kind of probing, or stabilizing. In essence, it is looking for what you want to look for. You can look for “motives” and find them, but they must correspond with your conception. But at this moment, you do not even know what your conception is. You are unable to secure it because you are only looking at the detail in time and space. In the meantime, however, your magical sensation is the whole. Thus the purpose of concentration is not to search, but to find the ability to see something from all possible sides at once. This sensation is not some vague, sentimental, emotional conception, or something like invisible hands playing music on invisible harps that cannot be heard. It is something that forces itself onto your ? ,4 something that wants to live and which you can bring to life. Only once this sensation enters your consciousness to a certain extent can you embrace the work as a whole, both formally and emotionally, irrespective of all the complications and the emotional and physical changes that take place while working. And this refutes an emotional interpretation in our sense of the word based on the opening of the work or the initial motive, because our “emotion-complex” is constantly changing; not even do strong emotional blows stay in our consciousness for very long.5 It is therefore impossible for a composer to hold onto an emotion, or the emotion that he wants nonsensically to “thrust” onto the work, which sometimes takes months or even years to compose! Thus the response of the “composer’s emotion” in the listener by means of the musical work is a myth. But this does not concern works that have a common denominator6 beforehand in the form of a program. In this case, there can be an agreement of emotions between the listener and composer,7 but we do not have any proof that the composer actually experienced the emotion embodied in the program. More often than not, judgments of this kind only benefit weak works. When we analyze something, we must not be afraid of contradictions, especially in musical psychology. If someone says that a work is based on an emotion, and someone else disagrees, this is not a contradiction—both can be right, just as both can be mistaken, and this does not mean they would agree fifty-fifty. But we can ask, even if they did agree, what do they really mean by “emotion?” Or the dichotomy art vs. craft: this, too, is not a contradiction. The agreement of the listener’s emotion with the composer’s emotion cannot be proven in any way. We cannot specify what the listener feels, and even if we could, each listener would respond differently. And much less can we specify what the composer feels (not what he expresses!); here I mean an absolute, scientific explanation. Instead, we usually get a compromised interpretation. Interpretations of this kind remind me of the interpretation of

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dreams from popular dream books. For example: thief = unpleasant surprise; inheritance = pleasant surprise; postman = writing away from home; baby = happy event. Based on the commentary above about the composer’s “feeling for the whole,” it should be clear that all of the “emotions” that played a role during the realization of the “unknown” intention or motive8 became focused in one way. They ceased being emotions and became a kind of attitude, which is perhaps an emotional state, but of a different category. Here we are at the moment called “inspiration,” a very mysterious thing. But inspiration is the very result of this subconscious thought-work and not some perfectly clear idea that comes all at once. It is the result of labor, straightening out direction, and relaxation, like something that emerges easily in the morning that we had been searching for earlier with great effort.9 I would like to stress here that I do not want to explain anything. I am only relating what I experience. And so it is absolutely clear, this state of “searching for a conception” is not and should not be considered some kind of mysterious ritual. It is not. Or that the composer somehow prepares himself for it, or that he has a system of contemplation, etc. This, too, is not the case. What I am describing here is the battle for the idea, which often takes place without the direct intervention of the composer! And there is nothing in this entire process that is different from what happens in other fields of creative endeavor (science, invention, philosophy, etc.). What is more, the composer need not reestablish this process for each work; it may suffice for more than one composition. But I will return now to inspiration. It is a result, as I said. It might get triggered by some kind of strong emotion. But an emotion of this kind has nothing to do with how the work is realized,10 because at the moment of inspiration, something in a latent state has been suddenly awakened that was long in preparation. At this phase, the composer does not even know how he will work, but only what his idea of the work is. He need not even have a motive yet, nor anything else.11 Some type of strong, joyful emotion—from the perspective of establishing the work and direction—can trigger inspiration, yet the result can be a sad largo. It is more common the other way around. A painful emotion can trigger an allegro vivo without pathos. We can support this quite easily, for example in the case of Haydn and Mozart. According to prescription, the composer would need to change emotionally four times over the course of a sonata cycle, and several times in just the first movement. And even if he did, the work would be disjointed and without a coherent style.12 In short, we cannot say what is happy or sad in music, if we were to employ such simplistic terms. Just see the tonalities major and minor—sometimes major is sad, sometimes minor is joyful. All of this is myth and convention. We can say the same thing about the descriptions we give to genres, for example music that is religious, proletarian, sensual, mystic, etc. No proof, only convention.

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Here the moment comes when the composer is just busy with his medium, his craft. The entire process that took place before this becomes fastened in his consciousness and becomes part of the composer, part of his gesture, his essence, his point of view. It has crossed over to a daily order and cannot get lost, and I think the composer forgets about everything that occurred beforehand. Here a sudden emotion can disturb the work if it is foreign to the subconscious plan. What becomes apparent here is the kind of battle and confusion that gets triggered when the composer is determined to carry out something beforehand that does not agree with his plan. These things13 help explain the discrepancy in opinion between the composer and the general public. The composer always values those works more that were prepared through a long period of searching rather than those that came about through a kind of automatic technique, even if the public thinks otherwise. And the composer cannot be open about these matters; it is impractical, so he lets the public persuade him in the end. These things also help explain the discrepancy between the common point of view, which demands an emotional or sensational commentary to the work, and the composer and his mature design—if the composer establishes that design before addressing matters of technical expression, or what we call craft. These issues come from the sentimental convention and desire “to suffer,” which was symptomatic of the preceding era and calls for the composer to be embellished, romantic, and obscure, even though we listen to the work and not the composer. And there are many composers who like this idea because it gives them a kind of magical illumination. Of course, an act of creation cannot take place without battle, tension, anxiety, joy, and will. All of these things take place over the course of the process I describe above, which is far more mysterious than any of those other stories. But I do not want to suggest that the composer does nothing more than write once he begins writing, or that everything is finished or set in his mind. I am quite far from making this claim. What is important to realize is that once he begins writing (and he already needs to know what he wants), he becomes deeply engrossed in his material and in the technical transmission of his idea into the given material, not only in terms of its possibilities, but also in terms of its limitations. In such an abstract field as music, one’s thought-complex and imagination are often greatly removed from the material into which they need to be placed in the end. Both the sound and the instruments make many demands. But if these demands cannot be fulfilled, it is necessary to find different instruments and a different technique, which—even with today’s almost unlimited technique—is not very easy.14 Other elements play a role: training, habit, mindset, convention, and often intellect as well, and of course the human character of the composer, his social stature, his environment, the era in which he lives, and many other things. Thus the entire story becomes quite complex, but the main account of the inner process

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before he begins writing remains in principle the same. Along with talent, some composers are gifted with the ability to concentrate quickly, but others battle with great difficulty. In either case, it is important that their spontaneity or knowledge does not lead them into a blind alley of exaggerated spontaneity or exaggerated intellectual searching.

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Chapter Thirteen

The Ridgefield Diary (Summer 1944) [Musical Knowledge]1

What do we mean when we talk about knowing a work, or getting familiar with a work as a prerequisite for understanding art? Does it mean that we heard it, saw it, or read it? We cannot say that we know a work just because we heard it, even if we have heard it many times. In what way is the effect of a work enhanced if we hear it more than once—towards knowing the whole, or towards knowing the details, the technical elements, or the construction of the work? And even if we “know” a work, on what basis do we deliver a “judgment” of it? “Knowledge” of a work is limited only to the conductor, who needs to know it as a whole. But we—the listeners—only know those elements that take root in our memory and of course a certain “effect,” or sensation, which is not always the same for each hearing. What is more, we cannot change a work through our opinion, because a work is a given once and for all. Finally, our opinion of a work changes over time and we accept it as such. There is not any criticism that will now change Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which will live on forever with all its “mistakes.” Thus our musical knowledge is very relative. It results from the way we abstract certain elements from certain eras that developed under circumstances with which we are unfamiliar but arrange into an order in our psychology, according to certain labels, according to certain works composed at that time, and according to certain theoretical rules that usually come afterwards and not before. In short, we arrange the work according to a “cliché” for which we have little evidence. We have, for example, the definitive form of the sonata, which, as we contend, developed “by the laws of nature.” But on the basis of which laws? On the basis of our logical probability, our understanding of space and time, our understanding of geometric laws, or on the basis of our instinctive human feeling, which is dependent on all of the above?

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I am not saying that we are on the wrong path, however. I only think that we do not know all the elements to be able to make a definitive conclusion, which we do nevertheless. In sonata form, for example, there is the great possibility that the restatement of the exposition came about as a means through which the composer could gain time (we know the conditions they composed under and the rush they were in) and not through some kind of higher organic causes, or causes that were logical. The restatement was probably influenced in part by folk song, where the repetition was triggered by causes of the same kind—i.e., to ease the burden on the memory and to make it simpler. We know that the three-part form of the sonata (A–B–A) does not correspond to other eras (Bach, the fugue) and that the exact form of the sonata is found in Beethoven’s sonatas almost as an exception. We can accept a judgment as a logical deduction, but not as a law of nature that is one and organic. But perhaps I am mistaken. Indeed, I feel the justification and logic of a form that corresponds to our idea of “order” and construction, but something holds me back from considering it “absolute.” When we closely follow the origin of a work, we see that it comes into being at a “specific” time and under the “specific” conditions of the spiritual state of the composer, under the specific conditions of his surroundings and the many elements that we will never come to know; in other words, at a specific time and in a specific space. A composer would never write a work in “just the way” he wrote it at that specific time, thus we cannot support our conclusions with anything solid. The composer himself and his surroundings and all the influences on him were constantly changing while he was at work and only a certain state of concentration, or certain direction held the creative idea in order, but we cannot support this with anything else than an emotional-spiritual depiction2 that might bring us closer to this process but not explain it. When a work is finished and the composer has succeeded in expressing an idea, he is convinced that this organism, or this complex, was possible to express only in the form it was once expressed, and all of the elements became subordinated and developed in the direction of creating a living whole, without the conscious intervention of the composer. This is what we call his personal expression, one of the greatest mysteries of composition and proof of the astonishing organism of spiritual life of which we can state very little scientifically but which affects us in the same mysterious way and triggers an emotional response which we can likewise neither define nor judge. Now the work has become public domain and de facto ceases to exist for the composer, and never again can he create it in the same likeness, as it has begun to live a life of its own. Now the moment sets in when we have to “get used” to the work and establish it in our psyche, and because we know that it is impossible to “bring back” a work and change it, we accept this “fait accompli” over time and the work gains our approval. In other words, it becomes a part of our life in the form it exists and not in any another. It becomes a part of our life to such an extent that we are unable to judge it anymore, and we draw our conclusions as if we were talking about something that is

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perfect. We do not even think about it, for that matter, because the work has become our property “over time.” In other words, the work “is not,” but “becomes.” In order to better express what I mean here, I will give the following example. When I was in Italy, a friend of mind drove me to Bergamo near Milan. In this small part of the world, you see gathered in one place the most diverse styles created over the course of history. In logical terms, this should give the effect of chaos, of something without “order,” and definitely not “a whole.” But in effect, it does function as a whole, as one artistic work. This is where our knowledge and “time” play a great role. And time straightens out disagreements within a composition. What perhaps appears to us first as a formal, constructive mistake, and actually is a mistake, disappears and gradually becomes distributed into the organic quality created by the distance of the work over time and only then do we make our conclusions. And if I use the term mistake, it is once again in the relative or technical sense, and of course I am talking about those works that we accept as artistically substantial and not those that are decidedly dilettante. We see in Beethoven and others that certain elements should have never belonged together (for example the different character of the movements in the quartets), yet they do create a singular whole for us both formally and compositionally. We consider Mozart’s style as crystallized and precise, yet we do not see the great differences between his compositions. The same holds true for Bach and the others. And we likewise know examples from popular music that make a connection with our sentimental, emotional instincts. To whom has it not happened that a certain “hit,” military march, waltz, etc., which does not have great artistic value and often stirred up opposition and distaste, changed over the course of time? In other words, we change to the point that we like it, or accept it the way it is. There are many songs in the national song repertories that we do not find particularly interesting, yet they do have a kind of magic for us. The same holds true for the texts. And we likewise disregard the fact that music during periods of the past had an entirely different function than we now attribute to it. Yet all of this does not bring us closer to the original question: how we come to know a work, or its inner function in relation to us. Do we come to know a work better when we hear it frequently, and if so, in what way? Does “knowledge” of a work really have any concrete meaning for us? In effect, no one “knows” the work apart from the composer, who often forgets it, and the conductor, who is required to know it. Knowledge of a work is otherwise limited to “hearing” the work, which means we carry away an “impression” (indefinable and unverifiable, different for each individual, and we cannot observe these sensations); certain technical materials (i.e., the thematic substance of a melody); a certain color of the orchestra (according to the expertise of the listener); a certain level of the construction (i.e., the formal placement of various passages, for which a greater “expert” is necessary); and of course something from which the composer wanted to express (if he succeeded in this), which is not possible to describe and might have actually been our own

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emotional response. We cannot even say that the work was performed according to the conception of the composer. Often it is not. Certainly, the conception of Mozart did not call for a one-hundred-member orchestra to which neither the style nor the spirit of his music corresponds, just as Bach did not compose for a fivehundred-member ensemble, just as our contemporary, dynamic approach to older works does not correspond to the way the work was formulated, just as our brilliant Molto vivace of final movements does not correspond to the simple Allegro vivo that was prescribed by the composer. Just take the madrigal, originally sung by soloists, where the formation of the melody and everything altogether was thought of and composed in this way. If you hear one performed by one of our choirs, absolutely nothing remains. You often hear them on the radio in a different tonality and performed much too fast. Thus it is self-evident in these cases that we get a completely different picture than the composer’s intention—merely a relative state. After hearing a work, we come away with a certain emotional state and certain elements that stay in our memory that are chosen chaotically. But we do not have the ability to grasp a work in its entirety, and not even through frequent hearings do we come closer to a control of a work that is situated in time. To do this, we would need to situate the work in our memory, to learn it, which demands entirely different assumptions and does not resolve much because even if we could grasp it “in time,” we can never grasp it as an immediate conception of the whole. What is more, our attitude towards the work changes over time. By listening to certain works, our spiritual and emotional life becomes enriched and expanded, but only when our entire human outlook is expanding, and it is during these times that we have the chance to gain—within that “impression” that stays with us after hearing a work—a greater and deeper knowledge of humanity and the universe. Here we come to the great problem of the effect and comprehension of music, or the effect triggered by purely musical elements, as opposed to those elements that are emotional, personal, or elements that I would call literary, pseudo-psychological, or that state that is sustained with great favor and creates a part of what we call “music education.” Here we arrive at the function of music and what is not.

Musical Perception Ridgefield, June 1944 Musical perception takes shape differently in the musician with respect to his technical knowledge (i.e., his conception of intervals, harmony, etc., which is shaped by his professional experience); differently in the composer (who has his own inner logic); differently in the player (in connection with his instrument); and differently in the layman listener (who does not have a more thorough musical training). These

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experiences cannot be interchanged. From a psychological point of view, a musician cannot transfer his perceptions to a layman, and the same vice versa. An absolute logic of a work does not exist, only the composer’s inner logic, which forces itself onto the listener through its intensity. Now the entire musical material and material of ideas becomes formulated in the composer over a long period of time, often over years, and it is over the course of composing the work that the composer himself becomes familiar with the material—i.e., he determines, chooses, and imprints the work in his memory in the way it develops in his mind—and the work itself, irrespective of the formulating that took place before composing begins, takes up so much attention and the composer moves about in the material he chooses for so long, that the elements—driven by their own particular logic—need to become etched in his memory outside of the creative process for spontaneous and rapid work to begin. Whereas the listener layman is suddenly situated at a performance that flows by quickly, and in that short period of time, he cannot possibly absorb all that was in play while the work was being composed and during the entire lifetime of the composer. Thus he needs to abstract something from the composition that is possible to understand and pay attention to at once, immediately, an immediate feeling—i.e., to abstract from a kind of technical knowledge which, in most cases, he does not have. Today, most people have a kind of technical knowledge that draws their attention away from the work to how it is constructed. Here we arrive at the function of music, which became manifest during the different eras in different ways. We are able to understand the magical influence and function in primitive nations the best. Much less do we understand the listeners of Bach. Here, too, music was linked to a magical element, for it was part of the liturgy, an accompaniment, filler, and it was probably only perceived in this way. During Mozart’s time, when works were composed for chamber music salons and court ceremonials, it was restricted to a far narrower circle of listeners and exclusively to musical amateurs; often it was merely a pastime. With the next development, the advent of concerts and romanticism, the function of music became linked with a literary element, sentimentality, and the fragmentation of individual forms into emotional details. Today music and art are quite special; they are autonomous forms of human activity. This is still a very rough draft, of course, and does not unravel the actual relationship between the composer and work. Instead, this concerns the social context, the composer’s environment, and this concerns symphonic production, because opera has a history of its own, and I am not concerned here with the collective and the individual. The question is to what extent music education can bring us closer to a work when we still do not know how music affects us and when we know that music can awaken certain sensations even in the layman, who does not have the presumed training that is necessary for understanding music, and when we cannot even determine the sum of these sensations, because as soon as we define them, we get as many emotions as there are listeners, emotions that depend on the personal

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life of each individual and are thus brought to an entirely different sphere. This is irrespective of the fact that ordinarily, when commenting on musical experience, the listener usually expresses what is expected of him—i.e., the stereotypical views that he accepts from his reading and instruction. Why, for example, does a listener get somehow upset when a composer or scholar concedes (and many composers have openly conceded this) that a composition actually dealt with an entirely mechanical issue that was given by the musical medium and that he did not look or wait for “inspiration?” The layman does not realize that a composition is not the work of a moment, but everyday labor, and that it often takes weeks during which the composer—according to this point of view—would need to retain the same source of inspiration and constantly tend to it and be constantly “blessed by God.” In other words, the layman does not realize that the score is put together over the course of many hours of composing and a number of weeks of manual work (i.e., writing). As soon as the composer concedes this, his work immediately appears less worthy to the listener.3 These are all remnants of a certain kind of training and the many widespread myths that remain in circulation. As a result, we are unable to measure the real sum of emotions, each of which—if we actually take the composer’s creative process into account—is a purely personal experience. This is why we must find a common denominator that really does exist, because if it did not, art would not be able to live. The response of the listener was always the subject of searching and speculation, and it was usually supplanted by a certain kind of sentimentality (i.e., the listener had, or seemed to have had, various visual, or other kinds of sensations, such as the murmuring of trees, or other metaphysical conclusions about depth). But very seldom did he have a purely musical emotion—i.e., a certain delight from the melody itself, from the sound itself, from the formation of the work which in itself contains a certain harmony encompassed in this or that organization of the tones, or from the composition as a whole. From this comes a listener who has the impression of depth and seriousness from each work by Bach and an impression from Mozart that is mixed with doubt about the work’s real depth. These, too, are “emotional clichés” shaped by fashion and training. The layman does not really think about this, for that matter, just as he does not think about many things. And this entire issue will never be resolved because we can only make an approximation of the real emotional content. But in the meantime, we should at least purge ourselves of our many ingrained prejudices and make our analyses based on the information that does exist and upon which we can at least make some kind of statement.4 The split between the composer and audience lies in these questions and in the determination as to what function music can have and with what facility the audience can respond to new musical styles, or to new emotions and forms. Based on a new set of specifications, an inquiry into the function of music over history might bring some surprises—but from a new perspective and not from the old school of psychology.

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[The Mysterious Change in Mental Reaction] It is really one of the great mysteries that—at the beginning of its development— music took form in a contrapuntal style. What was the reason for this? Was it societal? We can deduce from this at the very least that the music of that time was of an entirely different state of mind. From a logical point of view, we might deduce that today’s predominantly melodic style would have been much more understandable for the layman of that time rather than their own “complicated” polyphonic style! It was probably “science” and the perception of the masses that led to polyphony, as people’s comprehension of music was restricted to a different design—i.e., to a function in the cult of the church, or to a tonal accompaniment of the liturgy. It probably played a great role that music was linked to a celebratory rite that was distinct from ordinary life, or that it was not “repertoire” in our sense of the word. The celebrations and theater in Greece, medieval mystery plays, masses in the cathedral— these were all extraordinary situations for the common person where the moment became precious.5 It was a kind of self-forgetting, self-repressing, or transformation of human thought, where daily concerns were forgotten, where the person “became lost” psychologically, like prayer, spiritual relaxation, or repose. Everything must have made an effect: the cathedral, the stained-glass windows, the liturgy, the music, the gathering of people from the entire periphery, the new faces, the different moments from one’s ordinary life, and undergoing inner realization, even though it was of something unclear, something unfamiliar; it was calming, a kind of selfanalysis. These are all elements of which music was a part. This is a different set of relations from what we have today. This state of “uniqueness” and the events for which people prepared themselves for an entire week or even weeks has disappeared. With the help of radio, we now have music at every moment. No longer is it an event, but something that belongs to everyday life, often to daily hassles, for example the neighbor’s radio. Today the entire space around us is filled with music, and apart from this, our perception of music has changed. Music for music’s sake has shaped a new attitude that has yet to be analyzed, and we do not even know how today’s listener responds. We have the most various kinds of listeners, and perhaps we have some like those of medieval times, but our fundamental “understanding” of music has been turned over to a circle of “experts”—i.e., an informed and properly educated audience through which our entire attitude towards music has changed (and I do not mean for the better)—and our entire musical production takes shape for “groups” who are, or are presumed to be musically informed and educated, even though we cannot prove it, or if we can, only relatively. Our attention has been directed to a musical laboratory, or to how the work is put together (see musical analyses in concert programs) while the human relation (selfforgetting and the inner effects) is for some reason neglected. How can a listener come closer to a work such that he knows the material, its principal and secondary motives, its technical combinations (these escape us entirely

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in the case of polyphonic compositions—e.g., fugues—even if we are familiar with all the elements), or its formal construction (which we are likewise unable to retain)? I do not see how the listener can come closer to a work when instead of listening, he merely follows the elements that helped the composer create the work within its medium, and when, in the end, he forgets the work itself in favor of these elements.6 It is as if the listener wanted to “help” the composer compose and does not try to embrace what the music expresses. A very different and uncanny element in this matter is the ability to conceive a polyphonic composition, where each voice preserves its autonomy, despite its subordination to the whole. This style was developed by the composers of polyphony to such an extent that it is unthinkable that it was restricted merely to the composer and a narrow circle of performers, for it created an entire era in which music, with all its details, became infused with this form. Over the next period, our ability to comprehend this style disappears. Only with great effort can we immerse ourselves in this style (its “clichés” escape us, as with everything) and grasp these compositions that are alive and full of motion, where not color, dynamic nuances, or sentimental elements play a decisive role. Our homophonic, harmonic counterpoint is quite removed from this style, and if we want to follow these older compositions in their entirety (despite the apparent simplicity of doing so now), we need to exert a great deal of effort and get lost nevertheless after just a few measures. What accounts for this is the mysterious change in mental reaction that took place. This was triggered in part by the introduction of bar lines and the illusion of metrical symmetry, which became ingrained in us over the years and now impedes us from absorbing more complicated rhythms. Even in jazz, where the improvised rhythmic element developed to a marked perfection (this is likewise a “cliché”), it is surprising that the basis for this style is regular meter and that the rhythm becomes complex merely through ornamentation. Indonesian gamelan7 affects us exotically yet escapes us for the most part, despite all our attempts at imitation and the influence it has had on modern musical styles. Of course, we can gain a conception of it, but this is something we can achieve only “on paper,” at the table, through a cerebral, deductive process that does not bring it under our control as a whole. It is not a living experience, but a loose compilation of knowledge and technique that lacks spontaneity. What is not found here is that definitive repose that is necessary for controlling the conception, which only happens once it has crossed over to daily order, or into a mechanism. What were the causes of this mental change? June 19448

Our Solutions Occur in Time and Space When I look through remarks from various books = measurement; impulse to express = direction; impulse to communicate = extension. This is certainly correct,

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but direction towards what? And extension in what sense? We then arrive at a more detailed measurement. Extension in what direction? Direction in what way, in what capacity? Substance = what? Form = how? When we analyze a “substance,” we are making a measurement (time, space), and the same holds true for form. What = space, how = time. This all relates to music. The question of form as a geometric conception (a construction), or as a plastic one (a shape)—these are measurements in time and space (a comparison with a cathedral, architecture, mathematics, etc.).9 At the same time, form is functionally connected with the entire organism of tonal material and dependent on it. It would be difficult to employ Bach’s contrapuntal style for, in our sense of the word, a symphony, as a concerto grosso would come out in a natural way. It would be just as difficult to employ romantic musical material for a fugue. If we perform a madrigal with one of our large choirs, the “geometric” form is retained, but the inner-functioning, organic form is lost for good. Form is feeling. We cannot write a fugue and call it a symphonic poem. The conception of a melody for a solo violin and one for a string ensemble are psychologically very different. And the conception of a chamber music composition and a composition for a one-hundred-member orchestra call for entirely different states of mind. We likewise see that a certain theme—and as a result of this, yet another formation of the work (i.e., form)—is more appropriate for a sonata than a symphony, and on the contrary, for a voice than an instrument, and in a sonata cycle, for the rondo than the first movement, and as a question of instrumentation, for a flute than a violin, or for a clarinet than an oboe. In all of this, feeling for the entire organism can be found. If we admire a plant, flower, or leaf, sensation is likewise aroused by something other than its geometric form. Here we see that all “analyses” are mechanical.10 We feel this mixing of genres in music quite clearly, where the form of one genre is used for another (see the first movement of the Smetana trio,11 symphonic romanticism, and the great majority of modern works). We are bothered by the physical exertion of a modern orchestra when it tries to “dynamically reconcile” a composition which, on its own, has an insufficient kind of dynamism, or a kind of dynamism that overreaches the limits of its musical material. We often recognize the tempo of a musical work and the composition as a whole according to the formation of the melody, without even knowing the tempo marking.12 When a composer sees a melody in written form (Verdi, for example, or any other composer), he immediately knows whether or not it is alive. A melody in written form speaks right away, but the composer can “see” it, too, without it being written down. It is feeling, once again, a feeling for plasticity (this too is a term of time and space), but also a feeling for it being alive.13

[Formlessness is a Contradiction] The term formless is a contradiction: it was conceived for those things that do not benefit our conception of “order.” But in and of itself, neither “order” nor

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“disorder” exist in nature. These notions are triggered and controlled by our conception, which is relative and depends on conditions and relations. It is difficult to imagine something that is “shapeless” in our linear system of contours, and we likewise pay attention to the contour of an object and not the contours of the space in which it is found. A form can “follow laws,” but we do not know these laws (e.g., the form of plants, etc.); only instinctively do we sense them during the correct creative process. And sensing the correct relations, or the organism functioning as a whole, is a characteristic skill of the composer. The entire question of “style” and “personality” depends on this ability. Apart from this, “style” is not just the expression of a composer, but also an expression of his era and its “relationship” to the composer. The conditions of an era multiply to such an extent that it is almost impossible to find the “causes” as to why a style took shape in one way or another. And it is important to realize that style changes over time and not always simultaneously in the various arts. Of course, the personal expression of a composer will indicate the work’s qualities and deficiencies. But even if we take the composer’s personality into account, it will not be clear as to what extent his conscious and subconscious processes have determined the stability of the work. The ability for instinctive concentration, or “sensing,” depends on an entire complex of relations, where both the physical and emotional states play a role. Yet I do not mean to say by this that the composer plays merely an insignificant or mechanical role.14

[Specialization] The contemporary means by which works are explained to us has been induced by specialization, which is speculative, analytical, and invites complications. Since a work is an expression of relations, this cannot make understanding any easier.15

[Faulty Practices] I was just looking through some writings on music. In order to make a melody “easier to remember,” a text is placed beneath it—verses that are to emerge automatically while listening but emerge as an element entirely foreign to the work and create misunderstandings. We can note other practices—in ballet, for example. Dancers often bring out the rhythm to the detriment of the other elements and do not listen to the work as a whole. Thus the dancers limit their expression to just those numbers where they can follow the rhythmic shape, or just the conductor. And dancers often arrange their numbers according to their abilities and create an entirely different tempo; this brings the work to the ground.16 We can even see this in an artistic ensemble such

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as Sakharoff’s: just so they can follow the sixteenth notes of a Bach fugue and so they can “sweeten” it with the movement of their feet, they play the piece three times slower than it should be. You can imagine the result for the work, but few people seem to get bothered by this.17 The same holds true for the interpretation of art songs, where singers are overly dependent on the declamation, prosody, and “atmosphere” of the text. This all shows an artificial attitude towards the work, the artificial nature of the many lengthy writings on music, and how little the listener comes closer to the work through these means. In compositional practice, specialization of this kind on the “elements” is confirmed by the confusion in the younger generation’s works. A focus on the elements leads the creative process to an entirely different set of relations than is necessary. Rather than directing or controlling the form, the composer becomes controlled by it. I have several examples from teaching. One of my students made a point of writing “something” in sonata form. He brought me a theme that should have been used for a dance and not a sonata. I let him work with the theme, which he had analyzed according to all the elements. He carefully followed the schema of sonata form, and at a certain point, on its own, the entire composition came to a halt for good. But I let him search and continue. The more he worked, the more the composition fell apart. When I explained to him that we should not allow ourselves to be subordinated by the cliché of a form when our creative imagination and the formation of the work calls for different relations and solutions, he was so amazed by this that he exclaimed naively, “But no one ever told me this!” Nevertheless, he was a student who had gone through a number of schools and had very good training in the contemporary sense of controlling technique and showed genuine talent. But he was so impeded by his knowledge and by not being aware of the various spheres of relation that he followed what he had learned without thought. After I explained the character of his theme to him and he loosened up his imagination, the composition developed quickly, although the confusion of the previous approach left a detrimental effect on the work.18

The Question of Rhythm I will now turn to the question of rhythm and to something we consider natural: our ability to perceive music through metrical symmetry. There is a generally accepted premise that regular meters such as 43 and 44 are ingrained in us, but this, of course, is only “on paper.” It is as if we can listen only by sustaining symmetrical groupings of the beat in our minds and that it is only by registering departures from this symmetry that we can truly appreciate the rhythm. There might be some grounds for this, but we should not be misled. Even for the musician who is only listening, several measures might go by before the meter seems regular. If the meter alternates, as in modern composition, our sense for regular alternations of the beat breaks down or

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interferes.19 In modern composition, the supremacy of the measure has been nullified to a great extent, and the guiding unit takes form in running eighths or sixteenths. Seldom does the orchestral player count measures; he counts beats.20 I am not arguing against the kind of organic symmetry that creates the whole, but against the idea that the listener can enjoy the rhythm only by sustaining a certain kind of motion in his mind. This is a mistake, of course, because the listener does not control or direct the music, he follows it. Let us take the following syncopation, a favorite rhythmic gesture:



















In order to be aware of the disturbance in the symmetrical flow, we sometimes need to accentuate the strong beat. But this accentuation must be made by the composer; it will not be made by the listener for whom the syncopated rhythm turns into regular quarter notes after a number of measures:
















What is important is the composer’s ability to make this rhythm alive—i.e., to achieve his goal in effect and not only on paper. Here we see that other relations play a role, for example the construction of the melody, form, and style, and that this is not just an isolated question of rhythm. The composer, for example, can write a 43 Allegro in this configuration:








  
 


Visually, this is 43, but in effect, it is 42. Some metrical changes are easy for us, like:



      
    






    


 













And because we are used to symmetry, some are more complicated:

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And some are complicated psychologically:

   
     
  
  
  
  
  
  
  





which is actually this rhythm:


 
    
 

 
    
 

 
 
 

 
 
        




The psychological response is different for the conductor, who—while conducting like measures—instinctively places an accent on the strong beat with his gesture. In other words, he conducts into the rests:

      
    
  
  
  
  
  
  
  





or simply beats a 83 meter without paying much attention to what is happening in the orchestra. The player, on the other hand, must not emphasize the strong beats, but the musically accented ones. Most likely, he will only follow the eighth-note intervals without any consideration for the bar lines:



 

   
 

  
 
    
 
  
               

If this pattern lasted too long, the orchestra would fall apart. A player unaccustomed to modern rhythmic textures will probably follow the music like the conductor, but with greater care since he must avoid placing accents on the strong beat. If the player does not have a mechanical control of the irregular rhythm, the whole passage will get dragged down and lack definition. If the listener is not one of the “experts,”21 he will follow what the phrase suggests and have a natural listening experience:

    
 





    






which was the real intention of the composer. Now, if the composer had written it the way the listener actually hears it, we would get this:



 
    
 

 
    
 

 
 
 

         

but the orchestra would not be able to perform it, neither the conductor or the players. The composer’s intention in this case was to functionally express the melody but not to create a new rhythmic texture. Thus he does not require that the listener get

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the effect of a “more interesting” rhythm by sustaining a 83 flow. Instead, he wants the listener to hear what he is actually hearing. There is an easier way to write this phrase, both for performing and conducting:


 
     

 
     

 
   

 
         




But this manner does not satisfy the composer psychologically, because the final, empty beat of the 85 measure gives an entirely different picture of the phrase; it creates five eighth notes out of four, even though there is a rest on the fifth beat. Here we can see an entire set of consequences, both on paper and in effect.22 It might seem that our response to what we call rhythm is nothing more than an analysis of how much the rhythmic element diverges or does not diverge from the strong beat and that this is the only way we can understand it. But we clearly see that this is not the case. Indonesian gamelan23 escapes us to a certain extent, and Arabic and oriental melodies seem monotonous to us despite the fact—and perhaps for the very reason—that the rhythm is always changing and we have nothing against which “to lean.” Thus rhythm as such is a nonmusical element; we only hear pure rhythm when it is played by percussion. It is only one of the relations of melody, and it cannot exist without melody in musical form, even if we are dealing with a uniform succession of eighth notes. The construction of the melody creates the rhythm and not the other way around.24

A Small Problem of Time Let us take this chord played by an ensemble of strings:


 



 










Let us imagine the small interval of time where the chord should break off, or where the sound should come to an end (let us take a slow tempo). It is apparent that the sound ends neither like this:





 

  
 

nor like this:


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(at this point, the horns have already come in on the first beat). Thus the chord must end exactly on the bar line:


 


 




We should note how difficult it is to capture this exact moment in time through analysis, even though the player ends mechanically without giving it much thought.

[Dynamic Performances] The audience accepts interpretations of works without giving it much thought. Today we hear works that are bent out of shape both formally and musically because the conductor is a “showman” for whom the question of music is secondary. And we should note that a great majority of listeners admire these “dynamic” performances.

Public Opinion of the Composer 2 July 1944 Public opinion of the composer and his social status is confused in many ways. All of the eras left an influence, and today we still see him through a mixture of the roles he took in past times: a craftsman, servant, lackey, serf, freeman, individualist, fantasist, rational, irrational, visionary, dreamer, unkempt, useful, unnecessary, etc. Socially, he is neither worker, nor bourgeois, but some sort of parasite that cannot be categorized. Due to all this confusion, we are unable to gain an idea of who the composer is. Most people view him romantically, which is the spectacular view that is still in demand. Most people enjoy a certain mystery about him and his works, or at least those people who are interested in music. But for everyone else, he is simply unnecessary and “someone who does nothing.” When the composer’s music becomes a question “of propaganda,” or “of the state,” the story gets tricky once again. Bureaucrats will gladly employ a composer if he is needed for “propaganda,” but they look at him skeptically, as if his endeavor had no meaning. His work needs to be done for some kind of cultural need, but in the end, it says nothing to their “bureaucratic” state of mind. This state of affairs probably emerged because an awareness of music became widespread only with opera, where the function is not purely musical. In opera, the voice brings us closer to the music, but the libretto takes us further away. This would explain many things, like the way we no longer understand polyphony and its freedom of multiple voices. But until this time, music was a function, whether it was part of a religious ceremony in the cult of the church, or a form of employment with the

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troubadours and court orchestras. With opera and its appeal to the masses, musical understanding crossed over to a different field25 with the exception of those who performed it, or those who made a living from it and were incapable of doing anything else. This occupation, which was never organized or profitable (with a few exceptions, i.e., the guilds, the minnesingers, etc.), was for some reason carried out on the surface by people of a different temperament. This leisurely trade into which they placed their joy shaped a view that is sustained to this day by a laziness of thinking. Until recently, the composer—who knew nothing apart from his profession—was considered “uneducated,” to have a life that is unregulated, and to whom much can be forgiven since he is an artist. This was quite often true, but today, the composer’s social status has changed to the extent that this is completely false. Thus we see why composers who sensed this view began to close themselves off from society and even began to accentuate these differences.

[“Creating” Culture] When we analyze past cultures, we see, say, Egyptian culture, or Greek culture, etc. But was Egypt or Greece aware of their culture, apart from those who were creating it? Was an architect of the Gothic era, who was considered merely a craftsman just like any other worker, aware that he was creating culture, even if he never “signed off” on his work? It is self-evident that he had ambition and took pleasure in his profession, in “craftsmanship,” and took pride in battling for his livelihood. Today we see how people look almost upset when they learn that a work was “commissioned,” as if this lowered the value of the composer and his work (I mean commissions that are acceptable to the composer). Yet until recently, all composers produced nothing but commissions, either directly, or through the demands of their position, and left behind a magnificent work. We know that they did not try to create culture, or write to “preserve works for future generations,” but that they worked quickly and within a certain cliché that they enlivened with their imagination and personality and created a work that they then forgot about or set aside since they wrote it for a single occasion. In other words, after the performance, the work no longer had “function.” This explains the various mannerisms of composition, for example “gaining time,” the neglect in the care of older manuscripts, and the way that works were performed until editors began to print and preserve them. We know that—with the advent of collections—interest in national song dates back only to recent times and that the focus was on the literary aspect rather than the musical one, which was difficult to capture in notated form. If recordings had been available at that time, they would have acquired an entirely different shape. All we have now is a version of a song for which an exact notation had not been developed; instead, a purely metric notation was used that was only appropriate

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for certain kinds of dance songs. Indeed, the transcription of rhythmic songs, like those of Mexico, was impossible during earlier times due to an inability to notate their subtle and irregular rhythms. Thus just as we do not know what Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa looked like when it was painted, we, too, have lost an idea of what music, a song, or new cathedral looked like during its particular time and how people responded.

[“Serving” the Human Race] Does an artist, scientist, or those who search for the truth, need to feel that they are “serving” the human race? Do they need to be a “Good Samaritan,” or is it purely scientific interest that compels them to search? Humanity, of course, is among their primary concerns, but it does not necessarily play a role while they work. Commenting on Descartes, Van Loon writes: “It was the behavior of a certain kind of microbe that exasperated them, and they were out to get that microbe and destroy it, which is a great benefit for humanity, of course, but this was a matter of complete indifference to them.”26 The question is whether this premise of “serving” humanity, which is still in fashion, disturbs the subconscious creative process. It is something that is ethically justified, but irrelevant, because a result in science—as in the case of the microbe—will not change, and humanity will still profit from the discovery. If a scientist started thinking about these things, he would stop working on all the discoveries that might get transformed into the destruction of man. Is this not the same with a composer, but to a greater extent? Should a composer write down a melody without thinking beforehand whether it will “serve” the human race? Is this not the demand of today’s dilettante aesthetics? This issue is important because it makes the composer pretentious: it imposes a state of mind on him that is irrelevant and can often bring harm. Is this not the consequence of Wagner, German metaphysics, and bad interpretations of Beethoven? Didn’t composers create works throughout the ages with craftsmanship in mind rather than having their works be a critique of society? For a composer, humanity is a given; it is a foundation, feeling, but not knowledge. Doesn’t this lead to every composer wanting to create an era of his own and not wanting to work together? This is messianism—a German influence!27 This leads every composer to believe that he is at the center of the world and a savior of culture. I do not think that Bach and Mozart thought of themselves this way. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven were all well aware of the contributions of others and the time it took to make their own work possible.28 Today the demand for messianism is not only a premise of the composer, but also of the public, of each individual who, when he hears a work at a concert, should be aware that the composer is “saving” the human race.29

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Appraising Music Appraising music is an uncanny matter. Following a musical work can take place only over time, or over the course of a performance. Unlike a painting, we cannot gain an idea of a musical work “all at once.” With a musical work, neither the listener nor critic knows what the next measures will bring, and they cannot retain the measures that went by very long. This gets repeated over more frequent hearings of the same work with the only difference that the listener has certain “parts” in his memory but not the work as a whole. In order to appraise a work properly, it would be necessary to learn it from the score or play it oneself; in other words, to learn it by memory. But even here, our recollection of the work develops over time. What is easier to grasp is the construction, or plasticity. A musical construction is possible to grasp as a plasticity—not in the relation of motive to motive—but in the relation of the motive to the construction.

[The Origins of the Rest] An important element that we cannot call “musical” is silence, rest, repose; it is like zero in mathematics. But where does the rest come from? Is it the natural result of singing, or of the need for the human voice to breathe? Is it the result of wind instruments, where the player needs to take a breath? Is it the result of speech and declamation? Or is it a phenomenon entirely organic? We should not forget that, in and of itself, the rest contains a certain kind of psychological tension. Thus is it the result of the need for dramatic tension in today’s means of musical expression? The importance of the rest only dates back to recent times; during the era of polyphony, it appears quite rarely. What was its role in plainchant, ancient Greece, and in Eastern music? One of the examples of the function of the rest can be found in the fact that today, not only do we hear the music, but we “see” it as well by reading the score. Take for example the motive from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony:



    




For the layman who only listens, the result is an ordinary triplet. But for the professional musician with the score, the result is entirely different. The result is feeling the rest, even accentuating the rest, because the motive—as made clear by the way it develops—is not a triplet, but regular eighth notes of a 42 measure. In this case, we need to accentuate the first eighth beat; we instinctively “hear” the rest and emphasize it in our minds so we can get a correct picture of the motive and phrase. Here the rest is a structural element:

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Notice the conductor who, with the entire weight of his gesture, indicates this beat on which nothing is happening; this is a difficult problem for the conductor. The sonic result would be the same if he conducted:


  

     
   






but there would be no satisfaction for someone who saw this example because— since the work has already crossed into tradition—he would get confused. In other words, we already “know” that a rest is there. Even if we wanted to imagine a triplet, we would succeed only with great difficulty.30

[The “Logic” of Analysis] How can we grasp something that only goes by over time? For this we have the analysis of form. But the critic determines the form ex post facto: he divides up something that is in reality chaotic, just as he considers a work with a new construction chaotic. Analysis is limited to divisions such as A B A, or the more complicated A B b A C A1 A2 B C b Coda etc.; this is all a blur. Every composition can be divided up this way, and we should note that few of Beethoven’s sonatas correspond exactly to the schema of sonata form. Altogether, an analysis of this kind tells us little because it has nothing to do with the sonic realization. And for that matter, no one really composes this way.31 Damage can be inflicted when this system of “logic” begins to assume the role of the composition, because there is no “logic” for composing. But based on this system of compositional “logic,” certain conclusions get put into practice that bring about more confusion. There is no foundation of “logic” that a composer wrote a work by this or that method. We can draw conclusions about works that have become daily fare, but this is convention and not “logic.” The composer follows a certain balance and “order,” but he does not do this through the “logic” of the material, but through the relation of the materials. A composer might employ a very “illogical” continuation of the opening, yet we can still explain the work “logically.” Composing is a question of relations, and the composer’s ability to direct these relations is a question of practice. Just as we cannot understand gravity through logic, neither can we explain the creative process through logic, unless we were to give the word a different meaning. Thus if we hear that a composition has a “logical” development, or a “logical” form, we are only hearing the words of a phrase.32

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[Having a “Message”] Van Loon writes: Our age is too conscious of its social obligation towards its fellow countryman. Did Rabelais have what nowadays we call a “message?” I doubt it. I find no evidence that he ever thought of himself as a reformer and I am sure that he would have greatly resented being classified among the contemporary uplifters. But in spite of his pretense that he wrote only to please himself, he must have known that there was a great deal more to his book than appeared on the surface.33

This notion of having a “message” which makes the artist feel like a “benefactor of humanity”—if a composer accepts this a priori, it will complicate his creative process. This idea comes from sentimentality, self-pity, and selfishness. It emerged in the aesthetics of the previous era due to the many writers who needed to write about art but did not know what to write. It is the natural result of the post-romantic outlook, of the age of the “hero,” of messianism, of trying to save humanity. We know many figures in the arts who really were benefactors of humanity, but most of them did not think of themselves this way and would never have accepted this portrayal. Because for them, creating art came through a natural force, through a natural gift, or through a function that they fulfilled, and they did not give any thought to conveying a “message.” They certainly worked for the welfare of the whole, but this is a great step from considering oneself a “benefactor of humanity.” These figures attempted to show human frailties, to come as close as possible to human dignity, and this is a natural desire. They were not Messiahs, but philosophers of life who hoped that the next stage in humanity would come closer to their ideal. What we find here is a love for life and a respect for mankind, where having a “message” does not play a role. In a great creative artist, having a message is a given by nature. It is not something conscious and cannot be learned: it is part of the natural capacity that creates a great artist. Not Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and not even Beethoven, I am sure—who already lived at the beginning of the age of megalomania—none of these artists considered themselves “benefactors of humanity.” Nor did plainchant have a “message,” nor the entire output until romanticism, as well as much of the output well into the romantic era, too. Having a message is perfectly acceptable as long as it is not predetermined. A predetermined message places the composer in a false state of mind. There is a great difference between doing something naturally and forcing oneself to do it. There is a great difference between being given a “prescription” as to how we are supposed to do something, what type of attitude we are obliged to assume so we are considered a sufficiently great artist, and doing something we have to do, something that is a given to us with its entire artistic potential such that we consider it natural. We are usually unaware of it. But when it becomes a “prescription,” it emerges within an entirely different function.34

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What does a work look like when a composer is forced to convey a message?35 In Central Europe, we are familiar with the pointless battles between form and content, where composers were divided into “ordinary musicians” and “spiritual creators.” With the spiritual creators a program was needed, one that is “worthy of man.” After Brahms, we suddenly had Strauss and a development towards egotism and private affairs (see Sinfonia Domestica, Ein Heldenleben). The work became restricted to the message of a composer who is now at the center of the universe. Another development was the “battle with fate”: man is small, he gets lost in the world, yet he is not so small, he is great, huge; he battles with fate and is always victorious in his state of sorrow and spirit.36 Everything in the composer’s life is so important that—not only is he worthy of the current generation—but future ones as well. Everything is great, even though it is small, and the composer no longer seeks a “closed whole.” Instead he wants endless desire: the orchestra, which enlarges to the greatest dimensions, is no longer enough for him, and neither is form, which he draws out to endless lengths (see Mahler, Suk). A composer’s private life is often quite different from what he instills in his message—when he caters to others!37

The Effect on Form Today form has become adapted to this idea of “victory over fate” so that a “climax,” or “catharsis” can be reached at the end of each composition (as if believing in life were some kind of special “victory”). This no longer means “concluding” a composition, but forcing it to a close with an apotheosis, or an allegory with great commotion. This is different from the closed whole of earlier eras, of the fugue, polyphony, the classical forms, and the concerto grosso, where we find a calm development of musical relations. When we look more closely at this phenomenon, we realize the real nature of this “victory” and “salvation.” The desire to “suffer” becomes a cliché. The composer, who is considered a small god (or he considers himself as such), has the obligation to suffer more than others, and he needs to emphasize this and let the world know that he is bringing “salvation” to others. This is an artificial construct (there is no gauge for suffering and suffering is not reserved for the chosen), and as a result, the composer never feels fully appreciated. Thus in order for him to reach a climax of this kind where he finally expresses his optimism, he is forced to appear pessimistic throughout the entire work. And even here, his “victory” and “salvation” resound pessimistically. But this actually means that he is not satisfied and that he is not victorious, because in the next composition, he begins to “battle” over the same thing once again. The entire system is constructed for the composer: it flatters him, and he even shapes his output according to this idea. It also flatters the listeners, because they are invited to commiserate with the composer.

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This is quite different from the deep feeling that emanates from a strong love and embrace of life. This is a real drama, and history has left us documents of great worth. This is where “salvation” gains an entirely different appearance and is very different from the cliché that only appears dramatic. Here we see in the composer strong conviction, a feeling for humanity with all its strengths and weaknesses, and an energy and desire to fulfill a life that he loves, even though he criticizes it and accepts suffering as one of its elements. And he criticizes it not so he can overcome it, but so he can experience it to the full. This is very different from the kind of ephemeral victory that testifies to nothing more than a lack of peace. Victory over fate! What is this in effect? We know works about fate from the Greek dramas, but look how different this is! We know the dramas by Dostoyevsky, but look how different this kind of suffering is. We know Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which is considered the basis for all later “salvations,” but look how different this victory is, the kind of belief it has in humanity, and how petty and false most of the other small personal victories are when compared to this work. A technical solution demands elements that are natural.38 But once these elements are overemphasized, the relations, structure, and functional nature of the work get thrown out of order. These traces of literary influence from the previous era lead to a metaphysical conception and cliché. Here the composition gets directed towards a metaphysical conclusion, and we are left with little more than a continuation of tones that are driven uphill to a climax.

The Sonata as a “Natural Expression of Order” Many elements played a role in its development, most of which we are unaware: it is a complex both spiritual and practical. It is like a triangle. But a triangle can be neither dramatic nor dynamic. And schematically speaking, neither can form, which is a structure of relations that is dramatic both as a whole and in its contents. But once we begin to overemphasize certain elements, the structure of the work changes in terms of its content and sound, and it is no longer a triangle, or “closed harmony.” Instead, the composition races uphill, the ratio of relations gets disturbed, and we rise, rise, until we are “aloft,” at a “conclusion,” at a greatly developed, spectacular conclusion that makes an effect and appears to have meaning but really says nothing at all. These are the results of dynamism that we fail to see: rather than becoming an object of beauty, the musical work strains the nerves. This is irrespective of the fact that searching for a “conclusion” through these means does not make any sense. A musical idea is already exactly expressed in the form of the themes and motives, and if the composition is constructed organically, it must come to an end where it organically must come to an end,

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without the need of making some kind of fuss about it. We lose the beauty of form in this system of resolution that drives the composition “uphill.” We do not get repose, or the chance to stop and get oriented. Everything is driven forward like an avalanche, as if the goal of the work were its end.

Intensity and Dynamism Are Not the Same Thing Many of Bach’s preludes have an astonishing intensity, yet we are dealing nevertheless with a calm, non-dynamic largo. We hear this kind of intensity in Bach’s “conclusions,” but not in the sense of dynamics. For us, a “conclusion” has a different character: it is a dynamic intensification as if what was said over the course of the composition suddenly gains enlightenment. Often it is merely a cliché that appears dramatic and dynamic but does not really agree with the composer’s temperament or style. Whereas Bach and Mozart were dramatic only at a certain moment of the work (and not always at the end), we feel the need to be dramatic throughout. We often find a dramatic moment in Mozart, tension in the development (which was sometimes a cliché that did not correspond to his conception and was written simply to “finish”), but at the end of the work, we find a calm conclusion. At those places where Mozart and Beethoven paused so they could prepare a contrast or second theme, this is no longer possible for us because we are afraid we will interrupt the continuous ascent. As a result, we get deprived of the contrasting elements of a composition that loses its breath.39 In other words, we get deprived of the clarity of form and the contrasts that the work can elicit. I have often told my students that their attention gets stuck on how to develop a theme (i.e., that dynamic element, constantly forcing one payload uphill) through which they lose sight of the entire composition, not only from the aspect of form, but from the aspect of creation.

Feeling as a Technical Element and Not Knowledge: The Force of Orchestral Sound as a Relation We almost “weigh” sound in combinations of different instruments and groups: strings, woodwinds, brass, individual instruments, etc. Nuances (piano, pianissimo, etc.) are often a difficult problem, and they must be indicated exactly. A nuance is very relative. It needs to be weighed out and sensed (the individual player, like the composer, needs to place it instinctively as well). The same combination of instruments, or a melody, will sound differently piano than forte. Phrasing a motive is likewise feeling and not a calculation. And we can indicate a tempo only relatively, even if we rely on a metronome.40

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[Our Changing Emotional Response] The idea that the audience lives through the composer’s emotional experience is groundless. If a composer listens to his own work, will it trigger the same emotional response in him that it did while he was working on it? Most definitely not, or not always so for each hearing. If this were the case, a particular work would have the same emotional effect once and for all, which it does not. Just as a work becomes subject to our intellectual changes, it becomes subject to spiritual and social changes as well.

[Revising a Musical Work] Why doesn’t a composer revise his work and adjust it according to his new experiences? Because at the moment he composed it, the work as an organism is complete. When Beethoven composed his Ninth Symphony, his First Symphony certainly did not seem “weak” to him. And even if it did, he did not have the desire to rewrite it. A work is the expression of a specific moment, situation, and creative state of the composer—even with its mistakes, which become a characteristic of the work over time and which we accept as an element and not a mistake. The work is irreversible, a fait-accompli, a certain level of perfection and order. If this were not the case, a composer would be constantly revising his work without ever reaching perfection. And the more he would revise it, the more the original organism would fall apart.41

[Faulty Premises] The premise that the listener and composer share the same emotional experience is fiction. It is based on the premise of cause and effect. The premise of music education is likewise overly generalized and given too much credit. It would be interesting to see some statistics on this because the critic’s musical training is often insufficient.

[Adding the Visual Element] It is now necessary to add a visual element for the effect of an immediate hearing— i.e., to read the score—which was not the case during earlier times. Today the visual element supports the memory: it contributes to our analysis and judgment and to a more exact knowledge of the work. But except for the professionals, the score is

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not the living sound. Through the help of the score and repeated hearings, the work becomes situated in our consciousness but with all of its inner and outer complexes, our attitude and mental state during each hearing, our historical distance from the work, and in the case of historical analysis, the placement of the work among others. This means that the work does not change, but that we change while we are processing the work.

[Knowing the Technical Details] In contemporary education, knowing the technical details is required for “understanding” the work. We do this with the help of analysis (i.e., the analysis of harmony, rhythm, etc.), which is supposed to show a certain level of the work. Thus the work gets turned back to a certain circle of “experts,” or to those who consider themselves experts, but their “expertise” and “erudition” is never explored. Their expertise often depends on attending a series of subscription concerts through which their perspective is considered informed and broadened. And we should note that this ever-present “musical audience” is commonly much more conservative and clings to opinions that they adopt at leisure. From here comes the attempt by music education to teach people from the most primitive beginnings all the way through to the great complexes by which they think they are promoting understanding. But the fact is that our attention gets turned away from the work to a laboratory, which is not essential for our experience. We assume that the listener has a higher level of education, but it is of a kind that is technical and aesthetically sterile. In painting, for example, it is as if the observer were supposed to consciously bring to mind all the relations of color and to know how they affect one another. And if he does so correctly, he will know whether the painting’s construction complies with certain geometrical rules, etc. It is as if without this kind of knowledge, the observer would be unable to understand the work. Or it would be like requiring a person to know all the laws of physics when he wants to slice an apple (matter, resistance, etc.), an entire complex of laws for each gesture. But even if he knew these laws, he would not be slicing the apple so he can substantiate them, but because he wants to eat the apple—i.e., to have a certain pleasure or enjoyment from the taste of the apple—and not because the apple offers resistance to the knife, or that he pretends that the apple is imaginary. We would not need to discuss these matters were it not for the fact that the composer accepts this system of education and expects the audience to accept it as well. This leads to the need for a tremendous amount of intellectual resourcefulness, and the composer ends up writing a work that is intended for the eyes, or an intellectual game. The work is then not alive, but a calculation.42

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[All Contact with Life is Affective] All contact with life is affective (experience, attention, action), thus there is no evidence for the premise of a single emotion in a musical work. It is just like saying, “music develops over time.” This is certainly correct, but this statement loses value because everything develops over time. Even we develop over time while we listen to a work. It is merely a definition that searches for some form of stabilization.43

[Universal Education] It is in just today’s times, when music has become accessible to people of all classes, that we require a greater knowledge than ever before. As a result, the listener no longer listens but “observes.” The attempt to broaden the listener’s perspective through technical knowledge (i.e., musical analyses, literary accounts, a romantic view of creation, etc.) does have an effect, but it only takes his attention away from the work. The work was not written just so the listener can admire the composer’s abilities from the aspect of technique, which is often quite mechanical. The listener who knows sonata form is neither surprised nor dissatisfied when the composer arrives at the recapitulation, because this is the style of the sonata. In program music, the listener who follows the program gets completely lost and finds his place only at the end, without having listened to the work in the true sense of the word. Yet the issue of how to help understanding remains a mystery. Those who search for interpretations and speak for others by controlling emotions have become fixated on certain conclusions and create misleading definitions about how music affects the audience. These definitions are literary, aesthetic, psychological, scientific, or all these put together, but in the end, the fundamental issue remains confused and the interpretations that are meant to help “understanding” do not satisfy. This demand relates not only to music, but to other fields as well. What we call “universal education” assumes that each person has a knowledge of everything. It is a very bizarre trust in human ability that is not supported by anything and impossible to achieve, even in its roughest outlines. There are areas of knowledge that we acquire through daily experience, and there are abilities that are a “given,” but the others need to be learned—just like we need to learn a foreign language, the elements of one’s occupation, and virtually everything else. And if we leave out the general public, which does not have the time to study, this demand does not even benefit those we call educated and have merely a vague idea about everything. Yet today’s demand is to know everything, all the literature, the entire field of philosophy, and not only to know it, but to be able to explain it as well.44 At the

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same time, the very elements of this education are often so confusing (see aesthetics, psychology, etc.) that it is impossible for the layman to make any clear conclusions. And the same holds true for the professional, someone who devotes his entire life to his field. No longer do we live in a time when an educated person can draw from a few books, or just simply one. Today we have such a huge amount of explanatory literature that goes into such abstract detail and has so many contradictions that we get lost to the point of no return. We have lost a common denominator that has nothing to do with this demand for education. All of this has certain consequences. When a composer writes for a “musically educated” audience, he knows that he is writing for “experts,” or for those he considers to be experts. And the more demanding the composer is, the more his circle of listeners narrows. We have seen the results: they are not even worth the price of the paper. What is more, the composer’s professional training is in decline (merging training with individuality is not possible it seems), and as a result, we have many amateur composers who consider themselves professionals. Take for example music critics, many of whom do not play an instrument, or are not even proficient in theory. Nevertheless, these are the same people who direct this “universal education.” And here I mean critics and essayists in a general sense. Just imagine what you have read (because many of you have not read) about painting over the past few years, or a field that everyone can write about and everyone does more or less. Imagine this in a collective picture and you will see that we have come to something that goes beyond human understanding. The result for “universal education” is confusion or zero. You know much less about the subject than ever before. It all gets eroded to such an extent that we lose all contact with our original response to the work. Since everyone wants to bring forth a better truth, or prove his superiority in the matter, and since we are dealing mostly with the abstract phrases and games of intellectuals, we arrive at a place where we are almost embarrassed about the ordinary pleasure that an artistic work brings us and where we lose the whole for its details. Instead of universal education, the work becomes an intellectual structure without life and we lose all interest. Another example is how, through continuous exaggeration, our picture of ancient cultures and the different historical eras gets so distorted that we lose all perspective. Today everything that Bach and Beethoven wrote is considered ingenious. When we talk about Bach, dithyrambic cries resound, even though most people get bored by Bach. An artistic quality gets imposed by aestheticians who do not have a living relationship to the work and who are able to delegate better as the exclusive “experts” but only from behind a veil of rich phrases. And since fashion calls out for “experts,” they take up a position, so to speak, for free. If no one questions me, I know; if I would explain to a questioner, I know not. —St. Augustine—Confession XI. 1445

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[An Expression of World-Feeling] According to Spengler, each era and each work has a “type fundamentally peculiar and unique, an expression of a specific world-feeling, a symbol having a specific validity which is even capable of scientific definition, a principle of ordering the Become which reflects the central essence of one and only one soul, viz., the soul of that particular Culture.”46 A “world-feeling” of this kind might be useful when we classify the different eras and styles, but it does little to help our understanding of art and cultures. In music, our classifications are historical and have their faults. An explanation such as Palestrina, Bach: sacred music; Haydn, Mozart, and everything classical: aristocratic background; and everything else as bourgeois, romantic, nationalist, etc.—all of this is tremendously vague. “Sacred music” as such does not exist, and aristocratic courts and music have essentially nothing in common. With the classical style, music developed under the influence of new instruments,47 which is a technical and practical element, just like sacred music developed through the practical use of the choir. A bourgeois or proletarian reading of music is completely artificial.48 And we view Gothic art as a sudden transformation, or something that came about through great effort, even though we know that this is not true. But how did composers of the past view a change in era or style? How did Bach look at his younger contemporaries, such as his son C. P. E. Bach? He surely must have considered it a mistake, or some kind of “musiquette,” and through his best will and ability, he was unable to appreciate the new nature of the expression, or to understand the change. His affective attitude was of a completely different order. And despite our historical perspective, even we cannot comprehend the change from difficult polyphony to simple homophony (even though we explain it through the influence of instruments and the need for expression), because the entire essence of music changed at its core. All of the rules and elements suddenly changed as a consequence of something unknown to us and changed not into an experiment, but into a definitive, perfected, and specific form in which the spirit and details and the entire organism of the work grew into a definitive whole. Even though there was no searching, a new expression emerged that had little to do with what had been in practice before, either in form or contents. The heirs of Bach certainly understood his mode of expression and valued it, yet their style was of an entirely new world. We, on the other hand, do not understand how the composers of Haydn’s era could neglect their manuscripts, or how they could write for a single occasion and consider their task complete. Today we have the printing press, regular concerts, and an organized musical market. Thus it seems strange to us that these perfect works were written almost mechanically, with all the possible “clichés” for gaining time. We have enough technique and imagination to write a work “like” Mozart or “like” Bach (I do not mean “pastiche”). Yet we really cannot, because our mental state is so removed from these composers that we are unable to employ their material

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in any technical detail. Our spiritual training is so different that the organism of the work does not allow it. We would have to write the work just like Mozart to employ his material in any technical detail. This is one of the greatest mysteries of composition: how all the elements of a work develop into an organic and harmonic whole, without the effort, inventiveness, and searching of the composer. This is because, instinctively and almost mechanically, one thought is conditioned by the next, and a specific realization must comply with specific conditions and techniques.

On the Aspect of Emotion I remember an anecdote I once heard in Paris. During a rehearsal of Debussy’s La Mer, a misunderstanding emerged between Toscanini and one of the players on the interpretation of a technically difficult English horn passage from the second movement, entitled “Jeux des vagues.” After several unsuccessful attempts, the player announced that he wanted “to depict” the waves according to the title. Toscanini responded: “No, you stick to the notes, I will make the waves.”49 That was a good answer for the spirit of a rehearsal, but Toscanini did not make any more waves than any other conductor, because with the greatest respect and the most exquisite authority, he follows what is written in the score, not “waves,” but notes. This leads me to the thought of devoting greater attention to the orchestra and to the question of who projects this oft-debated emotional aspect—i.e., the sentiment of the musical work. The conductor? Certainly, but it is not the conductor who plays, but the players. Here we are at a unique phenomenon. Each player has an emotional response to his part, his instrument, and to the work, but his attention is focused primarily on his part and its technical difficulties. In other words, each player has only a certain portion of the emotional content, and even though he instills sentiment into his playing, this is merely a “local,” or mechanical sentiment, “his” sentiment, which is incomplete and can get detached from the emotional will of the work. What is most important for him is his musical problem (i.e., the phrasing, breathing, bowing, a solo passage, etc.). What is more, the player does not always have a complete grasp of the work, and there are always several players in the orchestra whose response is zero.50 Thus an orchestra is a heterogeneous complex—a composite of individual attitudes and concerns. Altogether, the “total” sentiment of the work, or the overall sentiment, is something quite different from what is generally explained. I know that you will object, that this “sentiment” is in the work itself, or that the conductor brings out these sundry elements. But in effect, it is the work on its own that projects this sentiment and only while it is being performed. Indeed, the conductor creates a new whole through his interpretation of the work, but he does not fundamentally change the attitude of the orchestra from the aspect of “sentiment.” If the player “responds” to his part, this happens because he is musically gifted, and not because he wants to project the

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sentiment, and neither would we want him to.51 For that matter, if the composer wants to project a standardized sentiment, there are numerous “clichés” that he can make use of. But when it comes to today’s conductor, many of them try to show off the work’s sentiment by conducting “spectacularly” for the audience. I remember a conductor from my time in a European orchestra who acted out entire dramas on the podium, entire scenes with all the shades of feeling which he expressed through gestures, facial expressions, poses, and grimaces—everything done for the sake of triggering intense emotions, just for the audience. Little did he pay attention to the work and the orchestra and little did we pay attention to him. We actually tried to ignore him because he confused us. This happens quite often, especially when the conductor forces himself into ecstasy when it is really not necessary. A strange game is being played with music here. But just imagine a quartet, or a group that plays at home for itself! Without an audience! Where is this demand for sentiment? Here sentiment takes form through the most ordinary joy of four people to whom music gives pleasure, where there is no mystery or mysticism, and not even the demand for a perfect reading. But in spite of this, they have an emotional response that is strong, natural, and genuine. And these four people, may they be professionals or amateurs, do nothing more than play their part well and try to bring the work in tune with the intentions of the musical material. Likewise, the orchestral player, whose role is functional, is also a member of a collective. What is primary for the player is his craft—i.e., his craft of mastering his instrument from the aspect of technique and musicality. Their role is not to know Kant, Bergson, or the latest aesthetic developments (even though many of them do, which does not change their attitude very much) but to honestly and joyfully carry out their profession through which their genuine and instinctive idea of the music is embodied along with their attitude towards musical expression. And they do not enhance their attitude through affected ideas. Instead, their attitude is simple, direct, and healthy. The conductor, too, carries out his craft, where there is a natural relationship and a subordination to the work. And here we come to those “unwritten laws,” where producing “sentiment” does not play a primary role. Here sentiment comes as a natural result of the work’s tonal content and not through some cheap, sentimental varnish, or what is most often merely a fictitious background. It is a question of talent, or gift—not everyone can be a musician or performer. Musical style, order, organization, and the whole—these things need to be within us, and interpretation should not rely on faking emotions in detail. It is not possible to achieve this order in any other way than through a good performance of the work according to its musical and stylistic demands: these are the metaphysics of music and tones. This is why we cannot “explain” music and why the composer tends to resist static readings in our romantic, emotional manner, which merely leads our attention away from the actual mystery and joy of understanding, or the capacity to feel those emotions that are healthy and primary and not those that are calculated and forced by fashion or whatever else.52

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Emotion Emotion is a natural part of each event and each action and thus a part of the creative process. But the composer does not create “for” this emotion. An emotionally inspired idea is different from this, and the same holds true for concretely realizing this idea. Conceiving a composition does not take a long time. But writing it down is a tedious, intellectual, and manual undertaking.

Inner Order An inner order directs the musical conception and not the personal emotion we gain from the work. If this were not the case, we would be able to play Bach like a romantic, a conductor could present Mozart like a neurotic, and a paranoiac could definitively change a work into something it is not. This is because there is “style” and “order,” which are likewise emotions, but of a different kind. What else is there other than this “inner order” that compels a musician to play a melody beautifully? What does this really mean? To play it emotionally? To play it technically well? Or to play it with deep spiritual feeling? None of this provides definition. The flautist Marcel Moyse once told me that he spent two years on a phrase from the Mozart concerto53 before he found the correct way to play it. What is important in the performer’s approach to the music is understanding the formation and function of the melody, the structure of the melody, its place in the whole, the fingering, breathing, nuances, etc. But at the core, there is instinctive feeling, conjecture, intuition, and embracing the whole. All of this is emotion, but of a special kind. Perhaps it is best not to call it emotion at all because the common meaning of the term takes us to a different field. Breaking up a flute phrase to “breathe” is certainly not an emotional element. But neither is it a purely technical one since it is linked to the formation of the melody, its spirit, and expression. The player cannot breathe whenever he wants, because he needs to find a way to leave the melody undisturbed. There is another element that we seldom consider, if at all. If we were to determine a melody statistically, or as a number, the sum total would not be the same when we play it on the piano as opposed to another instrument, for example the cello. Here, too, we find an unwritten law. When a composer writes for an instrument, he hears paradoxically something else than what he plays on the piano, because each tone changes in function based on the instrument that the melody was conceived for. The same tone of the same melody does not always have the same value, or the same sum total! For the player, this an instinctive problem, a problem of the musical medium and feeling. But is this emotion? Just listen to a national song sung by common people and then by a concert vocalist—look how poor it sounds, devoid of its magic. Or just play a melody on the piano that you have heard performed beautifully on an instrument or sung, look how strange it seems.

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Alexanian54 once told me an interesting story from Casals’s youth. In one of Bach’s sonatas, Casals was not satisfied with a note in a middle position for which he could not find a solution for the longest time—even in debates with Alexanian, who is also a cellist and an excellent theoretician of the instrument. The solution that Casals found—through which the entire melody suddenly gained great plasticity and beauty—is really quite surprising and one that no one notices while listening. Casals discovered that—due to the configuration of the melody—he could not play the note D as on the piano but needed to play it higher. In reality, he almost plays it as a D♯ so he can achieve the correct melodic balance. The effect is really quite surprising, but you do not know how he achieved it. He recorded this sonata and you can see for yourself.

Self-Forgetting [I] Self-forgetting is a kind of emotion of which we are unaware. The listener in the concert hall forgets his “time” and lives “in the time of the composition.” We do not take into account things that are self-evident. Breathing, for example, and many other things, as long as they are functioning properly. To serve something, a work, art—this is a kind of self-forgetting; often it is self-repressing. The composer, too, forgets himself while he works—i.e., he loses track of his time and surroundings just like during any period of concentration. From the moment he finds an idea until he writes it down, he loses contact with his time and space. We could almost say that he does not accentuate his personality or emotions because there is nothing that he knows about at that time; he has suddenly entered a different sphere. Is it possible to say that self-forgetting and accentuating oneself is one and the same thing?

[A Real and Fictitious Tragedy] For many years between the wars, mankind did not realize the drama and tragedy that was unfolding before his eyes that was directly affecting his chances for survival. The threat was easy to see and the drama was coming inexorably closer. But it was all too late. And that was the real tragedy! So why do we want a fictitious tragedy in the form of an artwork? Or is it possible that we understand only fictitious drama? Or is there some kind of desire in people to evoke fictitious drama, or danger, when nothing is being risked? Or to make oneself important, even if something is not real? People who talk about drama often come off as more elevated, but are they more humane? Is this simply the human condition? All of the artistic ideals seem to appear like a drama, as if they can only be

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achieved through battle, struggle, and tragedy! Why? Why didn’t people realize the real tragedy before the war that was unmistakably affecting all human values? Why does our generation call for a “climax” in each issue and art? And what is a “climax,” really? A catharsis? It’s almost like inviting someone over for lunch, and in the end, he breaks your furniture.

The Function and Role of the Conductor He did conduct in earlier times, but—apart from giving the tempos and cueing the entrances—he also played (harpsichord, violin), thus he did not have time to express his emotions and the emotion of the work. The conductor in the theater is fully occupied with these technical matters, and apart from this, he cannot be seen. But the conductor in a concert gives an entirely different picture: he “depicts” the composition, often illustrating his “conception” of the work to the point of being ridiculous. Yet the players in the orchestra do not seem particularly angered, even though they are the ones who are actually performing the work.

Self-Forgetting [II] Artistic creation is not consciousness, but becomes consciousness. I can consciously prepare a design, form, melody, etc., but the moment I am composing, I am not immediately aware of what I am doing. I become aware of myself only once I have completed a number of measures, and only during that moment does the next continuation appear, one that I have not yet written down and which I do not yet know and only have a feeling for and which I realize once again without conscious involvement.55

[A Feeling for the Whole] Listening to music should not be a “duty” or cultural obligation, and beauty is not an “obligation” to be civilized: it is the ability to perceive and have a feeling for the organized “whole”—i.e., relations, essence, order, energy, and pleasure. Of course, we can never say that we have understood the whole. Never do we know all the elements and relations, but we can have a feeling for them. The closer we come to a feeling for the whole, the greater pleasure and enjoyment we will have from the artistic work—not only from the aspect of “the whole” and the organism of the work in itself, but also from the “response” of our conception to the whole and from the universal complex of organization and order.

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[Capable Only of Being Sensed] Is there anything that can be defined that is not emotion or feeling? Spengler cites Boltzmann’s formulation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and remarks as follows: “‘The logarithm of the probability of a state is proportional to the entropy of the state.’ Every word in this contains an entire scientific concept that is capable only of being sensed and not described.”56 Personally, I do not understand this phrase and its import escapes me, yet I am able to imagine two things: (1) the pleasure the physicist has when he formulates this statement, or the feeling that is a part of his profession, and (2) the feeling of the person, who—even though he is not a physicist—is familiar with the laws of physics and for whom this statement confirms something; he understands it and gains insight into new relations and it puts him on the path to discovery. For the physicist, it is the pleasure from his discipline and his “medium.” For others, it is the pleasure of understanding. In effect, it is not “joy,” “emotion,” or “feeling,” nor is it entirely “satisfaction.” It is a feeling of discovery, newness, order, a certain state that is not on the same plane with psychological emotions. Is this not the same with music? The player in an orchestra or quartet does not engage himself directly and emotionally “a priori.” Yet he does have a feeling of pleasure, a pleasure from playing, a pleasure from the “medium” of the music. The listener, too, need not engage himself emotionally, yet he does have enjoyment, even if not from the musical “medium,” but from a feeling for the whole of “something,” of the sound, the conception. But if he considers it a “duty,” this leads to analysis, and the whole gets lost or remote.

[Self-Forgetting III] The composer creates in the moment “he forgets himself ” and not when he intellectually forces his idea, medium, or when he wants to express his ego “consciously.” The composition often develops very differently from his conscious plan. Over the course of his creative activity, the composer often gets stopped when he wants to “force” or “steer” his way through a given form in a way that does not create a complete whole with his idea of the work, or his feeling for the inner, organic relations.57

Why Do We Have So Few Good Composers? One reason for this, I think, is that he is poorly situated—i.e., he does not mean anything socially. But for the sake of propaganda (ethical, moral, national, etc.), there is no limit to his value. The requirement of being so “great” is placed on the composer that he ceases to be human—i.e., his attention is supposed to be focused

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on the meaning of the work from the aspect of ethics and instruction rather than on the music alone. The composer might be aware of the social import of his work. But he must be careful that his artistic process does not transform into something unwanted. When a composer is guided by creating a complete work, all of the other elements (ethical, etc.) become parts of a single, living whole. But if he is guided by a “moral cause,” his subconscious creative state gets disturbed. His creative power gets affected by something that should emerge automatically but can now distract the composer and damage the work’s coherence. There are a few rare moments when ethical considerations work together with the music at the same strength. But under normal circumstances, the medium of music should always take precedence! This idea of making a “Messiah” out of the composer: this is German philosophy, disturbing, analytical. The composer needs to be “consecrated!” Why? And what does this really mean? It means that the composer is placed on a different plane from others, as if others were incapable of thinking and feeling, as if this were reserved for the composer alone! The consequences of being misguided like this are really quite obvious. No one would ever claim that a dentist should get consecrated for extracting teeth, even though this is far more important to our well-being than anything else. Neither does a physician get consecrated when he carries out his craft. Doesn’t the composer, too, carry out a profession for which he was given a gift? But let us return to this critical practice. We have seen a means of appraising works that went so far that a work with a “national” program, or one that is so to speak deeply “spiritual,” became considered as such, or somehow better, or even great, without much regard for its actual inner value. You can imagine the confusion in the thinking of others! Semantics! While I compose and see others compose, nowhere do I see what is projected on the composer while he works. In this lies a great falsehood that many composers accept for opportunistic reasons—even though they know that it is not true.58 Still return to this subject! We’re traveling back to NY from Four Chimneys, Ridgefield. 8 October 1944.

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Chapter Fourteen

Essays from Fall 1945 Something about that “French” Influence Something that has haunted me throughout my entire life is a criticism of the French influence on my work. My residence in France and what I gained from it is like some national sin that weighs against me, and each new composition is scrutinized for how much I have or have not been eliminating this influence. For me, criticism of this kind is evidence of complete incomprehension and a lack of willingness even to want to understand. There is a kind of hypocrisy in our relationship to French culture that we have yet to overcome. We admire and celebrate it, but we do not believe in it and consider it “superficial.” By superficial, we mean not serious enough, not deep enough, or artificial. This comes as a result of our training which, in a calculated way, pounded this into us for the longest time through German metaphysics and a mysterious ideology into which all of man’s problems and mysteries were placed. This evolved to such an extent that we consider something “superficial,” but we still talk about it as if it were great art. We do not miss an opportunity to pass judgment when we find a fault, deficiency, or something manqué. It is a careless form of reasoning that is all the more inadmissible now since we see not only the great deficiencies of German metaphysics but also how terribly we suffered from it and how its many mysteries and problems exist only on paper. So it is time now to decide. If we really consider French culture superficial, at least in music, we should formulate our opinions accordingly and firmly establish our grounds, but we should then not say that “it is but is not superficial.” It is our duty to revise our rationale, even if different inclinations do not suit us. I am not saying by this that we should make a choice between these two positions. My point is that, if I consider something superficial, I do not make it one of my problems. What compelled me to get to know French culture were issues of much greater significance. When I was young and could not yet think for myself, I already felt that many of the views that were being presented to us are not part of our national spirit and cannot gain acceptance and that we are dealing with matters that have been sustained artificially and lead our development towards a field that is not Czech expression. In short, I found it all to be a farce and an unnecessary waste of energy. Perhaps

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I am exaggerating here, but this unease was within me and confirmed each step of the way, and the great majority of the works from that time confirmed my point of view. I saw up close that our natural expression corresponds to concreteness and healthy thinking rather than those mysteriously entangled, metaphysical systems that were pounded into us and seemed far more worthy and deeper, despite the fact that the depth was plainly verbal and in reality “superficial,” without proof or weight, at least for me. I also felt that this mode of thought does not agree with the spiritual expression of our great people, in whom I have always found concreteness, a healthy sensibility, and a healthy artistic attitude rather than all those mysteries and problems. Thus I left for France not to find salvation, but to confirm my point of view. And this is the error that so many fail to see. Since I am a musician, they think that I went there because of music, most likely because of Debussy in particular. And here we find the source of the pain: our attention gets focused on the issue of French culture according to the premise that “it is but is not superficial.” It is clear that a person who thinks this way knows French expression very little. In any case, Debussy was not the reason that I went to France, and even if he had been, then as a musician, it would have not taken me some twenty years to realize this. The single conclusion from all of this is that the ones who are superficial are those who talk about something that they do not know anything about. In other words, we1 are superficial, and not French culture or German metaphysics. If lightness appears in my work, aha!—there’s that influence. And if it’s the color of the sound, then we see once again how a Czech composer can be “influenced.” You can see how childish all of this is. But what is no longer childish is when each of my compositions is scrutinized for how much I “saved” myself from this influence, or how I lost or found my expression such that I have abandoned or am abandoning these influences—you clearly see the naïve, narrow-minded logic and incomprehension. Thus what I went looking for in France was not Debussy, impressionism, or musical expression, but the actual foundations upon which Western culture lies, which, in my opinion, reflect our national character much more than a labyrinth of mysteries and problems.

[Something about that “French” Influence II] Thus the Czech elements that I brought to France were not destroyed; instead, they were enhanced by maturity and brought to an organic order. And if I am not mistaken, these elements follow that specific line that Smetana and Dvořák began. Thus if I arrived at clarity and conciseness of form and expression, it is not because I “liberated” myself from French influence.2 There is a great misunderstanding here that needs to be rectified once and for all. Until 1918, Czech music was in a kind of political opposition, if not directly through its subject matter, then at least through national feeling and expression.

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Our music was largely romantic as well, or at least derived from romanticism. Surrounded for years by calculated German propaganda and philosophy, most of our ideologues—who were trained in this philosophy—did not look for how our musical expression and national character differs or could differ from this philosophy, but how it fits in. There was a discrepancy here that many had begun to suspect. Our training, however, was derived from this philosophy and—through its lack of precision—allowed for the most varied interpretations. These interpretations were often based on that emotional, mysterious, messianic romanticism that is simply so uncharacteristic of our people. We are definitely not an overtly emotional nation, yet these prophets tried to make us into one and acted as if they were adding the aureole of a greater and better humanity. Instead you will find in our people simple and healthy sentiment, strictness rather than abandon, sobriety rather than hysterical enthusiasm, and a natural sense for simple explanation and a simple relationship to things. There were many people who warned us about this, and national character became a frequent topic of debate (see Peroutka3). Our art always defended itself against this influence; it had to if it wanted to remain sincere (see painting, music— Smetana, literature—Nezval). Ideologues dominated the discourse, nevertheless, and they made themselves out to be more important than the composers through writings that were increasingly complex, mysterious, and somehow “better” and “deeper”—this, it seems, was the result of being trained in this philosophy. We can easily recall those articles in which meaning was drowned in a flood of verbal apotheoses. The whole matter became nonsense and most people had already rejected it, but its influence was so great that no one had the courage to say anything in public. And this is understandable because the battle was uneven. It was as if we were battling against great human principles that had gained an absolute value and—through verboseness and mystery—seemed much greater than basic common sense, which could have simply and clearly expressed commonplace statements without magic and without inflating them such that they look bigger and thus deeper (these two concepts were somehow always interconnected). It is quite difficult to prove what is “deeper,” of course, and it seemed that what is more entangled is also deeper. But it is easier to entangle things than to put them in order. So here, evidently, there was a danger. There is, in fact, a culture that prefers order and proportion, an exactness and clarity of form, and a simple, healthy nature. Battling against this culture was necessary because the entire system would collapse. And this is how it went. Those qualities of French music were all deemed “superficial” because they supposedly remained on the surface and did not go into “depth.” This was very serious because there is little that people fear more than the suspicion of superficiality. And this explains the confusion that the younger generation of that time experienced.4

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[An Orchestra is Not a Machine]5 You go to a concert, find your seat, the orchestra comes on stage, and the players prepare their instruments and talk to each other. Suddenly everything quiets down, the conductor appears, and the orchestra changes into a collective—i.e., into a configuration that demands greater attention. The whole atmosphere, as if it were something spiritual, now gains an entirely different light and everyone’s attention gets focused. You might think that an orchestra is an amazing machine that is directed by the hand of the conductor. But here you are mistaken. An orchestra is not a machine, and the conductor is not merely the leader who does everything: it is something that develops over time, both collectively and individually. Both the player’s instrument and spirit play a role in the whole and neither is inferior. The quality of the orchestra depends on this element. I played in an orchestra for many contented years. A very special relationship takes shape between a composer and orchestra. To a great extent, the composer depends on the orchestra—i.e., the way it performs, its relationship to the work, and its level of interest—for it is the interpretive link between himself and the audience. But not only that: the composer counts on certain players he knows or hears regularly. Indeed, the composer has a living conception—not only of an orchestra’s sound—but of its gestures; its preference for bowings; its individual players with their specific, outermost qualities; their movements; attitude; manner of playing; the particular mannerisms of the wind players (the winds like to “test” the composer; seldom do the strings, who resolve the problem on their own), etc. For someone like me who grew up with the orchestra and theater, having a conception of an orchestra and audience is of vital importance. It is a practical influence: when you know a great player, you bring out his instrument. And if the player is not good, you avoid writing for him. Of course I do not compose for just one orchestra, especially me, as I have worked with many orchestras, but I try to get to know each one as well as I can. The same holds true for conductors, and the soloists in particular, and I think that every composer has had this kind of relationship. Another example is when I do not write virtuosic passages for a student orchestra. We are not always aware of these things, but they are present. These are elements that might seem remote from the creative process, but they are an aspect of practical psychology and reveal something new and overlooked that plays a great role while composing. Not only can they inspire a composer, but they can set his limitations as well. These details might seem unrelated to an inspirational source or emotional spontaneity, but we should take them into account. We are unaware of most of them, but I assure you that they exist and have great significance. For example, breathing in the wind instruments, bowings that can ruin phrases, alternations between pizzicato and arco, certain registers that do not speak, dynamics, and many other things.

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Thus despite all the explanations about emotional inspiration that are so much in favor, we see that the composer must balance out very practical details. Thus to the work as a “whole,” a very new element emerges that creates a new “whole.” And once we add the audience, we have yet another “complex.”

For a Better Understanding of Music For a better understanding of music, we will need to find something that approaches scientific method, or a more exact method of verification, proof, and explanation. This is a difficult task, but we should be able make certain kinds of conclusions. But first we must realize that our psychological interpretations are very one-dimensional: they isolate the composer and his work and take into account only an imperceptible portion of the elements that are involved in creation. Yet even these elements are limited to a priori statements and an obsolete school of psychology that cannot provide us with anything more than an emotional, sentimental state. Our integration of all the elements is superficial. We restrict ourselves to these poetic, fictitious interpretations that often depend on a romantic form of expression that is now considered trite. It is a “means of popularization” through which certain conclusions get put into practice that are impossible to prove and on a certain level false. It is the same way in science, where there are attempts to popularize certain findings and bring them closer to us, whereas the real value of these findings lies in the research alone, which is often beyond our natural comprehension.

Advice to the Composer In the metaphysical inquiry of the previous era, it was customary to insert an entire story into each composition. What emerged from this is a kind of confusion that can easily distort the composer’s subconscious thought-process. Certain elements can get carried into this complicated and subtle process and redirect it to a field that is no longer musical. What is most important during this process is being aware of all the musical elements. Everything else can serve as “inspiration,” or stimulus on certain occasions, but it does not help the process itself, especially if these things emerge unnaturally or in an affected state. At a certain time in our country, there was a trend towards emphasizing “the land,” or “national affiliation.” But these things are natural and organic for the composer and need to emerge spontaneously, and no special process of realization and enrichment can help. The conceptual image of a work can get distorted merely by “trying” to get into this “mood.” Of course national elements might be a spontaneous part of the process, but here only musical considerations play a role while the composer searches for solutions.

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Another example of the past is “masculine expression,” or “masculinity.” It is obvious how the creative process can get distorted when someone “forces” himself into such a mood. It would be like trying to catch a fever. We can catch one, of course, but our entire condition changes right away. Tendencies of this kind are numerous and can have grave results for the work. Thus the solution, “perhaps,” is to say less, but moreover, to say it precisely. From the great breadth of material that is available to us today, it is necessary to select only what has an affinity, pattern, or relatedness to our compositional problem at a given moment. The same holds true for technique, where it is necessary to “choose” what has a direct relationship to our idea. In other words, we need to know what we want to express (not in terms of ideas, but practically) and find those proportions that can withstand the pressure. In short, we should not try to express more than we can at all costs. For someone who is able, this will become part of the process quite naturally. But if someone is not Beethoven, nothing through his greatest desire will help him compose the Ninth Symphony. Desire, too, is essential, but we need to recognize when it departs from our capacity and bring it into agreement with our entire artistic attitude and not force ourselves to do something through some special process. Greatness is either a given or won, it is contrary to convincing oneself, and I think greatness actually lies in how naturally we can express our idea. Therefore, do not burden yourself by trying to save the world. When we are at work, it is our musical equation that is primary to us, and metaphysical and affected ideas will only lead us astray. Of course we are always dealing with problems. Yet when we compose, we are not dealing with problems, but notes. When one has the correct attitude, the organism of the composition (if it is healthy) fills itself in on its own and emerges complete: the voices, the sound, the inner-workings, the choice of instruments, and the entire structure will come into being as a whole. The composition will be all the more precise the more we work with the medium of music alone. My second piece of advice is this: a composition is not only work with “themes.” Our theoretical training became fixated on this compositional game and overstepped the limits of naturalness and creative ability. That entire eras worked with “themes,” there is no question about this. But what we should understand is how they worked with them. Our training gave us a model that became completely mechanized. It is as if finding a “theme” and “counter-theme” were enough and the composition is done! What follows is that the student forces himself to satisfy this model. I have already stated the results: the work gets restricted to a theme upon which the compositional stream comes to a standstill, and the student looks for all kinds of “variations” so he can somehow continue. In short, there is something wrong with this “thematic” model. It is a mistake to begin by looking for a theme: this will immediately constrict us to a two-dimensional design. And it is a mistake to think that—if we find a “theme”— we will be able to produce a composition through different variations of that theme. It is necessary to see how others composed and not how schematic analyses explain it to us. Do not forget that a design is not the form or construction; it is merely a vehicle to express what we want to express. We will not arrive at a form by playing

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with themes, because a composition as a whole does not develop this way. Different variations are not merely a derivative of a theme but a functional element of the composition and the choice of how to deploy and elaborate these variations can be found within this holistic function. Thus the single piece of advice that I can give you is this: do not cling to a theme or counter-theme, but immediately let it go once you see that you have exhausted its potential, and perhaps even earlier—if, that is, you are working in this style. A theme is a very mysterious thing and often depends on chance or a given disposition. In order to avoid confusion, it is best not to call it a theme at all. It is only one element of the greater material. A half-measure element might be enough for an entire movement, and a long theme can get depleted immediately once it is stated. But each time we “stretch out” a theme, a disruptive effect takes hold that ruins the composition. An exclusively rhythmic theme—despite all the magic and possibilities it offers—can become monotonous and mechanical and can quickly tire out the listener. A melodic theme might be more appropriate, but it does not offer as many possibilities after its definitive statement. And here I am thinking in the sense of that “thematic work” that I discuss above. If we have a conception of a form, the possibilities of the themes and variations should become present almost simultaneously, but only during the correct creative process.

[Further Thoughts] We do not commonly talk about things that are natural, or things that are organic. We are not even aware of them. That we breathe, for example. The ramifications of this are considerable and I will return to this subject. Our continual dependence on authority is strange; it is often on a local authority. It is not an inferiority complex, but comfort. We see this in the worship of heroes. In the case of every cult of great people, of Smetana, for example—I am the one who takes responsibility for my work, and not Smetana, right? This relates to that saying by Masaryk,6 “if I can do something and I am capable, then I will do it myself.” I have often been asked what I was searching for and what I gained in France. I laid out an entire novel7 about this, and it really is a substantial chapter. But in short, I would say I found what I was looking for—i.e., a sense for proportion and this in every way.

The Influence of Dynamism on Form8 We can look at dynamism in one of two ways: (1) as a functional gradation that is organic and essential to the whole; or (2) as a cathartic gradation that subordinates

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the musical idea to emotional expression. In the first sense of the word, the musical potency gets intensified, making a fortissimo, or extrinsic strengthening of the sound unnecessary. In the second sense, the gradation takes the form of an apotheosis, and the musical potency gets diminished; here we see how the purely musical elements—as they transform into a mass of sound—lose their inner compositional value.9 I do not deny that dynamism in this second sense belongs to our expression. I am only pointing out its drawbacks and unsuitability at times—i.e., its mechanical and “static” nature, and the ease with which we can achieve it. Its influence on the work’s idea and construction is clear: we go from small to larger, from piano to forte, we develop a theme by means of a gradation at which point we move on to another gradation and to an even greater apotheosis. We clearly see something extrinsic and superficial here that restricts the work’s inner construction. And we clearly see an absence of substantial musical ideas and how an “effect” is achieved merely through the power of sound, or through the fake apotheosis that we force on the work by habit. Symptomatic of this is the way a musician loses interest during a gradation that is based on the percussion. You might disagree, however, that a composition without a catharsis of this kind will give a dry effect, but then you have completely missed the point: the intensity of a musical idea does not need to resort to an artificial gradation. Tension does not lie in noise! If a gradation is not needed, then we need not deploy one. And if we can express tension without it, then the construction of the work will gain an entirely different character. Once we begin inserting our moods into the musical material, we lose our perspective. We have appropriated this from the era that called for it—the era that was linked to operatic and programmatic expression, or to a literary, psychological element. If we are working with a program, then the program’s emotional dynamics condition the structure. Our inner creative process (we distinguish between the creative and compositional process) begins adapting to something and gets disturbed while the musical element takes shape. I myself—and others who are willing to admit it—have felt a sense of unease when I come to a catharsis of this kind and to an immediate loss of interest when I am filling in the instruments, chords, and the inner voices (the exact opposite of what is supposed to be happening), or when the musical substance gets engulfed by sound, or the outer bombast that is needed just so it sounds programmatic and cathartic. Psychological readings of music and art provide us with detailed explanations of the creative process, along with explanations of the emotional and formal elements of music. And to justify their claims, these writings rely on the statements of certain composers. The only problem is that most of these statements are selected from the composers we know—i.e., the composers of the last century, or the romantics exclusively. We should realize that these composers needed these emotional and subjective elements because they were organic for them. Of course I am not arguing against the legitimacy of romanticism, the emotional aspect, or dynamics, but against the accentuation of these elements. When we take a closer look at this phenomenon, we begin

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to understand the spirit of this era and see that its entire mode of expression was of an affected state and that it was either consciously or spontaneously directed towards a program, confession, and as a further result, self-pity. And this is the element that is pathological and justifies these anti-formal catharses and departures from a purely musical design of consistency—i.e., what a work needs and how far the capacity and inner experience of the composer can go—such that these gradations (which he does not consider “gradations”) may be placed in the work by means of the content and form. We have many examples in the literature where the composer achieved this, where a “climax of emotion” is not always comprised of a cathartic gradation. Here the composer creates a different kind of emotional intensity, one that is not dynamic or cathartic. Once we realize these things, the entire paradigm of self-pity begins to seem less appealing. When a person is young, there are many things that tempt him to embrace self-pity. But in the end, he becomes tired of it. Other dispositions and the desire “to suffer,” for that matter, begin to seem foreign and worn out, and all these interpretations seem childish. Psychology, like science, has long abandoned this primitive outlook and views mankind differently. Thus there is no reason to retain these things in art, which could never be explained or made easier through this antiquated mode of thought.10

[Reliving the Creative Process] In order to gain a sense for a work, we are supposed to work with the composer and somehow relive his creative experience. This is what the aestheticians call for and we have come to accept it. But the sense of the work that we gain is vague and imprecise; it defies analysis and forms merely a curtain to nothing. In effect, it explains nothing at all because we cannot observe the conditions of the creative process very well and place ourselves under their control. A work is not the result of a single moment, emotion, or mood. We do not even have the guarantee that the work is being performed in the way the composer conceived it. And we do not have all the facts that would establish the composer’s state of mind while he composed. All we have are assumptions about how the composer was supposed to have been looking at things or behaving, what psychological attitude he was supposed to have had, in other words, certain psychological and romantic “slogans” according to which the old, primitive psychology classifies certain states for us, their context, relations, and attitudes.11 These are superstitions and illusions that attempt to bring the work closer to the listener, awaken his emotional response, and explain the work, but positive evidence of any kind is missing. Aestheticians often refer to definitions, phrases, and statements by composers from which they choose only what benefits their system. And many composers enjoy believing this system because it flatters them; they suddenly gain an aura of divinity that they are reluctant to dispel and sometimes even unable to. Wouldn’t this demand—I mean of getting a sense for the original creative process—be best applied to the composer while he listens to his own work? He alone

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embodies all that is necessary, for he knows best what he wanted and what he was doing. In essence, he is the only one who knows. Thus if he is the most qualified, will he be able to fulfill this demand? Will his own work have the same effect on him the way it did when he conceived it? Does he even have the need to stop and relive everything the way it once took place? Is this even possible for him? Is his relationship to the work during each performance identical to the first impression he had and what he wanted to express? And if he is unable to do this, how can the listener? The composer is often asked rhetorically, “It must be a wonderful feeling to hear your work for the first time!” With this question, which comes from all kinds of assumptions, you are left with nothing else than to nod your head and allow this wonderful feeling to set in your face. But the reality is quite different. There is hardly a trace of this wonderful feeling, and here I am talking about the performance and not the first rehearsal, which is usually catastrophic. Instead, there is much nervousness and unease (we see this in the singer who comes out on stage for the first time); every small detail disturbs you as if the entire composition depended on it, as if everyone noticed (finding out that no one notices is even worse); and every small change in tempo or nuance threatens with catastrophe. And then there is that somewhat comical and technical matter that the composer needs to go on stage (it’s actually painful), and this is already enough to ruin the concert for him. Something else from my experience is that the manager seats you near the orchestra and exit where the acoustics are the worst, just so you can make it on stage in time. Or it even happens that you are in the boxes, and—just so you can make it on stage in time—the manager asks you to get up a number of measures before the end and disrupt the audience behind you, right at the best moment. Or something I do by habit—button my coat at the beginning of the last movement. I am sure you will find this all terribly prosaic. But this is the way it is, and you begin to realize that there are many factors that deprive you of this wonderful feeling. In effect, these factors deprive you of enjoying your own work. And there is something else that is left unaccounted for: how the audience will respond. You will probably object, that these things are not supposed to play a role when the composer has confidence in his mode of expression. But they do, and they do with all of us, even with the greatest, and this is understandable and natural. Now we see that, out of everyone in the audience, it is the composer who is able to devote himself to the work the least. And this goes on until a certain amount of time has passed, when the work has crossed over to a “daily order” for everyone, including the orchestra. But by that time, it no longer has meaning for the composer.

Theory and Facts According to theory, we are supposed to be bound by a piece of music from the first to last moment, and much emotion should flow from it. I will conduct an analysis of myself with actual facts, which are a bit skewed due to my professional attitude, but perhaps do not differ so much from the general listener.12 I need to say, however,

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that being fully bound by a piece of music does happen, but it is a phenomenon quite rare. What actually happens is that we pay attention to the course of our thoughts, and let us assume that we are not too distracted and that we can devote ourselves to the music: The conductor raises his baton and the first chords ring out. The orchestra is in good form today, we can hear it right away, an interesting way to modulate, what was that, too bad we can’t stop, why is that woman next to me always wiggling, I think I’ve seen her before, there’s that beautiful modulation again, what an exquisite way to develop that theme, or is it the theme, I can’t recall the beginning anymore, it reminds me of something I’ve heard, what could it be, they were just playing it, it must be from an opera, or +++ (this means attentive listening), I just moved, ++, someone nearby just coughed, +, there’s noise coming from behind the doors, that people can’t get used to coming on time, I came late yesterday though, I didn’t hear the first movement of the Brahms, now he doesn’t know how to develop it, he’s tiring out both himself and me, it’s not expressive enough, 000 (this means passive listening) 000, I wonder how the blood circulates while we listen to music, 0000, someone keeps on coughing ++0000, it’s nice to be soothed by music like this, it’s a little long, Mr. S. is not in his seat, what’s he doing tonight, he never misses a concert, and finally +++++, a remarkable, magnificent passage, +++, the tension let up again, the percussion is getting ready, this will be the climax, 000, uninteresting, where are the keys to my apartment, I did lock it I hope, ah, there they are, that violinist has an interesting head, the audience looks a bit different today, 0000, I’d like to meet Miss T. during intermission, she said she’d be here, with her mother of course, 00+0+0+0++++, an exquisite ending, truly an enjoyment, music is really invigorating, etc., etc. Now I did not write this just for fun—this is what really happens. Sometimes music absorbs you and there is a greater amount of attentive listening, and it really takes you away for a while and allows you to relax. Perhaps you will not consider this evidence, although you will probably allow for the possibility that it is, but it does not matter. The fact is that even during attentive listening, we get disturbed by our thoughts and extraneous elements, and it need not be of something conscious but merely a shade of thought. And where are the emotions in all of this? They are there, of course, the music triggered them. We know this because we remember a certain pleasure from the music, a certain effect, a result, or that impression that we take away with us. And it was not an absolute emotion, but many emotions, and they alternated with each other and stayed with us. Perhaps it seemed at times that we were more alive than usual and that our energy and will had suddenly become supported by something and that a small part of humanity became revealed to us, or something that was unknown to us until that moment. But now someone asks and we are supposed to bring these ? into words, into complete consciousness, into some sort of concept. And this is where we run into trouble. We can only make comparisons, we usually exaggerate, and other emotional elements get mixed into our

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judgment, reasoning, and intellect. As a result, our primary emotions change into something very complex. In the end, we make a theory out of everything through continuous, banal repetition. This is already a very conscious process where we are dealing not with the emotions that we experienced almost subconsciously at the concert but with rigid concepts that look better cloaked in a verbal garb that do not say more but less. These are emotions that are thought out ex post facto, may it be for whatever reason, because bringing back a conception13 is one of the most difficult and delicate psychological processes.14 To a certain extent, we can bring back the effect of certain moments of a work or the work as a whole, but our conception will no longer be primary. Instead, it will be something new that is based on different conditions in a different configuration. And if we try bringing this conception into words, we will get even further removed from the music we heard. And we usually do not realize we are doing this. But just ponder for a while and do away with all those things we have learned and do not think about, and you will come across a very interesting psychological process. Thus you might ask, how do we determine our emotions? We do not have to “determine” them, you see, because we have already placed them into our “experience” and they belong to us. And so we don’t ruin them, we say that the work is fine, beautiful, exquisite, ugly, good, bad—all of these terms are relative and natural judgments, but it is not possible to create any theory or aesthetics from them. But it is not possible to create any theory or aesthetics when we simply ignore the fact that we determine our emotions this way.15

[A Ruined Accompaniment] Look how easily a performer can distort and completely ruin a phrase. Original:




         


       

Performance:






  
   
   


                 


See how the accompaniment gets ruined once the melody changes to 43, even if quite imperceptibly:16


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[Defending against Interpretations] In almost every analysis written by a modern or past composer, we see how he defends his composition from being interpreted programmatically, even if the composition came from an external, programmatic impulse. But nearly everywhere we see how critics and musicologists thrust a program onto the composition and position it into a dominant position, regardless of all that results. The same holds true for when they project the various intentions and relations that the composer had or must have had, which, according to them, played an important role. But for the composer, there are often much more important things that are far simpler and much more concrete. For example, whether the English horn will not get covered up too much by the rest of the ensemble, whether the oboe or some other wind instrument will have enough time to breathe, whether the cellos will come through in a specific register, and the many other technical details that have not been resolved upon the completion of the work or are not convincing or plastic enough. If the composer had any idea of what the critic will project on his work, he would immediately lose “inspiration” in the face of the banality of the word.

Emotionality Is Not a Virtue Emotion can come naturally, in which case we do not talk about it, or it is artificial, exaggerated, in which case it causes harm. We17 are probably the only ones who employ the formula of our grandmothers for “increasing” affect through sentimentality. Take, for example, the following statement in the newspaper Czechoslovak18 (17–8 November 1945): “As soon as we see his eyes (the composer of ‘The Beer Barrel Polka’),19 we see the musicality of the Czech man that is so characteristic of his nature.” !???!

[Last Thoughts and Aphorisms] As far as it concerns evidence, I know there is much in art that is not possible “to prove.” But just because of this, we should not believe everything that is presented to us at face value. We know the composer’s disposition because he gives information about it in his work, where his creative state becomes concrete through the help of the media he employs. But how do we recognize the disposition of others? Or are we to deduce that they are not sensitive and that only the composer is sensitive?

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It is quite interesting how—despite all their personal interests and intrigues—musicians reach an agreement instinctively and understand each other, and how aestheticians and musicologists—despite all their erudition and analysis—cannot reach an understanding. In effect, we do not have any norms, or laws, that a composition has to be the way it is, with the exception that—over time and repeated hearings—it becomes etched in our minds as a fait accompli, which proves very little. The work could have been created differently, in which case it would have become etched in our minds in that form. With the exception of style and certain conventions (which is style), we cannot generalize these norms. The work is what it is and we no longer see the mistakes. We only see what we consider most important, which are sometimes the mistakes. We already have everything in our minds as a whole from which we create laws ex post facto, which we then apply to the next work. We do not even have the opportunity to fix what we consider mistakes. For that matter, the original norms under which the composition arose might have been convention. And once we allow for the possibility that it could have been worked out differently, we realize that we cannot deduce any absolute laws. The act of creation is simultaneously instinctive and controlled: both are necessary for an integration of the parts into the whole. Apart from this, control and development are influenced to a great extent not only by our thought, but also by the material, by the very media itself—i.e., by the organism itself—and often without our direct involvement.20

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Chapter Fifteen

Notebook from New York (December 1945) The “Pastoral” Symphony: What Are Invariable and Variable Conditions? Let us consider the following phrase: “Yesterday I was walking (on the beach, in the woods, in town, in the park); when evening came, I decided (to go home, to the theater, to the cafe), etc.” In this phrase, certain conditions can change, but others cannot without changing the entire meaning of the sentence, or its character in a given context.1 In other words, certain conditions can change without having to tell a different story. We can apply this primitive example to a musical phrase and structure. I will take Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” We could isolate the first motive and analyze its specific material, but I will do this later. What really interests me is what comes next. Typically, analyses instruct us how an entire composition is consciously developed and knitted together from the first motive. Yet each analysis goes a bit further. In these personalized statements, we get the feeling—through all the phraseology in which the work is wrapped—that all of the creative joy has disappeared and that everything is a mere calculation, or a game of construction with blocks. This opposes our view of musical creation and plainly shows that the work did not take shape this way. Therefore, we can offer a different point of view. Certainly, my statements will also be subjective, but in my opinion, they will come closer to the facts that each composer, whether it is Beethoven or someone else, will probably find true. Thus there is no reason a composer could not apply his statements in place of those “analyses” with which he disagrees. In order to clarify my aims in this essay, I would like to note a number of things. Beginning a composition is a rather mysterious process that often cannot be described or determined by the composer and certainly not by someone who sees only the finished work. Up to now, most analyses have been purely deductive and have relied on speculations that are not supported by practical and concrete facts. In most cases, they are the product of the romantic school, which, in and of itself, has a particular kind of literary expression that was contrived and calculated with a

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specific interest in mind and passionately promoted even by the composers themselves. But these kinds of analyses do not explain anything concretely and often falsify the process; they simply try to make the process more interesting and often at all costs. When we read such analyses, we get somewhat inspired, but concretely, we do not gain a better understanding of the work. This is because, for the composer, it is not only a battle with emotion, but also a battle with the media and technique that he needs to unite with what he wants to express. In short, analyses of this kind are embellished and come from a distorted point of view. We have enough descriptions of the creative process by artists that plainly testify to something with a more concrete foundation. And we have statements not only by artists, but also by scientists, for whom the creative process is a scientific activity.2 We need for composers to tell us sincerely—without embellishments, without fanfare, and without all the flights of fantasy that they think they must preserve—what the process actually looks like, at least to the extent that they are able to view it themselves and follow it. It is possible that even they will be mistaken, but their thoughts will be much more authentic than someone who simply makes it all up. I have already attempted to describe this process.3 This is a quite intricate matter that will be understood, perhaps, only by those who create. I wanted to describe how, before any written work begins, a certain holistic shape takes root in the subconscious that chooses from the material of ideas those elements that are appropriate for the organic whole and rejects others that are good but inappropriate at that point. It is a certain “field,” if you will, in which only certain operations play out. This does not mean that the composer knows what the composition will look like. At this point, the composer does not even know how he will begin. Nevertheless, the entire composition gradually crystallizes and enters the consciousness more and more, even practically through the medium. For this reason, not only is the composition guided by the principal motive, but this motive is also derived from the entire vision of the composition. This is how the relatedness within a work appears, which is explained to us by analyses statistically, for example motivic development, etc. And this is why, in a good composition, all of the elements—of which there are many more than we realize—fill each other in and create unity and variety. And this is why we cannot trace any kind of momentary “mood” or emotion in the music that the composer experienced. Indeed, the entire substance of the composition is prepared long in advance and the difficulties of beginning are often a matter of technique. Thus it does not concern finding a theme; it concerns being aware of the whole from all points of view. The orchestration, for example, is not an independent element that comes at the end, but something that needs to be united with the idea. The same holds true for the rhythm, melody, form, and the emotional content as well. There are no mysteries in any of this for the composer, for he need not be aware of these things if his concentration is sufficiently focused and grounded in this process. He usually loses an awareness of himself, because he simply follows his musical thoughts. Everything that brings the musical material together is part of this process,

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and only when we directly analyze this process can we see what is happening. The composer is primarily concerned with technical realization. This is why a composer changes a theme, searches for a different one, or varies it. And this is the battle: of choosing from those limitless materials what is necessary and what the subconsciously conceived whole demands. It is quite possible that the subconscious is not the best term for this, but for now I have no other. The composer develops an ability to tap into this process through practice. But I stress: finding a theme through practice is not difficult. What is really difficult is finding what corresponds with the inner plan from which all of the other elements are derived almost automatically. Often, it is almost an imperceptible detail. For example, a modern melody, independent of bar lines, is something you can write in various ways: in 86, 43, 42, or in changing meters; it can be allegro, poco allegro, moderato, or larghetto; and it can be forte, piano, or mezzo forte. But only one choice will bring you into direct contact with the whole, and your composition will then flow naturally and without great strains. At the beginning, the composer might spend many hours before finding what is appropriate. From my experience, one of the greatest difficulties is stabilizing the general movement, not merely on paper, in notes, or in rhythm, but in the mind. In other words, stabilizing the particular motion, or the particular interval in time, or what I would even call the wavelength upon which the entire composition will lie. For it does not concern finding a motive or placing it in a certain motion, but filling in this plastic motion with notes. Try imagining, for example, the motion of Mozart’s “Rondo alla turca,” or Beethoven’s “Eroica,” or whatever composition you know well, and you will understand what I mean: that motion that perpetually “goes forward.” And now try imagining the composition “without notes.” Suddenly, in approximately the fourth measure, you will find yourself beginning to accelerate. Now return to the original tempo and stay there. Notice the equilibrium of motion you gain and the importance that motion suddenly assumes.4 Sometimes you find it immediately. It is like a certain emotional quantum of time that brings together the required materials as you compose. Of course, you can change the motion over the course of the composition. But this is a different kind of motion, one of tempo, rhythm, or one that is mechanical. And this has nothing to do with using a metronome. And now to my alternative analysis of Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” I will look past the initial motivic material:5





    


 
              





What happens next? We see how this first thought suddenly develops, as if after the fermata, after the pause, the doors open up from which this thought drives forward

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and develops into a long line. Everything is natural and logical, as if the musical stream wanted to catch up and have the first pause be forgotten. Here analyses show us how everything is arranged and combined thematically, how everything rises from the first motive. But we should look for more that is happening. In the fifth measure we see something new that appears that changes the character of both the motive and line, something that expands in breadth. Here we see evidence that the work is neither a calculation, nor a game of construction with little blocks the way it is shown in analyses, but creation, or the joy of creation, and how naturally this entire passage flowed out, as if everything were finished. This new element is not created through intellectual effort, but dictated spontaneously by an organism that became crystalized in the composer’s mind beforehand. And this was not the only solution: it is entirely possible that Beethoven might have begun using the given material differently, without needing to change the whole. Thus the first theme is an invariable, and what follows is a variable that is directed by free inspiration, the joy of creation, and perhaps momentary mood. Now we come to a new invariable that fastens the composition into the primary sphere. This—in analyses—is presented as a transition, as a bridge and less important. But I consider it an invariable, because I sense the conscious effort of the composer to do something definitive. Here I feel how much this moment really mattered to Beethoven, perhaps not so much musically, but from the aspect of form. This is not a pause, but something like new hope, a new promise that, afterwards, new and precious inspiration awaits. I sense this because Beethoven repeats this measure several times, as if he wanted to reinforce something in the minds of the listeners.6 And let us not forget the change in tonality, which reinforces this first stabilization. What comes next is unabated joy from the musical wealth that was concealed in that opening phrase. I always admire the certainty and instinct with which he prepares this passage: the pause for breath; the way he balances the form before setting loose the free fantasy; and the way he creates anticipation for a return to the original key. Here we see how the entire organism, or gestalt, functions impeccably in the composer’s mind. This essay has compositional technique in mind and is not meant as a new or different analysis. My goal is to draw our attention away from the statistical and dead elements of analysis and bring us into contact with the living composition. This is the mystery that defies words, these strengths and weaknesses, these contrasts, these lights and shades from which the musical thought comes to the surface, where spontaneity is achieved by an awareness of all the elements and possibilities that create a single work. Thus it is not just work with a “theme,” but a control of expression and the creative imagination. And now Beethoven has come to where he wants to arrive, and we hear how he feels unbound. What interests me at this moment is the musical stream from the aspect of tension, even though the musical expression—almost static, stable, with imperceptible changes—moves continuously at one level, within the span of a fifth.

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Now let us examine this line in more detail. See how it narrows more and more, the way from four measures, a two measure, one measure, and then half-measure element emerges, the way it seems to accelerate, as if it were rising. Just try calculating something like this! And if you are aware of that tension that is concealed in that short phrase, you are well on your way to understanding what I mean. And now a new surprise awaits you. After that theme is unleashed, everything suddenly stops on a triplet motion. Here there is evidence of musical feeling, a sense of balance, a scope of vision, and a living relationship to the work. This sudden change increases interest, or at least sustains it, even though there is a pause once again for breath, or a preparation for what comes next. Also notice that—if we proceeded according to logic—we would probably employ a sixteenth-note motion instead of triplets. Here it is musical feeling that warns the composer that the sixteenth-note material that predominated to this point has been exhausted. And had this not been Beethoven, making this change would have been merely a stroke of good luck.7 I would like to note that I did not choose the “Pastoral.” It was only by chance that a motive occurred to me. This is all just an improvisation, and I do not even have the score at hand. It is merely a sketch where my aim is to point out those elements that are missing in analyses, and if possible, to look at the work from its inception. Here I would like to note a few more things about analysis. When we judge a work, we should not forget the various elements that play a role either directly or indirectly in the creative process. These elements include the particular conventions of the time, fashion, tradition, the composer’s particular habit, the composer’s personal cliché whose sources we do not know and never will, his temperament, his physical and mental well-being at any given moment, and many others. The period, too, dictates many elements, even if the composer was opposed to them. And then there are those elements, both positive and negative, that the composer acquires almost instinctively over the course of his training, work, and efforts.8 Another element that plays a role in the process is craftsmanship, which is viewed today with ignorance and disrespect, as if it were something demeaning. But it was not always this way. Instead, it was thought of positively and a priori necessary, which of course it is. Many parts of works and entire works were written (and painted) through craftsmanship alone, even many of those that we bow down to in amazement. And then there is the complicated question of “psychology,” something each one of us considers himself good at. But the fact is that we choose from psychology only what suits us, and this is the basis upon which we draw our conclusions. Then we realize that there are as many conclusions as there are “psychologists” and that the results are zero and that psychology is far more complicated than all those little formulations we know. Everyone thinks that once we state something as psychologically justified that everything has been said. But we are placing our own psychology into the matter and not the psychology of the composer, about which we know nothing.

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The composer himself cannot fully verify certain aspects of his work to the extent that he could say something about it definitively. We should keep these things in mind if we want to come to more concrete conclusions, even if they will not be entirely correct. All of these elements help create the relations of the work. Of course, we do not know all the elements, but never do we know all the relations of an event, for that matter. We should not forget that an analysis is only an analysis—i.e., an analysis of the structure of the work and not an interpretation of the way it was created. It merely represents our point of view. I have one small advantage in that I know how I compose and how my friends compose, what happens, and my relationship to these things. Of course, I do not want to compare myself to Beethoven. I only want to show that a mysterious literary fantasy is created out of elements that are really something else. For this reason, those elements that hold no mystery to us are overlooked, for example craftsmanship, trained instinct, routine, and those things that allowed for the inception of the work. And these things are replaced by fantasy and a kind of mystical deduction for which there is not the slightest foundation. If the composer was “sad,” “joyful,” “sorrowful,” or “happy”—for me this is irrelevant. Just as an illustrated formula representing an atom is insufficient, so, too, are our static, surface-level analyses. It is necessary to search for something better. And only once we ask the composers what really happens will we be able to reach a certain level of verification. Let us take, for example, the opening motives from each movement of my Fourth Symphony.9 Now it is entirely possible that a future theorist will write how ingeniously the whole symphony grows from one small motive. But the fact is that I just noticed this while giving thought to the “Pastoral.” I had never noticed this because, first, my entire system of thematic development is completely different, and second, it had never occurred to me to analyze my work this way. And if you look, you will find that all compositions can be justified in this manner because the motives almost always resemble each other. What is left is how much we want to arbitrate the matter.

[Criticism and Craft] Stravinsky once said a number of sincere words about his work, but I am sure that most amateurs would prefer believing the critics and aestheticians. Once in a program, I, too, wrote factual remarks, and the result was several letters, protests, and polemics in the press about how the composer should compose, that I wrote the work the way Mr. Kaiser builds ships (i.e., one a day), and that this is not in line with artistic conceptualization. As soon as the composer’s point of view becomes known, the listener assumes a dismissive attitude and judges the work to be “cold.” Cold in relation to what? According to them, Stravinsky is only a rhythmicist. These things

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are wedged into the minds of the listeners to such an extent that you are almost defenseless. And we should not be surprised because these things are pounded into them with all possible means—it is the easiest system.10 Just take a look at spontaneity. Apart from our own practice as composers, we have no proof that a work was written spontaneously. A work may appear to have been “cast in one breath,” but it might have been the result of very long and patient work. Once again, this is something only the composer could say. And if there is spontaneity of this kind, we should remember that this comes as a result of craft. I am reminded about this dismissal of craft each time I go out very carefully and make sure not to engage too much with others. And I am not alone. Many of us who are convinced about our point of view seldom venture into this field of polemics because it would immediately get projected onto our work through the attitude of the listeners and critics. But forgotten is the fact that the vast majority of composers created great works based on this principle, and that craft means something more than just “technique.” Craft means discipline—the artistic work is discipline, a control of all the elements, and there is amazing power in fine craftsmanship. The composer is often compared to an engineer or architect. But they, too, cannot let their emotions outgrow their material. In music, craft plays an important role in the audience’s safety as well.11 It is an element about which you can make a statement and practically measure, which is not something you can say about many of the others. Craft—more than all those emotional elements that are difficult to support—is better at resolving issues between people. Craft means not only technique, but also a love for one’s profession. So we feel that something is not in order. It is a conflict between contrived theory and reality. When we read analyses about how composers create, we almost get the impression that someone is making fun of us. I think this is something all contemporary composers will agree upon. And there will be no recourse from this until we concretely clarify the nature of the creative state.

[Music “Saving the World”] Let us recall a time not too long ago when—according to certain prophets—music was supposed to save the world. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, for example, is considered one such work through which everyone is supposed to transform for the better. Here the influence of music was carried over to a different sphere and the limitations of judgment were overstepped considerably. The concert hall turns into a shrine and the composition becomes a mass. The same thing happens with operas, even with comic operas—just see our Bartered Bride. But offering salvation is something that religion should do. When we look back at what happened in 1945,12 at what happened to moral values over the past twenty years, we see that two thousand

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years of religion did not save us, and much less did music, for—in my opinion—it is not part of its mission, or at least not to the extent that it is assumed. Just let us recall the concentration camps, the mass and planned destruction; responsible for this was a people who were considered the most heavily influenced by music and loved it the most—i.e., the Germans. Hence, we ask, where are all those Beethovenian influences? Where are all those musically religious and mystical influences that are supposed to transform people for the better? This is not the failure of music, but the failure of religion, whose mission was to control the brutal instincts and passions of man. In Germany today, where are the ones who—with their entire arsenal of “deep” theories—were overcome by Beethoven’s compositions but arrived at a complete degradation of man on a scale you find few examples in history?

[Mistakes] What happens when a critic reproves us for the mistakes in our work? Can we fix them? Of course we can, but usually we do not, and I do not need to say why. This means that those mistakes (which are relative) will remain there forever, even if they are really serious. Whatever objections we have, the work will not change and we have to accept it the way it is. The work is not absolute: absoluteness is created by the work being recorded in our memory by habit. Habit works such that, in the end, we do not even see these “mistakes.” Or we accept the work with its mistakes because there is nothing we can do about it. There is no absolute measure that would allow us to properly criticize a work apart from outright technical deficiencies, which the critic usually does not even see.

Language and the Conception of Shape Through language we can express an object, or kind, but not a shape or form. Describe the shape of a vase, light bulb, or whatever else, so that someone who is not familiar with it can gain an impression. I have a floor lamp here, a pole—how should I bring it closer to your mind? Only through comparison. It is “like” a cane. But what is a cane like? Like my lamp. If you do not know the shape of a cane, the result is zero. So how do you expect to describe an abstract form, or a musical form?13

The Soloist Today Big posters out front, the program is not even given (it’s not important—it’s always the same). Today’s soloist spends his entire life playing only a few concertos with which he does not have a direct connection in time. They are not from his period,

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and he does not create them with the composer for whom he does not fight. Since he only interprets the work, the only question that remains is how he plays Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc. About six compositions are enough for an entire violinist’s career. It is no wonder that the composer has abandoned this field of creative work since he cannot find any contact or interest. The soloist has simplified his work for his own comfort. He only defends his position so nothing can happen to him, so he does not lose a few listeners for whom he plays only “proven works” (a matter of the box office) and avoids controversy (the job of “the manager”). In defense, he will tell you that new works are problematic, unrewarding, and weak, which might be true, but his contact and cooperation with the composer has disappeared. Many of today’s composers are not professionals like those of past times, who gained their technique through practical experience. This is no longer possible due to the norms of our times. The composer hesitates in writing a work when he knows that the soloist will play it like Chopin or Schumann. The soloist has lost contact with the composer, something that is necessary for the creation and interpretation of new works. The same holds true for the theater. It is only by writing for the theater that the composer learns its technique, conventions, and demands, whether he subordinates himself to them or battles against them.

[Program Notes] I seldom read program notes, but today (20 December 1945), I looked through the New York Philharmonic’s program and read the discussion of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony: “The Song of the Earth” expressed a philosophy of pessimism and withdrawal from the world. The Ninth Symphony is even more markedly a dismissal of life. Throughout the sketches of the Tenth Symphony . . . were remarks such as these: “Deathwork (foreboding),” and in the fourth movement: “Destroy me so I may forget what I am; that I may cease to be . . .”

John N. Burk? Think about it. In the same program there is an analysis of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto (Rudolf Firkušný playing with Bruno Walter): 5 April 1803 . . . at the Theater an der Wien. At 5 in the morning Ferdinand Ries found Beethoven in bed writing out the trombone parts of the oratorio . . . The solo passages of the concerto were indicated by empty spaces or strange scrawlings. Beethoven made some speedy additions to the score . . .

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And then there is the story about how Ritter von Seyfried turned pages of invisible writing: “As was often the case he had not had time to put it all down on paper.” Think about this as well.14

[Playing the Critic] It is typical that many people do not listen to music but only criticize it. These are two functions that do not go well together. If you have two thousand critics at a concert next to two thousand regular listeners, you will find it pretty hard to satisfy everyone. If you try to do this, you will lose track of your composition’s “raison d’être.” I would think that you go to a concert for the pleasure of listening, but if you buy an expensive ticket only to criticize the music, you are just wasting your money. It would be better to leave this to the critics.15 Of course, everyone knows everything about how to compose, how to arrange everything, how to do this better than the composer, and all of these opinions vary and contradict. You might have two thousand opinions about your idea to consider, but they were not about your idea. Your single and simple purpose was to make your “one” idea “acceptable” to two thousand listeners, and you did your best to make it comprehensible and plastic enough so your listeners could grasp it. But you did not expect to find yourself sitting among two thousand critics who will tell you how to proceed; that you doubled the strings with the winds; that it is incorrect to write your symphony in an impressionistic manner since no one has done so until now; that your scherzo is not as good as your finale; that your Second Symphony was much better; that your First Symphony was better than your Second; that a piano is not good in the orchestra; that the piano is much better as a solo instrument; that your development section was not developed enough (my works have no development section at all); or that your development section was too long and too complicated. In short, you entirely miss the piece. Of course, you were not thinking about these things while you composed. Instead, you just developed your idea musically without giving much thought to such possible objections. In fact, you had an entirely different plan in your mind. You thought they would listen to your imagination and not to what they themselves are imagining.16 That we are guided by our own ideas is nothing unusual or unnatural. But what is unusual is how this state of affairs developed and how it is justified. Everything testifies to the fact that our first contact with the work, or our immediate response (which we do not consider “intellectual” and really is not), or what actually brings us in touch with the magic of the work, is substituted by perceiving it through a theoretical response, enjoyment, and judgment—all at the same time. In other words: we do not let ourselves be taken away, or we do not listen. Perceiving a work theoretically might seem like the more elevated thing to do, but the opposite is true. We should

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leave all this to the critics who sit there for this reason and who are or are supposed to be equipped with the technical knowledge to classify the work, its meaning, strengths, and weaknesses. What is more, the work was not written for this critical approach but for something completely different. Most of us have little respect for criticism, and there are very few articles and essays that we could consider real criticism. Yet despite all this disrespect towards the composer and his work, we force ourselves into the role of a critic as if this entitled us to a better understanding. As a result, we deprive ourselves of a spontaneous relationship to the work and the enjoyment that the work wants to bring us. This gets even more complicated because, almost consciously, we replace our “new experience” with the “old experience” we are used to; in other words, we mix together two different worlds. We close ourselves off from the effect of the new experience so we can convince ourselves that we have a better understanding by uttering a few meaningless phrases that have nothing to do with what we are hearing. We revolve within the circle of our usual experiences and close our eyes to the new ones. Perhaps this would not be so important were it not for the fact that we lose our ability to lose ourselves, or the ability to respond spontaneously to what the work provides on its own. We are unable to forget ourselves because our “personality” stands in the way. Rather than gaining something from the work, everyone tries to add something to it, and you would be amazed by everything that these critics come up with. Good, valuable criticism is really quite rare. More often than not, we get essays and observations that have little to do with what the work is. It is a difficult profession to be a critic (I mean a responsible one), but seldom is it taken seriously. When we take a closer look, we see that most “critics” do not even have sufficient musical training and lack sufficient interest and that the single result of their activity is having filled out a certain number of lines that have no meaning but are considered information, criticism, or a review. In Prague we had a school of criticism that analyzed the work until you got dizzy. It was filled with all the problems of metaphysics, verbalisms, and obvious nonsense that had no relationship to the work itself. But not even this school could disturb the natural relationship between the common listener and the music until the critics began asserting their own superiority in the matter and started shifting the listener’s perception to a different design. In the end, all of this is human and understandable, only that we fail to realize that there is no positivistic basis for this approach—scholarly, theoretical, emotional, or any at all. The single result is that we think that we understand the work better and that we have come closer to it, but all this amounts to is an illusion or artificial attitude. This is irrespective of the fact that each one of us has our own theory about the “effect of emotion” that is impossible to prove. We elevate the emotional element to the greatest significance but replace it with something that is completely different, with a static formulation, or with a capricious analysis that has no basis in reality. Then we are neither critic nor listener and we do not come any closer to the work. Perhaps this suffices for works we know well and which, through frequent hearings, get drawn in our

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memory with our initial emotional response, even though we know that this too will impede our natural contact with the work. But with new works, from the very start, we create a direct barrier and get deprived of what creates the work’s basic premise as well as a more genuine form of musical enjoyment. We lose a kind of contact that is direct and healthy, as well as any sense of unity with art.

[Solutions in Gestalt] Thus what I suggest is to avoid constructing the whole from the parts, the way it is done today in analysis. Instead, we should go from the parts to the whole, even though this is the exact opposite of what happens during musical creation. We now know that “the whole is not merely the sum of all its parts” and that by connecting and combining the relations we get a “new entity and new potentialities,” or a resulting compound that was not present in its elements. In other words, the work that we hear is this compound and not its parts.17 The danger of such analyses is that the work becomes lost for its details. We make references to structure by noting how the work is comprised without asking why it is comprised the way it is. Even without hearing the work, it is possible to write clichés like: here the theme is developed by the full orchestra through which we hear the rhythmic and harmonic possibilities that fully express the composer’s idea; the second movement is a slow cantilena that employs melodic elements that are supported by interesting harmonies; the third movement is a humorous rondo; etc. I warn you that analyses in this style are often the products of the composers themselves—and this includes myself—when the composer is asked to write “something” about his work. But in reality, the composer has a hard time writing about anything because, for him, the work is conceived as a whole and not from its details, and he is no longer aware of that inner work, or gestalt. The work does not become homogenous by assembling and developing different or related material but by the way the whole gets shaped in the mind, which does not necessarily come about outright consciously. When the composer selects his material, he leaves out what does not fit into the system of the work but also processes the foreign element so it does. Or, as we say, he wants to hold the work together. This is not always a directly conscious process but instinctive integration based on the idea of the work rather than this or that “motive” or “theme.” Processing the material depends on the disposition, capacity, and honesty of the composer.

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[Practical and Ordinary Purpose] On Gothic architecture, Ruth Benedict writes: “When we describe the process historically, we inevitably use animistic forms of expression as if there were choice and purpose in the growth of this great art form. There was no conscious choice, and no purpose.”18 This purpose might have been “practical and ordinary,” but it is disregarded or not considered purpose as such. Purpose of this kind might be related to the daily concerns of the artist, and we have documentary evidence for this. But we would rather not discuss such things because they would seem to lack spirituality and depth.

[Concluding Thoughts] When we view a work from the beginning, the first thing we notice, of course, is the motive. This is also the first configuration. But a melody is not just a group of notes—something organic already appears: the form, a balance of elements, expression, and style. Compare, for example, a melody by Mozart, a melody by Bach, and a romantic theme, and you will immediately see a difference in configuration and all the consequences for the development of the form and its particular shape. Take the theme of a fugue—try creating a fugue from a romantic theme. Here we see that a motive is not something that appears by chance, and the same holds true for style and order. When we view a work as a whole, we have a new and more complicated gestalt. And when we view the entire culture into which a work belongs, we have an even more complicated gestalt that depends on numerous conditions that are both known and unknown to us and upon which the composer is dependent, whether he is fighting for them or against them.19 The fact is that we can never know all the elements of a work or culture. Of course, if we knew them all, we would not have any problem. Another thing is that we know many of the elements but cast some off to the side. In other words, we do not consider them serious enough because they would disturb our fine aesthetic thoughts. But by doing this, we immediately arrive at a different design to which we think we must adhere, even at the cost of sacrificing self-evident facts. This is not scientific method and cannot bring us any closer to a true knowledge of a work because the most basic human element is excluded from our judgment. As a result, the composer thinks he must appease public opinion and come up with a different account of how he works.20 Should he tell them that he works by intuition, should he tell them that he is something of a prophet like Christ who sacrifices himself for humanity, should he tell them that—well, we all know what the critics and public want to hear. If he had the courage to bring things to the correct measure, the value of his work would immediately drop to zero.

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NOTEBOOK FROM NEW YORK

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Let us say you are in front of a painting of an old master you admire. You search for phrases for how to describe its effect on you, and then someone tells you that it is a copy, or fake. You notice that confusing psychological process that suddenly takes place inside you. You tell yourself that this is not significant, but you are already trying to protect yourself because you should not be mistaken. The fact is that— even though the painting did not change—your interest in it did, and you suddenly assumed a different point of view. What happened? Something crept into our conditioned thinking that changed our opinion. In other words, a disruptive element came into our perception, into our attitude towards the work, into the “superiority of our aesthetic judgment,” or into something that was not as firm as it seemed. Now our emotions to the work are mixed, and upon each opportunity, we will alert others to the fact that it is a fake. Here the name of the artist—about whom we are merely “culturally informed”21—plays a greater role than the painting itself. This all shows the relativity of our discernment and our bookish cultural education. One of the elements that we underestimate is craft, which we have discussed above. Today it is almost considered a defect. Also underestimated is the daily life of the artist, which we take into account only once there is no other recourse and which we embellish so it does not seem too trivial. And then there is that mechanism, or that automatism that is a part of life and the work, and the many other elements that would seem to devalue the work, which is nonsense. There are things that can be supported far more concretely than all those fantasies that we add to the work, which actually impede us from coming closer to it. Everyone knows better than the composer how the work was supposed to be written, comprised, and conceived. But what is forgotten is that great rift between “knowing how to do something and doing it oneself.” Today, almost everyone knows what should be done and how. But no one will do it, because as soon as he starts working, everything appears in a different light. The same holds true for criticism. It is very easy to assume a position, but it is much harder to defend it with facts and not merely phrases that mean nothing in the end. And regardless of all that we add to the work, the work is still the same, with all its strengths and weaknesses. It is fixed once and for all and our opinion will not change anything about it. These habits show an unnatural attitude towards the work that limits its effect to a static, analytical judgment that is vague and goes against all evidence. The actual technique and craftsmanship of the work becomes limited to something that is mechanical in the worst sense of the word. This has a crippling effect on the work and our attempts at instruction. Everything becomes mechanized towards phraseology in a way that has little to do with what the work really is. The work is communication. First there is the work, but then there is the explanation, the work’s purported raison d’être—this is communication about communication. The first is clear, simple, direct, feeling, perception, and experience. The second is confused— we do not really know what we are talking about.

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Chapter Sixteen

Notes from 1947, Excerpts An Unwritten Law? When I was teaching at Tanglewood, Earl1 brought me a composition with which I was generally satisfied. We only stopped at one place. There was some kind of mistake there but we could not figure it out. We corrected that place and everything seemed fine for the moment. But I was still not satisfied and I thought about it until the next day. I kept a visual picture of the score in my mind and suddenly realized that, indeed, that place had been wrong, but the real mistake had occurred some twenty measures earlier, and from that point forward, the entire composition was off course. Since I did not know the score perfectly, I waited until I met Earl at lunch. When I spoke to him, he told me that he, too, had found the mistake and that it was several measures before the place we had tried to correct in our lesson. I was pleased that he had found it on his own, but I was curious if his discovery was the same as mine. I was not completely sure because I did not know the score well enough from memory; I merely had a recollection of what it looked like. Thus we immediately set out for his apartment to look at the score. And lo and behold, the mistake was in the exact same measure. And we both found it independently: I found it from a kind of photographic image of the score in my mind, and he found it by working through the score methodically. After correcting it, the composition proceeded without difficulty. Thus there is something here that cannot be defined: that an organism, it seems, demands certain things, and that we have no other choice than to subordinate ourselves to it intuitively. Is this a question of training, tradition, or habit? Or, are there certain laws of which we are unaware? This is something I have experienced quite often while composing. Once, while writing a violin sonata, I wanted to skip the scherzo but could not. As long as I had not written the scherzo, I could not find anything for the final movement.2

[The Limits of Musical Knowledge] 1. In general, our knowledge of the musical work is incomplete. We have the result, the composition, or the artwork. But we do not know the steps by which the composer

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arrived at this result, which is a complex that consists of numerous elements, many of which we are reluctant to consider. We have tried to reconstruct the creative process by employing facts from the composer’s life—i.e., his letters, notes, and writings. But what we get in the end is our own point of view: we merely choose those elements that fit into our system and construct a picture of the work that is imaginary. When we do this, we tend to aestheticize the composer’s creative process and accentuate his high state of mind, but we push aside those things from his daily life that seem almost ordinary. We create an imaginary system that is sometimes quite ingenious, but we do not have any concrete evidence for what we place into that system. And if we did this any more, our picture of the work would become completely false. 2. We have the work, the unique result, and we can verify what was written. But we do not know what was not written, what was omitted, or what could have been written. In other words, we have to accept the work the way it is—even with all its mistakes and weaknesses—and cannot change it. 3. Another question is, when do we really know a composition? The answer is that we never really do. We can play it, listen to it, study it, but—except for the conductors who need to know it by memory—we can never really say that we know it. We do not know all the elements because a musical work develops over time and we need a period of time through which to recall it. In other words, we cannot imagine a work in a single glance. After performing and hearing a work many times, we can still make new discoveries, or find new mistakes and deficiencies. Sometimes mistakes are found in the parts after many rehearsals. Sometimes a reading or hearing of a well-known work is a complete revelation. And this is apart from the fact that each reading or hearing takes place under different conditions, and each time it will produce a different effect. 4. We have to allow for the possibility that the score is not perfect. As composers, we have to stay within our technical means and accept the fact that the score can never completely express what we imagined. We only have primitive means to express ourselves. Thus in analysis, we do not have all the evidence for what took place in the composer’s mind. At what moment can we say that we really know the work, or the composer’s real intention? What criteria should we use? What are the consequences of this for our understanding and our attempts at instruction? Are we not talking about something we cannot know? All explanations are given from within the limitations of the human mind, the habits of fashion, and sometimes by negligence.

[My Latin Origins?] What interests me now is something about myself. How is it that—from my earliest years and without knowing why—I felt instinctively that something was not right.

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How is it that—from my earliest compositions—I felt the need to be precise, clear, and unburdened by the German strain of metaphysics. Today, I do not know the true impact of German propaganda on our culture, nor did I at that time. I think I already belonged to that generation that had relative freedom, and I never bothered to read those German writings3 that did not contribute to my interest in the principles of rationality and clarity, which were considered superficial and less worthy and still are.4 Nevertheless, something attracted me to these principles in a very personal way and enticed me to embrace them. What was it? None of my relatives, neither my father nor mother, were culturally engaged. Neither were they politically engaged, nor part of any social movement. Both of my parents were common people who earned just enough for their living through hard work. At home we discussed neither politics nor art, and neither one of them had those qualities that disturbed me so much subconsciously. I was never a romantic, even though I was brought up on romantic literature and had my spells of romanticism, just like any youth. I cannot say what the older generation was like. They seemed German to me, even though I did not know at that time what this meant: something heavy that justifies spiritual content with a verbose, “deep,” and often incomprehensible rationale.5 At that time we still did not know French art, which influenced me so much later on. All we knew were certain works of French literature that had a kind of surface-level appeal that I did not understand but spoke to me in an intelligible way. I had a very strong desire to learn, but it was only after many years that I realized these things and convinced myself that I am on the right path. But I still ask the question, where did my inclination come from? It did not come from my parents, whose basic traits were common sense, loyalty, honor, and justice.6 The differences between the generations, starting with my grandfather, whom I never knew, between my parents and my brother, who was just a few years older than me, are so striking that it is difficult to comprehend these chasms in development. The environment that I was exposed to in Polička and Prague offered such a diversity of things that were all irreconcilable. These things are quite difficult for me to recall right now, so many years later. And they were unclear to me even then; they were things that I could somehow only sense. Many of the people who played a leading role in life at that time were grounded in this German culture. And some of them are still alive today and continue to play an important role, which is really quite astonishing. So despite how badly we suffered at the hands of German culture, we still cannot get rid of it. Nevertheless, I continue to ask: why was it necessary for a Latin element to emerge in my work? What drove me to it and where did it come from? I was completely alone, surrounded on all sides by the exact opposite of what I desired, and I often questioned myself whether or not my thoughts are correct. I even told myself that I cannot be right since everyone around me insisted on something else. I almost did not dare to believe that I might be right, especially since my thoughts were based merely on my feelings. Of course, I was not completely alone, but those of us who held this point of view did not dare say anything in public. Most of the others were under the influence of German propaganda,

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which the Germans fully believed in and served them very well. It was the basis of their philosophy and later led to Hitlerism along a very logical path. And we can see the results of German philosophy quite clearly now, even though many of us would prefer not to see it. Of course, I had no insight into any of this back then, which is probably quite natural for someone of that age. And this no longer interests me so much, not even now when I know a great deal more. It is just for the sake of being complete that I return to those times that we all know. But what still interests me is where exactly that impulse came from, which—from the very beginning—separated me from the community at large and indicated an entirely different path from the one that was given to me by my surroundings and circumstances. Is it possible that some of my ancestors were Italian, French, or Spanish in origin, and that their name might have been Martini, Martin, or Martinez? If I had a choice, I would choose Italian ancestors. But this is only a thought.

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Figure 1. Martinů with his friend Stanislav Novák. Prague, 1912.

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Figure 2. Martinů at the Polička music school, 1918.

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Figure 3. Bohuslav and Charlotte Martinů, most likely in New York City, shortly after their arrival in the United States, spring 1941.

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Figure 4. Martinů in his New York City apartment, 1942–43.

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Figure 5. Martinů with his personal library in his New York City apartment, 1942–43.

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Figure 6. Martinů in discussion with Antonín Svoboda in Central Park, New York City. Also seen are pianist Rudolf Firkušný and Charlotte Martinů. April 1943.

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Figure 7. From left to right: Antonín Svoboda, Bohuslav Martinů, Rudolf Firkušný, and Charlotte Martinů. Central Park, New York City, April 1943.

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Figure 8. Martinů in South Orleans, MA, 1945.

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Figure 9. The Searles Castle in Great Barrington, MA, Martinů’s residence while teaching at the Tanglewood Music Festival in summer 1946. After nightfall Martinů fell from the semicircular terrace seen here. His accident was a life-changing event that affected his plans to return to Czechoslovakia.

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Figure 10. Facsimile of a page from Martinů’s essay “On the Creative Process” from his Notebook from Darien, 1943. In the second line, he appears to be crossing out the prefix “pod” (sub) of the Czech word “podvědomý” (subconscious), but he actually meant to underline the entire word and emphasize it.

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Figure 11. From Martinů’s essay “The Question of Rhythm” from his Ridgefield Diary, 1944.

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Figure 12. The first page of Martinů’s essay “Something about that ‘French’ Influence,” 1945.

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Figure 13. The first page of Martinů’s essay “The ‘Pastoral’ Symphony: What Are Invariable and Variable Conditions?” from his Notebook from New York, December 1945. Šafránek made various editorial markings on the page for his transcription of the essay in DHS.

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Figure 14. The last page from Martinů’s sketch to his orchestral work Toilers of the Sea. At the bottom of the page he writes, based on the last line of Hugo’s novel, “Until there was nothing more than the Sea!”

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Figure 15. A page from Martinů’s sketch to his Second Symphony, 1943. He transferred the date from this page, “July 24, 1943,” to the end of the full orchestral score, indicating that he considered the work complete with this sketch.

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Figure 16. A page from Martinů’s sketch to his Second Symphony, 1943. The vertical series of short horizontal lines in the right-hand margin was his shorthand for instrumentation.

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Figure 17. Zdeněk Nejedlý speaking at a rally in St. Wenceslas Square, Prague, in February 1948, the month of the communist coup.

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Figure 18. The communist cultural politician Miroslav Barvík, 14 November 1951, at the height of his influence over Czech musical culture.

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Figure 19. Václav Kaprál, Vítězslava Kaprálová, and Bohuslav Martinů during their summer holidays at the village of Tři Studně, Czechoslovakia, 1938. See discussion in appendix 3.

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Part Three

Documentation and Further Reading

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Appendix One

Martinů’s Source Reading Barzun, Jacques. Romanticism and the Modern Ego. Boston: Little, Brown, 1943. Benedict, Ruth. Patterns of Culture. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1934. Benn, Alfred William. History of Ancient Philosophy. London: Watts, 1912. Bridgeman, P. W. The Intelligent Individual and Society. New York: Macmillan, 1938. Einstein, Albert, and Leopold Infeld. The Evolution of Physics: From Early Concept to Relativity and Quanta. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938. Guggenheimer, Samuel H. The Einstein Theory: Explained and Analyzed. New York: Macmillan, 1925. Heard, Gerald. Pain, Sex and Time: A New Hypothesis of Evolution. London: Cassell, 1939. Huxley, Aldous. Music at Night. New York: Doubleday, 1931. _______. Texts and Pretexts. New York: Harper, 1932. Jung, C. G. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1933. Kahler, Erich. Man the Measure: A New Approach to History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1943. Lang, Paul Henry. Music in Western Civilization. New York: W. W. Norton, 1941. McCabe, Joseph. The Riddle of the Universe To-day. London: Watts, 1934. *Muller, Herbert Joseph. Science and Criticism: The Humanistic Tradition in Contemporary Thought. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1943. *Planck, Max. The Philosophy of Physics. New York: W. W. Norton, 1936. *Plank, Max. Where Is Science Going? New York: W. W. Norton, 1933. *Reiser, Oliver Leslie. The Philosophy and Concepts of Modern Science. New York: Macmillan, 1935. Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926. Van Loon, Hendrik Willem. Van Loon’s Lives. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1942.

Note: An asterisk denotes the original source of a text that Martinů noted in his diaries, but it is unclear whether he had that source in his possession or he noted the text from a secondary source where that text is also found.

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Appendix Two

Miroslav Barvík’s Report on Martinů from May 1955 Report for Comrade Hendrych1 on Boh. Martinů According to the Ministry of Culture’s Secretary for the Division of Musical Institutions, Comrade Miroslav Barvík, Bohuslav Martinů (born in Polička on 8 December 1890; student of Suk and Roussel) has been living abroad since 1921.2 He first resided in Paris, where he studied on a stipend from the Ministry of Education, and he remained there until 1941.3 He fled from the Germans to the United States, he took American citizenship, but he returned to France in 1954 and now lives in Nice (he apparently refuses to return to the United States).4 There were deliberations in 1947–48 about B. Martinů returning to the ČSR to become a professor at AMU. He promised privately several times that he would at least come and attend the festival in Prague,5 that he would teach for about half the year at AMU while continuing to live in France, etc. Apparently, under the influence of the tendentious battles over formalism in our country,6 he renounced his intentions, and he even spoke on a program for Voice of America.7 But he never actively engaged in battles against the new Czechoslovak Republic. In fall 1953, B. Martinů—through his lawyer—sent a letter to the Státní nakladatelství krásné literatury, hudby a umění8 in which he states that his compositions are not being published and performed and that he wants to transfer all of the author’s rights that he still has here out of the Czechoslovak Republic. Since it concerns a composer of international significance who is frequently performed, this question was of utmost importance both politically and monetarily. Through negotiations, we have succeeded in averting the exportation of his rights, and Martinů’s compositions are being printed once again (primarily for export) and performed by orchestras. But the Ministry of Culture recommends only those works that are not typical of his creative output between the years 1921–36, when he submitted for the most part to French bourgeois modernism. Also, in honor of his sixty-fifth birthday, compositions by Martinů are being performed on the 1955 Prague Spring International Music Festival. Martinů was invited to the festival in 1954 and 1955,

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and he promised privately that he would come, but his position and possibilities are unknown at the moment. As of late, there has been talk that his financial situation is not the best, his age is taking a toll, he is homesick, and that his family in Polička, it seems, is not doing that well either. A visit by Bohuslav Martinů to the Czechoslovak Republic would bring considerable political benefit.

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Appendix Three

On the Literary Reception of Kaprálová and Martinů Jiří Mucha’s Peculiar Loves and Miroslav Barvík’s “At Tři Studně” Jiří Mucha’s documentary novel Peculiar Loves (1988)1 did much to promote the composers Vítězslava Kaprálová and Bohuslav Martinů. Set in the Czech artists’ colony in Paris during the late 1930s, the book brought to light, for example, what an astonishing musical personality Kaprálová had been: Kaprálová had been revered as an exceptionally gifted composer during her time, and Mucha leaves us to wonder about the kind of brilliant career she might have had—if her life had not been cut short by illness and misfortune. And with respect to Martinů, Mucha offers several recollections of a composer who—during the 1940s—would become famous in America: here, in somewhat comical terms, Martinů is shown as taciturn and unpredictable, or as someone lost in his own world with little effort to respond to the people around him.2 Underscoring Kaprálová’s achievements and promise, or providing a reading of Martinů’s artistic personality, are not, however, the threads that hold Mucha’s book together. Instead, Mucha focuses on Kaprálová’s multiple and simultaneous trysts, which included one with Martinů, who had been her composition teacher in Paris. Mucha himself plays a central role in the story in that he, too, had become involved with Kaprálová and married her just before the German invasion of France; tragically, for reasons that are still unclear, Kaprálová died some eight weeks later during the days of the French capitulation. For his novel, Mucha relied on Kaprálová’s extant correspondence, which he had kept for many years before finally examining its contents; this led him to realize what a complex figure she had been. The

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publication of Peculiar Loves brought shock waves to the Czech musical community, as Kaprálová’s affairs—and her affair with Martinů in particular—would no longer be a subject of mere gossip and speculation. Indeed, until that time, biographers had largely suppressed the intimate details of the Kaprálová–Martinů relationship, not only out of respect for Kaprálová and her family, but also out of respect for Martinů and his wife, Charlotte, who lived on until 1978. The fact that Mucha quotes extensively from Kaprálová’s correspondence brings a sense of credibility to the book. But after the end of his narrative, we find two letter excerpts without context or explanation.3 These excerpts, as we will see, are inauthentic, and bring the veracity of Mucha’s book into question. Furthermore, these excerpts were then cited in several sources, canonizing a tradition of storytelling about Kaprálová and Martinů that should have been discarded long ago. Some of the sources in which these excerpts have appeared are of minimal academic relevance, which has made it difficult to justify a more thorough investigation of this matter.4 But now, with the appearance of one of them in Derek Sayer’s Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History, published by Princeton University Press in 2013, there is a compelling reason to examine them, all the more so since Sayer continues to retell and poeticize the Kaprálová–Martinů relationship, leaving more substantial artistic issues aside.5

The Letter Excerpts and Their Origins Thus let us begin by presenting the two letter excerpts in question, as they are found at the very end of Mucha’s novel. From the first excerpt, we are led to believe that Martinů is writing to Kaprálová’s father, Václav Kaprál (1889–1947), the renowned Brno pedagogue and pianist, from Kaprál’s country retreat in the Bohemian Highlands in the summer of 1938: What a summer, Václav! Perhaps there’s no place as good as yours at Tři Studně . . . One day I should celebrate the Highlands and all its little streams and springs with a simple composition that’s filled with children’s voices and such ringing laughter like that of your Vitulka . . . She’s so tiny and so animated like the smallest little sparrow, and one always feels good when she’s around. For someone her age, who has accomplished as much as she? And on top of it all, she’s still the girl who was not afraid to write the Military Sinfonietta . . . I’m lying here in the grass by your cottage at Tři Studně and I feel well, even though there’s an evil cloud in my mind, as if I shall never return here alive, as if neither Vitulka nor you will be alive in a few days. Václav, what nonsense has overcome me! . . . It’s difficult for me to confess, Václav, how much I love the two of you—your daughter Vitulka and you— and how much I would rather not leave tomorrow . . . and not part with you and for everything to stand still and remain the way it is.6

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And from the second excerpt, we are led to believe that Kaprál is writing to Martinů, just after the Second World War: I can finally send you a letter to Paris, because I’ve been waiting for five years now for more details about how Vitulka died . . . They’re talking about you . . . that you’re completely different . . . no more chasing after the latest experiments. I find it hard to believe that your fascination with surrealism has left you, but I’ll confirm this once I see you again—if I ever see you again. A small rash has appeared on my neck, you see, and it’s growing . . . down to my chest, and I’m afraid it’s a tumor and no one will save me. I lived through Vitulka’s death and the entire war, I lived through the Svatobořice camp . . . but it was all to no avail. Vitulka had already been dead for a long time, and I had to be interned because my daughter was abroad . . . It seems I won’t be in the world much longer . . . Bohuslav, return . . . even if I won’t live to see you, but return, because all three of us must meet once again at Tři Studně. That’s where we never lied to each other. And never made any pretenses . . .7

The inauthenticity of these excerpts was first revealed by the Martinů scholar Jaroslav Mihule in his short article “On Jiří Mucha’s Peculiar Loves” (1999).8 Mihule’s article was in part a belated protest, as he had been asked to review Mucha’s manuscript as a specialized reader, but to his dismay, the many corrections he had suggested on factual matters were completely disregarded. The principal reason Mihule had turned to the press, however, was to expose where exactly the letter excerpts had come from: a curious literary piece published in the Brno daily newspaper Rovnost in 1984 entitled “At Tři Studně,” authored by a certain Zdeněk Lužický.9 Since Mihule’s article went largely ignored, we should reexamine “At Tři Studně,” which I have translated in full and append below. “At Tři Studně” is a fascinating object of study that tells a moving story, yet we should be aware throughout that it is laced with misinformation.

“At Tři Studně” and Its Notorious Author “At Tři Studně” is framed by a short prologue and epilogue that provide the context to three letters: one written by Kaprálová around 1929 at the age of fourteen, the next by Martinů during the summer of 1938, and the last by Kaprál just after the Second World War. The title of the piece refers to the location of Kaprál’s summer home, the village of Tři Studně, which translates as “Three Springs.”10 A careful reading of the letters clearly reveals that they are concocted; their chronological anomalies alone are enough to give them away. In the first letter, for example, Kaprálová expresses her excitement over meeting Martinů, who “has been in Paris for almost six years now.” But why would someone writing in 1929, before the Second World War, refer

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to the First World War as the “first war” rather than the “great war?” Furthermore, as Mihule notes, Kaprál exhorts Martinů to return to the “new Czechoslovakia,” a phrase bearing the unmistakable imprint of the period after the communist coup in 1948, which Kaprál never lived to see.11 The letters on the whole—if one reads them as authentic—contain a range of peculiarities, but we should first make clear who wrote them. Mihule certainly knew the answer to this, but he only gives a hint by stating, “it seems a mere combination of coincidences that the article is signed in the name of Zdeněk Lužický and that the birthplace of a certain Kaprál student of political notoriety is Lužice u Hodonína.”12 It was by chance that I encountered Professor Mihule in Prague shortly before his article went into print, when he handed me a draft. After reading his article, I encountered him again and asked him point-blank, “So who’s the author of the piece?” “Miroslav Barvík,” he retorted loudly, with no ambiguity whatsoever. At that time I was still a graduate student researcher in Prague, only beginning to unravel the Czech musicological literature. Indeed, this was a name I had yet to hear. But this was partially due to the fact that Barvík was a figure that many in the Czech musical world had wanted to forget. For some five years after the communist coup, considered by many to be some of the darkest in Czech history, Barvík had served as the chief Party administrator for musical affairs (see fig. 18). For his role in purging from the musical community those deemed insufficiently engaged in Party policies, Barvík became known as the “hatchet man,” as he had exercised a kind of dictatorial power.13 After that time, his influence diminished, but he continued to play an important role in communist musical politics until the Prague Spring.14 By the 1980s, however, when he wrote “At Tři Studně,” Barvík’s situation had changed dramatically. Like many of the young idealist intellectuals who had seized the chance in 1948 to help build the new socialist state, Barvík became disenchanted with the 1968 Soviet invasion and occupation of his country. And due to his own role in the resistance, he was stripped of his Party membership, which ended his official career in Party politics.15 During the ensuing period, known as the Normalization, when hardline communist policies were restored, Barvík became most well known as a radio presenter of classical music and a musical journalist. As we will see, however, he never disavowed his socialist ideals. There is little question that Barvík authored “At Tři Studně,” as he had had a regular column in Rovnost’s “End-of-the-Week Reading” literary supplement called “Saturday Reading about Music,” which he signed off with his press abbreviation “mbk.”16 And in the 15 September 1984 issue of Rovnost, “At Tři Studně” appears right next to his regular column.17 Barvík also had the kind of intimate knowledge of the three figures to write about them in so much detail: he had been one of Kaprál’s most devoted students and a regular guest at Kaprál’s home in Brno;18 on at least one occasion he went deep into discussion with Kaprál about Kaprálová and her fateful circumstances in France;19 and Kaprál also gave Barvík access to Kaprálová’s manuscripts once they were returned to Czechoslovakia after the war.20

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Undoubtedly inspiring him to write “At Tři Studně” is the now well-known photograph of Kaprál, Kaprálová, and Martinů from their 1938 summer holidays at the village of Tři Studně, which Barvík probably saw for the first time many years earlier at Kaprál’s Brno home (see fig. 19). One question we can ask about “At Tři Studně” is what exactly we should call it. Is it a kind of nostalgic fiction? Or is it a series of forgeries designed to house a range of subversions? It is a combination of the two, as we will see, with both aspects working hand in hand. Viewing it more purely as fiction, we can see an array of literary motives, for example the number three: three epistlers, the village of Tři Studně (Three Springs), and a three-act structure complete with exposition, development, and conclusion. Another literary motive—obviously inspired by the photo—is the fact that both Kaprálová and Martinů are “lying in the grass” at the Kaprál summer home while writing their letters, some nine summers apart. This is perhaps believable for a fourteen-year old Kaprálová, but much less so with Martinů at the age of forty-seven. Clearly a touch of fictitious license is the phrase in the Martinů letter, “I’m lying here in the grass by your cottage at Tři Studně,” which is included in the letter excerpts in Mucha’s book: Martinů was actually staying with Kaprál and would have no reason to write him, unless he was writing in the form of a journal entry, or a letter he intended to send later on. This, alone, as printed in Mucha’s book, is a clear tip-off that the letters are not genuine.

Politics and Subversion When we read the letters as authentic, however, we find a range of subversions, both personal and political. Before examining these modalities, we should first keep in mind that Barvík did not write this piece for a critically minded audience. Instead, he wrote it for a weekend literary supplement that provided leisurely reading for the politically pacified masses. This was quite characteristic of the Czechoslovak Normalization press, where cultural journalism often took form as a bland, empty filler, with meaningful content, if any, to be discerned from between the lines. Certainly, trained musicologists and the cultural elite would have not taken “At Tři Studně” seriously. But more likely than not, the vast majority of its readers had little idea about its veracity and probably accepted it as true. Notable about Barvík’s strategy is that he begins with a fourteen-year-old girl’s carefree reflections about her aspirations in the arts and her affection for her father. This is a cover for the more serious commentaries that follow. From here, Barvík— through Kaprálová—comments on the professional injustices that Kaprál had suffered. Kaprál, in fact, had been of the “correct” socialist persuasion but for this reason prevented from securing a teaching position at the Brno Conservatory between the wars. The way Barvík writes about the travel restrictions placed on Kaprál and Kaprál’s friend and artistic collaborator, Ludvík Kundera, is highly ironic.21 We are

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led to believe, due to their support of the “Reds” as Czechoslovak legionnaires during the Russian Civil War, that the government of the First Czechoslovak Republic had prohibited Kaprál and Kundera from traveling abroad. This was a common tactic of the communist political journalism: to portray the First Czechoslovak Republic (1918–38), or the “Bourgeois Republic,” as highly repressive. But this was also a form of inverted reality, since it was actually the communists who, once they seized power, closely monitored their citizens and severely restricted their right to travel. The Martinů letter, too, begins with innocuous remarks. These take form in Martinů’s affection for the Highlands and the Kapráls, who were natives of Moravia. Native allegiance to Moravia is an important modality of the piece: it was an expression of Barvík’s own Moravian patriotism but also an attempt to bring Martinů into the Moravian fold. And this is quite consistent with Martinů’s own views: in his 1941 Autobiography, in fact, Martinů describes the Highlands, his own place of birth, as “geographically in Bohemia, but in essence a part of Moravia.”22 But by establishing Martinů’s affinity with the Highlands and Moravia, Barvík is also separating Martinů from the politics of the East–West ideological struggle. Upon realizing the importance of the Highlands and its central place in Europe, Martinů gains a sense of enlightenment by suggesting that its citizens should “help sustain peace in Europe and thus the entire world.” This sets the stage for Barvík’s revision of Martinů’s compositional oeuvre, which he fashions according to the communists’ long-time disdain of French music. In the scenic outdoors of his native Highlands, Martinů realizes that he had been wrong to embrace French cosmopolitan modernisms during the 1920s and that his decision to compose Czech works for the Czech theater during the 1930s had been completely correct. And not only that, Martinů vows that he will one day compose an ode to the Highlands and that Vítězslava Kaprálová, or “Vitulka,” will be a source of inspiration. This, of course, is a reference to Martinů’s folk cantata Opening of the Springs (1955) and suggests that it was during his days with the Kapráls in the Highlands that summer in 1938 that he had had a grand premonition to compose this piece. There is no doubt that The Opening of the Springs held great meaning for Martinů in that it embodied much nostalgia for a homeland that he could not visit.23 But this is a far cry from having it represent—as Barvík wants us to believe—his complete transformation from a French modernist to an ethnic lyricist. Indeed, Martinů never rejected his early Parisian works, and he continued to view Half-Time, which he supposedly rejects in this letter, as a vitally important result of his creative process.24 What is more, defining Martinů’s late output with The Opening of the Springs is outright misleading: it is a relatively simple composition that cannot compare in compositional breadth with his large-scale works from that time, such as his Fourth Piano Concerto (“Incantation”), Gilgamesh, and The Greek Passion. What follows is Barvík’s most remarkable political interpolation, set in the dramatic context of Hitler’s threats against Czechoslovakia that summer. In his letter, Martinů continues to distance himself from France by suggesting that the French

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have become cowards in the face of Hitler’s aggression and that they no longer have the political will they had once had to initiate the French Revolution. The revolution, in fact, had to be definitively “accomplished by others,” by which we are supposed to understand the communists, who established the first communist state in Russia but continue to be attacked and repressed everywhere else in the world. The Martinů letter reads: “France is now a different nation that has outlived its glory and forgotten its role when it was the first to rise up one hundred and fifty years ago at the dawn of the real, new era. Later this had to be accomplished by others definitively, but now everyone wants to strangle them for it . . .” Thus while in the introduction Barvík had placed Martinů’s sympathies with the Highlands and Moravia, here, for a split second, he launches him to Moscow in defense of the communist cause. The Kaprál letter and the epilogue are filled with reproach about Martinů’s “refusal” to return home.25 Specifically, Kaprál, like Kaprálová in the earlier letter, reminds Martinů that it is the duty of Czech composers who are allowed to study abroad to return home and pass on their knowledge to the next generation of native composers. And in his epilogue, Barvík even fleshes out the Czechoslovak government’s generous offers to bring Martinů home, which Martinů had simply shrugged off. This was especially rude since—if we look back to the Kaprálová letter—Martinů had launched his international career with the support of government funding. Although contrived, the Kaprál letter probably captures an aspect of why Martinů never returned home that is rarely addressed: in order to avoid having to face the barrage of personal questions from family and friends he had once left behind. Indeed, factors such as his accident, the communist coup, and his American citizenship account for the most obvious reasons Martinů never returned home. But his desire to avoid having to answer for his absence should be taken into account as well. Milan Kundera, in his novel Ignorance, shows that the issues of emigration are extremely complex and often evolve into an individual’s complete alienation from his native psyche.26 This suggests that the full breadth of Martinů’s postwar circumstances should undergo a more serious reappraisal. One question that remains is how the letter excerpts appeared at the end of Mucha’s novel and why. This is something Mihule personally addressed with Mucha, who simply “changed the subject” every time he was asked.27 Of course it is possible that an editor at the publisher Mladá fronta had added the excerpts to the book and that Mucha had no control over the matter. But if Mucha had, in fact, extracted the passages from “At Tři Studně” himself, he would have certainly known—as a writer of his caliber—that they were coming from a fictitious and politically subversive piece. Only adding to the intrigue about this matter are the discussions that emerged in the press after the 1989 Velvet Revolution that Mucha was not so immune to political matters as we might think. Although having endured political imprisonment by the communists during the 1950s, Mucha later enjoyed a privileged status. As the son and heir to the famous Art Nouveau painter Alfons Mucha, he was allowed to represent his father’s work abroad, thus freeing him from the travel

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restrictions placed on ordinary Czechoslovak citizens. But along with this privilege came the suspicion in Czech society that Mucha had become a double agent, or that he had served in espionage on behalf of the communist state.28 “At Tři Studně” and its transmission into Peculiar Loves is the product of a profoundly idiosyncratic period in Czech cultural history, when restrictions on the press and the psychological stress of repression produced some highly unusual results. Yet we should realize, too, how much these works of fiction by Barvík and Mucha have distorted our image of Kaprálová and Martinů. This we can see in the way they inflate the significance of the Kaprálová–Martinů relationship, the last visit of both Kaprálová and Martinů to Czechoslovakia and the Highlands in 1938, and The Opening of the Springs as a symbol of Martinů’s nostalgia for homeland, if not a reminiscence of his talented composition student from long ago. Furthermore, the writings by Barvík and Mucha show an attempt to inextricably tie Kaprálová and Martinů together, leaving the story of their relationship to overshadow Kaprálová’s rightful achievements as a composer. And with respect to Martinů in particular, these literary works bring us only further away from grasping the real nature of his artistic values. In his writings, we saw Martinů insisting that we not look into the personal lives of composers to explicate musical works. Yet this is exactly what Barvík and Mucha would like us to do.

Postscript While presenting this research at the conference “Vítězslava Kaprálová in Her Times and Our Times,” held in Basel, Switzerland, in November 2015, Christine Fischer, the conference organizer, personally noted to me from her French-language translation of Mucha’s novel29 that there is another unusual excerpt planted in the prose, also without context or explanation. I then reviewed the book and realized that, indeed, just a few pages before the excerpts I discuss above, during the Kaprálová death scene, we find excerpts from Barvík’s Kaprálová letter from “At Tři Studně.”30 These excerpts are situated in Mucha’s prose as if to represent a dream Kaprálová was having just before she died. Like the other excerpts that were selected from Barvík’s article, they are innocuous in nature and bear none of Barvík’s personal and political distortions. Let us take a quick look: The setting is nighttime, with Kaprálová lying in her hospital deathbed. Mucha sits at her side, tries to console her, and holds her hand. With the sound of the rain steadily drumming the window pane, Kaprálová hears a regular tempo and begins conducting in the air. She becomes delirious, starts speaking in half sentences, and falls asleep. We then read the two excerpts from Barvík’s Kaprálová letter, where, as a girl, she speaks to her father about her love for him, her love for her mother and how much she pities her, her love of painting and music, and the peacefulness she feels in the countryside that she fears will be broken. Just at the break of

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dawn, Kaprálová awakens for the last time and pleads to be let home. We then read, without explanation, “It’s Julietta,” as if she can hear the strains of Martinů’s eponymous opera in the rain; these were her last words, we are led to believe. This would, in fact, be evidence for the “eternal love” between Kaprálová and Martinů. But in light of the way we see the sources trying to make us believe this story, we are better off to dismiss this entire passage, or simply to take it for what it is: fiction—and one of a most “peculiar” kind.31

Translation of Miroslav Barvík’s Article “At Tři Studně” (1984), Written under the Pseudonym Zdeněk Lužický All three of them should have been laid to rest there—Bohuslav Martinů from Polička, with his friend Václav Kaprál from Brno-Královo Pole, as well as Václav’s daughter Vitulka. In the meantime, the only one watching over that place is that little squirrel32 they both loved so much. I know not if there is anything more difficult than to outlive one’s children . . . ❧ ❧ ❧ How I envied you, Daddy, that you were traveling to Paris! I was only a small girl at that time, and I didn’t even know if I would go to the conservatory or paint—all this was still boiling in me like the way it was between you and mum. Mum painted so beautifully, but her singing was lovely too—her deep and enchanting voice must have intoxicated you when you came home on leave for a few days during the first war. Nowadays, Mum is always sad and unsettled and doesn’t know how to help herself—I feel sorry for her. If I could, I would sit with her all day and watch her paint. Her miniature landscapes are an expression of her longing for beauty and fortune— somehow, she manages to paint everything nicer than it really is, even our Highlands and all of our beloved little places at Tři Studně. But it is you, Daddy, that I love the most, because when we talk, I feel like I’m flying into the unknown. With you I feel like a different person, free and unrestrained . . . I know you’d prefer traveling to the other side, to the East, all the way to Moscow. I know how much you suffer from and feel humiliated by the scorn of those Brno snobs and bigots who will never forget that you write articles about music for Rovnost33 and that you hold classes at your music school for amateurs and that you try to have music and its beauty be reserved not only for the rich and allow for the greatest number of people to understand the fact that beauty is for everyone, especially for those who have little in this world and for whom simply dreams about beauty bring them a little pleasure and help them survive. This is why you haven’t become a professor yet at the conservatory, even though all of your classmates from the Janáček Organ School have been working there for the longest time. But you will not give in. It is your courage that I admire

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the most, because you’ve shown that a small private music school can produce more talented and higher caliber people than the conservatory. I know who lives up on Purkyně Street no. 6—it’s is our faithful “little uncle,”34 your inseparable friend and colleague from whom you always take advice and with whom you play piano four hands, or two pianos together. But he too has been stigmatized—he too had supported the Reds as a legionnaire in Siberia, so he probably won’t live to see what he’s earned. And what a pianist, scholar, and aesthetician he is! Once there’s a universitylevel music school in Brno, he should become the rector, but we shouldn’t expect this to happen any time soon . . . When you and Dr. Ludvík Kundera requested permission for a trip to Moscow, not only did you get turned down, but you’ll both have it “good” now for a couple of years—they won’t be forgetting about either one of you. But everyone is going to Paris! That’s the official center for world culture, but our country only supports those artists who go to Paris “to learn” and faithfully pass it on to us at home. I like it when you say that there is much in Paris from which you can learn, even though it upsets you that it only serves those with means. But now you’re studying with Alfred Cortot and working through his piano pieces with him (they won’t even let Dr. Kundera go there).35 I look forward to the time you bring back Cortot’s new edition of Chopin, who is your God, and tell us how he did it.36 But at the same time, you’ll be thinking about Skryabin and Rachmaninov and dreaming about all those new young people in Moscow and Leningrad on their way to new paths. Recently, it seems, at the Warsaw Chopin Competition, a young man from Leningrad shined, an extraordinary pianist and composer, a certain Dmitri Shostakovich . . . there certainly must be others. It was in Paris, for that matter, that they published some new compositions by Prokofiev—what a revelation! Not only are they brilliant in technique but also stunning with their dazzling and deft ideas that are almost painfully sarcastic . . . but most of all I look forward to meeting Martinů! He’s been there for almost six years now, and little did he know that the one-year state stipend that he received unexpectedly in Prague in 1923 would be extended for so long, and who knows if it will be extended even longer, because, in the meantime, he still copies quite a bit and searches. But as soon as he finds himself (like that Prokofiev), wow, will that ever be a drama . . . ! Daddy, I’m lying here in front of our cottage at Tři Studně watching the clouds fly about on the August horizon. I imagine I’ll experience such moments and feelings many times in my life, but in the meantime, an ominous premonition that I don’t want to believe whirls my heart about . . . I’ll wait until you’re here once again so you can bid us farewell and return and bring back Bohuslav Martinů so he can take pleasure in the Highlands with us—because he hardly knows it here anymore . . . ❧ ❧ ❧ What a summer! Perhaps there’s no place as good as yours at Tři Studně, not only because it’s the “roof of the world” from which you can see how one stream flows to

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the Bohemian side and how its waters, along with the Elbe, become swallowed up by the North Sea. But because from that very same place, you can see a second little stream that flows to the Moravian side and how, along with the Danube, its waters become subsumed by the Black Sea. Who would say this about such small hills in the Highlands? Yet the name “roof of the world” is fully fitting, and it might even have a symbolic meaning. The Czech lands are at the heart of Europe, and we’ve always been searching for paths both east and west. The Přemyslids fought over it, but it was only with Charles IV and Jiří of Poděbrady and Charles the Elder of Žerotín that . . . Our main role and function should be to help sustain peace in Europe and thus the entire world. It is on these very summits of the Highlands that they should erect the symbols of peace so that everyone can see with their own eyes how calmly and freely one stream flows into Bohemia and the other into Moravia and how . . . Václav, it was really a great idea for you to build a cottage here. Here the entire world seems so far away, yet I feel so close to everything that concerns the most important issues of our world! One day I should celebrate the Highlands and all its little streams and springs with a simple composition that’s filled with children’s voices and such ringing laughter like that of your Vitulka. Sure, she’s over twenty now, but she’s so tiny and so animated like the smallest little sparrow, and one always feels good when she’s around. For someone her age, who has accomplished as much as she? And on top of it all, she’s still the girl who was not afraid to write the Military Sinfonietta and even dared to put on tails and stand in front of the Czech Philharmonic to conduct the composition herself! Vítězslav Novák was glowing with happiness, because he had had well over one hundred students but never such an unbelievably “rare pearl.” It was a gracious act that he allowed her to come and study with me in Paris for a couple of years. It’s only now that I realize who Novák is for Czech music and how we would have never become so cultivated or disciplined without him. And you cannot succeed in music without rigorous discipline! This is something I never appreciated enough when I studied with Josef Suk almost twenty years ago. We parted ways in Prague as teacher and student without a deeper understanding of one another, and this troubles me to this day, because . . . indeed, his rural outlook37 did not agree with my dreams of the sublime, but none of this really matters anymore. What’s most important in the end is that basic musicality and the ability to hear in oneself what makes people people, what makes them humane and elevates them. Everything else dies away and is forgotten . . . This is why I crossed over from works like Hilftime38 to Špalíček and Comedy on the Bridge, even though I never believed at first that someone would want to play them for me at home. And this is what is so gratifying and miraculous, when you hear them being performed at the National Theater, on the radio, or in those same places playing The Bartered Bride, Rusalka, and Jenůfa . . . I’m lying here in the grass by your cottage at Tři Studně and I feel well, even though there’s an evil cloud in my mind, as if I shall never return here alive, as if neither Vitulka nor you will be alive in a few days. Václav, what nonsense has overcome me! In Nuremberg Hitler screams that he’ll send hundreds of planes and

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wipe us off the map. But I’d rather not think about this because it’s all so nonsensical and absurd that I would have to give up my Highlands and my moments with you, the Kapráls. I only have a few close friends, and I know I must value the confidence that I have just found in you. Charlotte does not speak Czech, and although I am indebted to her for so much, I realize that most things escape her, because she doesn’t feel and experience them like we do. Most people in France are different for that matter. No longer is this the nation that withstood the Battle of the Marne, the Battle of Verdun, and the Battle of the Somme. It is now a different nation that has outlived its glory and forgotten its role when it was the first to rise up one hundred and fifty years ago at the dawn of the real, new era. Later this had to be accomplished by others definitively, but now everyone wants to strangle them for it . . . Charlotte is always worried about me, and I’ve become so accustomed to her care that I’m unable to recover from a cold on my own. Only here, at Tři Studně, does it seem that I’ve returned home, all the way to Mum, to Polička, and that I’m strong, invincible, free, and brave . . . But in reality, I am not like this. I too am afraid, and if I could, I would depart all the way to the end of the world, if this were possible, to escape my fate. It’s difficult for me to confess, Václav, how much I love the two of you—your daughter Vitulka and you—and how much I would rather not leave tomorrow and not part with you and for everything to stand still and remain the way it is. Or, is it possible that we will never see each other again? ❧ ❧ ❧ I can finally send you a letter to Paris, because I’ve been waiting for five years now for more details about how Vitulka died. But I’m afraid that you haven’t even arrived from America yet, even though you informed us by postcard that you’ll return. Various things are being said about you here, about your illness,39 and mostly about your compositions. People say that you’ve completely changed—no more chasing after the latest trends and experiments. I find it hard to believe that you’ve lost your fascination with surrealism, but I’ll confirm this once I see you again—if I ever see you again. A small rash has appeared on my neck, you see, and it’s growing. It’s already expanded down to my chest, and I’m afraid it’s a tumor and no one will save me. I lived through Vitulka’s death and the entire war, I lived through the Svatobořice camp40 from which good people always helped me escape based on the most various pretexts so that sometimes I’d stay outside the camp in the infirmaries more often than on a plank in the camp. But what does it matter—the pain! And it was all to no avail. Because Vitulka had already been dead for a long time, and I had to be interned because my daughter “was abroad.”41 I’d like to find out from you what exactly happened during that flight of yours from Paris, and why you were all unable to help her so that she could depart with you, and why she had to search for a ride to Marseilles by herself so she could get to England by ship, and why young

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Mucha tried to save it all at the last moment with that wedding, and why . . . ?42 I will have so many questions for you to the point that it will be unkind (but don’t worry—I won’t say anything in front of Charlotte—I know how she is). It seems that I won’t be in the world much longer. I held myself together through the entire war, and I managed this thanks to those youngsters. Do you know how much “my class” means to me? You’ve never experienced this,43 because I began teaching at the Brno Conservatory at the outset of the war, and those boys of mine, Milan, Mirko, and Karel44—that was an accomplished group, and we always used to talk about you and Vitulka and how the two of you will return and . . . but now she’ll never return, and one of them, Milan, died of tuberculosis right after the war, so only two of them survive . . . But most importantly, do not believe those who are trying to frighten you and warn you about the new Czechoslovakia—those are the ones who are trying to curry favor for themselves the most and be saved. Bohuslav, do not believe them and return! Return, even if I won’t live to see you, but return, because all three of us must meet once again at Tři Studně. That’s where we never lied to each other. And never made any pretenses . . . ❧ ❧ ❧ Vitulka Kaprálová died suddenly in June 1940 in the southern French town of Montpellier during her flight from the Nazis, while her father, Václav Kaprál, died of cancer in June 1947. Bohuslav Martinů never returned home alive, even though he had been invited each year to the Prague Spring International Music Festival, named a professor of composition at AMU in Prague, and offered the chance to lead summer composition classes in the ČSR.45 In July 1959 he learned that he had cancer, and he died on 28 August in a sanatorium in Switzerland. Today, he, too, is buried at home . . .46

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Notes Introduction 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

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The European premiere of the Concerto Grosso (1937), H. 263, was stifled by the events leading to the outbreak of war, and upon his arrival in the United States, Martinů believed the score to be lost. But much to his surprise, a copy of the score arrived in New York City in the hands of conductor George Szell, who had rescued it from Prague and brought it to the United States via Australia. See the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980), s.v. “Martinů,” by Brian Large; and Morgan, Twentieth-Century. Taruskin, Oxford. See Halbreich, Bohuslav Martinů. See Large, Martinů, 139–40. Although Large is the frequent target of criticism in the Martinů literature, there is much to commend in his efforts since he was one of the few researchers outside of Czechoslovakia working on the composer during the 1970s, something that was far more challenging then than it is today. Martinů, Bohuslav Martinů. Šafránek reserved Martinů’s theater essays for the volume Divadlo, henceforth DBM. Much of Martinů’s correspondence is archived at the Martinů Institute in Prague (henceforth IBM; see http://www.martinu.cz) and the Bohuslav Martinů Centre in Polička (henceforth CBM). See Šafránek, “Bohuslav Martinů”; Bohuslav Martinů: The Man; Bohuslav Martinů: Život a dílo; Bohuslav Martinů: His Life. Since the Czech and English versions of Šafránek’s second biography (Bohuslav Martinů: Život; Bohuslav Martinů: His Life) differ somewhat in content, I cite in the present book from one or the other, or from both. For more on Šafránek, see his posthumously published memoirs, Miloš Šafránek. During the Nazi occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, the Czechoslovak Information Service in New York City served as a cultural-diplomatic arm of the London-based Czechoslovak government in exile. Among the few studies of Martinů’s Parisian Criticism is Vysloužil, “Martinů.” Notable monographs on Nejedlý include Křesťan, Zdeněk Nejedlý and Červinka, Zdeněk Nejedlý. DHS, 19. Vogel, Leoš Janáček.

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14. See DHS, 125, and Šafránek, Bohuslav Martinů: The Man. 15. Commenting on the negative press he had received in Czechoslovakia, Martinů commented in a letter to Šafránek (from 24 August 1957) that such a volume would be a “good deed,” and that it is necessary to put in order “that nonsense that has been written about me until this time” and “to provide additional facts for future musicologists who will make up whatever they want about me just the same.” Translated from the original letter; see also DHS, 5. 16. See DHS, 125–267. In my doctoral dissertation, I referred to Martinů’s American Diaries as his “1940s Notes,” but I have reverted to Šafránek’s original designation. See Svatos, “Martinů.” 17. Scholarly work on Martinů’s American Diaries has been based entirely on the troublesome DHS edition. See Fukáč, “K Průzkumu”; Settari, “On Some Aesthetic”; and Vysloužil, “Journaux.” My first article on the diaries based on my study of the composer’s original manuscripts is Svatos, “Reasserting.” 18. See Editorial Remarks (chapter 10 in the present book).

Chapter One See Martinů’s Essays from Fall 1945 (chapter 14 in the present book). See ibid. For an overview of the aesthetic literature current in Prague during the first decades of the twentieth century, see Novák, Česká. 3. See Šafránek, Bohuslav Martinů: His Life, 72. This is paraphrased from Martinů’s 1941 Autobiography, which I have translated in chapter 11 of the present book. 4. In “Something about that ‘French’ Influence” in his Essays from 1945, Martinů writes, “We can easily recall those articles where meaning was drowned in a flood of verbal apotheoses. The whole matter became nonsense and most people had rejected it, but its influence was so great that no one had the courage to say anything in public.” My emphasis; from my translation in chapter 14 of the present book. 5. For more on the issue of censorship and auto-censorship in musical life under Czechoslovak communism, see Jůzl, “Music,” 45ff. 6. See Nejedlý, Zdenko Fibich; Zpěvohry; Počátky; Dějiny předhusitského; and Dějiny husitského. 7. For more on Nejedlý’s conception of Czech music, the battle over Dvořák, and how various figures were involved in the polemics of that time, see Dějiny 1:115–19. 8. For more on the separation of the Charles University in Prague into German and Czech branches and the development of musicological study at each, see Locke, Opera, 138ff. 9. Typical of the Nejedlý School’s campaign against Dvořák is the book by Bartoš, whose criticism of Dvořák’s personality and works was merciless; it was the first and only full-length monograph on the composer available at that time. See Bartoš, Antonín. See also Svatos, “Clash,” 16ff. 10. Zich, Estetické and Estetika. An influential study based on the Hostinský–Zich school of aesthetics was Racek, Idea. 1. 2.

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11. See Svobodová, Hudební. 12. See Nejedlý, Kritiky (1923–1935), 196ff. 13. Nejedlý, Kritiky (1907–1909), 406–7. For more on this review, see Svatos, “Clash,” 6–7. 14. In his book Smetana’s Operas (1907), Nejedlý depicts how Dvořák was taken under the wing of influential figures in Vienna once the thirty-five-year old composer had won a stipend from the Austrian government: “These were the Bayreuth years, when Wagner stood at the goal of his most audacious dreams: the opening of the Bayreuth theater in 1876. Vienna stood on the extreme wing of reaction at that time and was the side seemingly defeated. Now Hanslick focused greater attention on Dvořák. Everyone must have been surprised by the astonishing originality of our composer, which immediately placed him among the foremost of not only Czech masters. But Hanslick also came to sense the nature of Dvořák’s pure musicality, or his strong inclination towards absolute music. Indeed, this served the leader of the reaction against programmatic and modern dramatic music remarkably well, thus Dvořák was now promoted by Vienna as much as possible. But Hanslick mocked Dvořák considerably, as he did not work for Dvořák out of some kind of inner conviction, of which he was generally incapable, but only out of musical diplomacy.” See Nejedlý, Zpěvohry, 212. 15. Nejedlý, “Zrání.” 16. See Křesťan, Zdeněk Nejedlý, 455, for a reproduction of the Nejedlý caricature by Suk’s friend Hugo Boettinger (1880–1934) that first appeared in the daily newspaper Lidové noviny on 19 May 1925. The caricature shows a sculpture of Smetana— with a Red Star on his chest and a hammer in his hand—pinning a burgher to the ground with his left foot. Nejedlý, depicted as the sculptor, is in front of his work, carefully appraising it. The caption of the caricature reads, “Sculptor Prof. Dr. Nejedlý: ‘My monument will trump all others. Now, Tovarish Smetana, I’m starting to like you.’” Boettinger published his caricatures under the pseudonym Dr. Desiderius. 17. See Dějiny 2:7–9. Originally appearing as a pamphlet, Helfert’s essay is reprinted in Helfert, Vybrané, 29–53. 18. Nejedlý, “Svoboda!” 19. See Ottlová, “‘Dvořák Battles.’” On a personal level lies a matter usually reserved for gossip, which was passed down with such regularity that it became part of Nejedlý’s legacy. Exasperated by the notion that Dvořák had “negated” Smetana’s progressive conception of Czech music, many people in the Czech cultural world gave up rationalizing Nejedlý’s agenda, favoring the story of the critic being curtly turned away by Dvořák when he purportedly appeared at the composer’s residence as a young man in an effort to win Dvořák’s daughter Otýlie as his wife (Otýlie later married Dvořák’s student Joseph Suk). This, according to legend, triggered Nejedlý’s hostile, tendentious, and paranoid critical style. See Pečman, Útok. 20. Polička locals had in mind the example of violinist Jan Kubelík (1880–1940), who had earned an international reputation as a soloist by this time. Jan Kubelík was the father of the internationally renowned conductor Rafael Kubelík (1914–96).

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❧ notes to pp. 13–15

In 1908, Martinů was famously dismissed from the violin program at the Prague Conservatory for “incorrigible negligence.” The next year he was readmitted to the conservatory, but to its organ department; he passed his state exams in 1912 only after failing the previous year. 21. See Šafránek, Bohuslav Martinů: His Life, 45–46. 22. Stanislav Novák, concertmaster of the Czech Philharmonic (1917–36), was instrumental in the battle to bring Václav Talich to the orchestra as music director; he undoubtedly helped Martinů join the ensemble as well. Martinů and Novák became inseparable friends after meeting at the Prague Conservatory as classmates. A bust of Martinů now appears outside the room that they shared during their student years on Prague’s riverside promenade Na Kampě. Martinů’s homage to his friend, written shortly after Novák’s death in 1945, is reprinted in DHS, 312–16. 23. See Popelka, “Česká.” Here I make no revisions of the term “impressionism” in how it may or may not reflect Debussy’s intentions or aims; I simply retain it in the way most Czech musicians and critics of that time equated it with Debussy’s works and style. 24. The strains of Mahler’s Symphony no. 2 (“Resurrection”) that Martinů seems to have infused into Czech Rhapsody, H. 118, composed in honor of Czechoslovak independence, might be seen as a reference to the resurrection of the Czech nation. 25. See DBM, 118–19. 26. Nedělní. Adding to the contemptuous tone of this review is the critic’s use of the word “dumping” in English. The return to a “deep, Czech conception” is most likely an allusion to Martinů’s neoromantic cantata Czech Rhapsody, H. 118, which, of any composition by Martinů known to Prague’s public at this time, best fits this description. 27. Listy. 28. See Martinů’s Essays from Fall 1945 (chapter 14 in the present book). 29. See Martinů’s 1941 Autobiography (chapter 11 in the present book). 30. In his homage to Roussel from 1937, Martinů describes how his recently deceased teacher had been essential in helping bring clarity to his many “confused ideas”: “I came to him looking for order, transparency, balance, taste, and a clear, exact, expressive language—the characteristics of French art I had always admired and with which I wanted to become intimately familiar.” See DHS, 94. 31. See Dějiny 2:85–90. 32. See Bartoš, “Nebezpečí.” 33. See Dějiny 2:86. Talich defended his programming decisions by stating, “the performance of foreign compositions makes clear what is Czech in our work and what is international.” 34. Bláha-Mikeš, “Boj.” Bláha-Mikeš suspects that a certain Milcová is using Bendová as a pseudonym. 35. Suggesting the future confrontation between the “metaphysical conception” of Czech music and Stravinsky, Martinů writes: “It is certain that, in our country, Stravinsky’s work will clash with our ‘ideological’ attitude, which retains the many vestiges of that long era that was romantic and subjective. It will largely clash with

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notes to pp. 16–18

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48.

49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

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the opinions of a public that will be roused from its leisurely consumption of music and sentimental ideas.” See Martinů, “Igor Stravinsky,” Listy. See, for example, Zich, Symfonické. See Dějiny 2:143–44. The chamber music portion of the ISCM’s festival that year was held in Salzburg. Martinů, “Cestou”; DHS, 24–26. The lifting in 1859 of “Bach Absolutism,” or the police regime that was established in the Austrian Empire following the 1848 revolutions, inspired Smetana to leave his post in Göteborg, Sweden, and return to Prague to cultivate Czech musical life. Martinů, “Cestou”; DHS, 25. Ibid. Ibid. Martinů, “Igor Stravinsky,” Listy; DHS, 31–33. Martinů, “Stravinského”; DHS, 30–31. Martinů, “Igor,” Czech Philharmonic concert program (23 November 1924). This article is not found in DHS and had not been documented as of this writing. By “characteristic motives,” we can understand Martinů to mean musical gestures that became associated with extramusical ideas over the course of the romantic period. Despite his severity with Martinů, Jaroslav Vogel (1894–1970) was probably not in favor with the Nejedlý School for having devoted his scholarly attention to the Moravian outsider Leoš Janáček, whose harsh critiques of Smetana during the 1880s in his own journal Hudební Listy, published in Brno, were never forgotten. In his review of Janáček’s Jenůfa, Nejedlý criticized the Moravian composer for “naturalism,” or for deriving musical style from folk sources directly as opposed to fashioning a “higher” artistic synthesis. See Nejedlý, Umění, 167–87. Vogel served as a critic for the daily newspaper Československá republika during the years 1923–26. On Vogel, see Československý 2: 890–91. Another Martinů composition from this year with parallel diatonic triads in the style of Stravinsky’s “Russian Dance” from Petrushka is the Concertino for Cello, Brass, Piano, and Percussion, H. 143. Showing that Martinů was perhaps just one of many composers who saw in Stravinsky’s mannerisms the new lingua franca of the times is George Anteil, who, in his Ballet Mécanique (1926), writes xylophone passages reminiscent of those that help create the bizarre and chaotic tonal world of the “Infernal Dance” from Stravinsky’s Firebird. Martinů, “Případ”; DHS, 33–35. See Martinů, “Igor,” Czech Philharmonic concert program (23 November 1924). Martinů continues by writing that Stravinsky has stabilized tonality and rhythm in a style that never loses definition, despite the most complicated rhythms. Also, Stravinsky’s work “assumes a true form of dynamism,” adding that “dynamism” is the term now employed to characterize this new style. Vogel, “Igor Stravinsky.” Ibid. Then Vogel takes issue with Martinů’s characterization of Stravinsky as “a return to absolute musical values, to pure music.” Vogel explains that the work by

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54. 55.

56.

57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

64. 65.

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❧ notes to pp. 18–20 Stravinsky that was performed that evening by the Czech Philharmonic, Song of the Nightingale, originally an opera, has now taken the form of a symphonic poem and closely follows the opera’s narrative. Since Stravinsky does not rework the material as “absolute music,” the work relies on a knowledge of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, thus making the work programmatic in the most thorough sense of the word. But the way Stravinsky can be considered a composer of absolute music lies in his use of musical materials in terms of “pure musical invention” and “self-sufficient purposes” and not as a means for expressing a certain kind of “inner human nature.” In this way, Martinů is correct by stating that Stravinsky’s music rebels against romanticism and the “production of feelings,” which, according to Stravinsky himself, led to immoderate degrees of pathos during the previous era for the sake of creating depth that was often merely fabricated. Vogel, “Hudba.” Ibid. Who Vogel means as a “Czech Strauss” is unclear. In another berating review, Dvořák biographer Otakar Šourek gives a different version of Half-Time’s reception: “I do not believe that anyone took this musical soccer very seriously. The applause with which one part of the audience (spoken in the style of the work: fans) protested against the hissing of the other will not confuse me in this.” See Šourek, “Pražské.” Just after World War II, however, Šourek was among many in Czechoslovakia who hoped that Martinů—due to what was seen as his great work on behalf of Czech music—would return to work in Prague. See Mihule, Martinů, 389. Martinů, “Případ”; DHS, 34. At the opening of his response, Martinů states that he is not writing in his own defense and that his “true defense lies elsewhere”—i.e., in his abilities as a composer. But with his anger boiling over at the end, he writes that—when attacked out of ignorance—he has the right to defend his work with all available means. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. See Martinů, “Half-Time.” These program notes were put together from a letter Martinů had sent to Talich and a short statement on the work he had written for the Czech Philharmonic’s program annotators. Martinů’s letter to Talich is reprinted in Kuna, “Korespondence,” 215–16; Martinů’s short statement on Half-Time is reprinted in DHS, 272. Martinů, “Případ”; DHS, 34. Kuna, “Korespondence,” 216. Ibid. From the perspective of his American Diaries, Martinů means that Half-Time is the result of a subconscious assimilative process that took place away from the spectacle that he had witnessed (the soccer match, in this case) and cannot be subject to extramusical interpretation. See chapter 4 in the present book. Refers to the Brno musicologist Gracian Černušák (1882–1961). See Československý 1:192–94. Martinů’s letter to Novák is printed in DBM, 149–50.

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Chapter Two 1. 2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

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The chamber music portion of the ISCM festival that year was held in Venice. See Dějiny 2:144–45. One of Dvořák’s last students, Rudolf Karel (1880–1945) was part of the Czechoslovak Legion in Russia during the Russian Civil War and conducted the Legion’s orchestra; he composed Sinfonie Démon (1918–20) while the Legion held the Trans-Siberian Railway. He became a prominent Czech composer of the interwar period. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and imprisoned in Terezín where he took part in the concentration camp’s famed musical life; he died there on 6 March 1945. See Československý 1:649–51. Dějiny 2:144–45. Nejedlý student Josef Bartoš provides a different view of Half-Time and its place on the festival program. Before relating the moral of the story—i.e., how, for the composer’s benefit and for the reputation of Czech music, embarrassing works of this kind will need to be eliminated from the “national representation” on future festival programs, he writes: “B. Martinů has finally gotten on the program of the international concerts, obviously as a representative of the pseudo-modernist directions in our country, and I believe that it was Talich who supported him with verve . . . We Czechs took a firm stance on Half-Time when it was first performed by the philharmonic, and it is highly improbable that it made an original effect on the foreigners.” See Bartoš, “Druhý.” See Dějiny 2:145. Martinů, “O hudbě”; DHS, 99–102. Making a direct reference to the ISCM festivals, Martinů concludes this article in a similar vein: “the new music festivals have confirmed that we have not convinced the world of all of its errors.” Martinů, “O hudbě”; DHS, 100. Martinů, “Ke kritice”; DHS, 41–43. Here Martinů makes a reference to an article by Mirko Novák, which he commends for dealing with this particular problem; the article by Novák had appeared in a recent issue of Listy Hudební matice. Martinů, “Ke kritice”; DHS, 41. Martinů, “Ke kritice”; DHS 42. Martinů, “Ke kritice”; DHS 43. Martinů, “O současné hudbě,” Listy; DHS, 73–78. Martinů, “O současné hudbě,” Listy; DHS 73–74. Unfortunately, Martinů does not give any examples. He might have in mind certain composers of Les Six, whose importance he downplays (with the exception of Honegger) in Martinů, “Současná”; DHS, 46–49. In this article, Martinů takes issue with the dismissive attitude of Czech critics towards virtually all forms of new French music while attempting to shed light on the principal figures of the French musical scene and the latest musical developments. Martinů, “O současné hudbě,” Listy; DHS, 77. Martinů, “O současné hudbě,” Listy; DHS, 78. Martinů, “O současné hudbě,” Listy; DHS 77.

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18. The first article of this series is Nejedlý, “Dnešní.” 19. Ibid., 2. 20. See Martinů’s discussion of these works in his 1941 Autobiography (chapter 11 in the present book). 21. Despite settling in Paris on a more permanent basis, Martinů’s contact with Czechoslovakia remained undiminished, as he traveled there regularly during each off-season, dividing his time between Polička and Prague. See Martinů’s 1941 Autobiography (chapter 11 in the present book). 22. The four composers became acquainted at a concert series for young composers of the Orchestre des Concerts Straram, where Martinů was recognized as an unusually facile composer. The performances of the Orchestre inspired the publisher Michel Dillard to produce a limited edition of works by these composers under the heading L’École de Paris. See Šafránek, Bohuslav Martinů: His Life, 111–12, and Large, Martinů, 38–39. Apart from Martinů, the composers included the Hungarian pianist and composer Tibor Harsányi (1898–1954), the Swiss-born Conrad Beck (1901–89), and the Romanian Marcel Mihalovici (1898–1985). The conductor and impresario of the Orchestre was Walther Straram; Straram was an anagram based on the conductor’s real name, Walther Marrast (1876–1933). 23. See Mihule, Martinů, 145. The Czech cellist Bohuslav Pavlas, who inherited the Kinský Palace in Prague from the famous dancer under the condition that it would one day be home to the Bohuslav Martinů Foundation, related to me what seems to be an undocumented anecdote. At one point during a dance rehearsal, Podhajská turned to her class and announced, “and now we will all go to a concert and applaud a very gifted Czech composer.” Personal communication from Pavlas, Prague, 1999. Pavlas also reports the existence of a substantial collection of letters between Podhajská and Martinů. The Martinů Foundation and Martinů Institute were both situated in the Kinský Palace for several years after the 1989 Velvet Revolution before moving to its present-day location in the Kobylisy district of Prague 8. See http://martinu.cz. 24. Martinů, “O současné melodii”; DHS, 78–81. Commenting on the reluctance of younger Czech composers to embrace innovation due to the dismissive attitude of the critics towards new music, Martinů writes, “better to do nothing than experiment and take a wrong step.” 25. Martinů, “O současné melodii”; DHS, 79. 26. Ibid. 27. Martinů, “O současné melodii”; DHS, 80. 28. Ibid. 29. Martinů, “O současné hudbě,” Přítomnost; DHS, 81–85. 30. Štěpán, “Estetický.” On Štěpán, see Československý 2:735–36. In a sign of respect, Martinů refers to him in his essay as “Dr. Štěpán.” 31. As examples, Martinů notes the attempts by aviators Nungesser/Coli and Lindbergh to make the first transatlantic flight, the first of which ended in tragedy. This was a bit of self-promotion, since two of his recent works were linked to this subject—i.e.,

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notes to pp. 28–31

32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44.

45. 46.

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his ballet Amazing Flight (A Mechanical Ballet, 1927), H. 159, and La Bagarre (Allegro for Large Orchestra, 1926), H. 155. Martinů, “O současné hudbě,” Přítomnost; DHS, 83. Martinů, “O současné hudbě,” Přítomnost; DHS, 84. After noting how audiences now ignore the categories of “greater” and “lesser” works, he remarks, “the musical work is not for explaining, but listening.” Martinů, “O současné hudbě,” Přítomnost; DHS, 85. Ibid. His remark about what he “dislikes recalling” is quite possibly a reference to the “Battle over Dvořák” (see chapter 1 of the present book), but he leaves this unclear. He concludes his article by scolding the critics once again for their destructive appraisals of new music: “In every review and essay we see the stamp of the devil, which—upon each opportunity—exercises its sovereign opinion of a kind that should have been discarded long ago. The consequences of this are being felt by the younger composers, who—even with all the freedom that they have been apparently given—will still need to walk through great fire.” Martinů, “O současné hudbě,” Přítomnost; DHS, 82. See Dějiny 2:145–46. See Šilhan, “V cizích” and Dějiny 2:145. At the Prague National Theater, Wozzeck was chosen over Vítězslav Novák’s Grandfather’s Legacy, which triggered a polemic between Novák and Ostrčil over the ensuing years. In Dějiny, Šilhan is described as a musical dilettante. See Dějiny 2:145–46. Nejedlý, “Bergův.” Reprinted in Nejedlý, Kritiky (1923–1935), 196–99. Refers to Jaroslav Šafařovič (1866–1937), who served as the Prague National Theater’s administrative director at that time. In Československý (2:673), Šafařovič is noted as having “performed his duties tactfully, never interfering in artistic affairs.” Nejedlý, “Pan AŠ.” Reprinted in Nejedlý, Kritiky (1923–1935), 199–200. By writing “the music department at the academy” (Nejedlý’s emphasis), Nejedlý undoubtedly had in mind his own musicology department at the Charles University. It is notable—despite the socialist and pro-Soviet nature of his writings during the interwar period—that Nejedlý did not officially join the Czechoslovak Communist Party until just after his arrival in the Soviet Union in 1939. Later, this was covered up during the communist dictatorship, when Nejedlý’s membership was backdated to 1929. See Křesťan, Zdeněk Nejedlý, 277. For more on this subject see Locke, “‘Wozzeck Affair.’” Attesting to the quality of the production, Berg called the Prague production of his opera the real “Uraufführung,” even though the opera had been premiered in Berlin the previous year. Influencing his remark might have been the fact that he attended the raucous third and final performance in Prague. See Dějiny 2:145. Ibid., 146. The music historian and critic Hubert Doležil (1876–1945) served as editor of the journal Smetana during the years 1921–26. “His collaboration with Zdeněk Nejedlý not only had an influence on his methods, but it also led him to be an enthusiastic

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47. 48.

49. 50.

51.

52.

❧ notes to pp. 32–35 propagator of the Hussite reformation and an authority on Hussite motives in music.” See Československý 1:252–53. Doležil, “K 60. narozeninám.” A notable revelation in Křesťan’s ground-breaking monograph is that Nejedlý nearly became a victim of a purge that Stalin had prepared of a number of historians at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, where Nejedlý had held a position during his exile. In February 1941, a series of discussions was held at the academy on the subject of Russia’s stagnation during the rise of capitalist industry in nineteenthcentury Europe. Nejedlý, in his remarks, claimed that Russia’s prerevolutionary stagnation had been caused by an inadequate level of urban development and that Russian towns were unable to disseminate new technologies to the rural population. After a transcript of the discussions had reached Stalin and his powerful secretary Andrei Zhdanov, Nejedlý was charged with “bourgeois nationalism” and forced to defend himself; what had angered Stalin in particular was Nejedlý’s remark, “we Europeans,” making Stalin feel slighted by the idea that the Russians were mere “Asians” and less advanced. Archival records show that Nejedlý was on a list of personnel from the academy due to be executed. However, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union that summer made Stalin turn his attention to more pressing matters, in effect saving Nejedlý’s life. See Křesťan, Zdeněk Nejedlý, 282–88. See Sayer, Coasts, 249ff. See Barvík, Skladatelé. This is the address of the Secretary General of the Union of Czechoslovak Composers to the union’s first plenary meeting in April 1950; I discuss it at length in Svatos, “Sovietizing.” See Československý 1:37. As a composer with a “socially critical accent” who studied with both Hostinský and Nejedlý at the Charles University, Axman was seemingly the crown prince in the line of Smetana’s heirs at that time. The waning influence of the Nejedlý School by the 1930s, however, made the idea of a single line of succession a moot point. Axman was among the most engaged Czech composers in music criticism; his contributions to Smetana during the 1920s are ubiquitous. An authority on antiquarian musical manuscripts, he was also a skilled singer, and his vocal works are generally highlighted among his compositions. See Dějiny 2:222–23. An official offer for Martinů to teach in Prague could be issued only after the interim postwar government’s mandate had expired and a new Minister of Education and Culture was in place, which happened in July 1946. In other words, Martinů could receive the official offer only after Nejedlý had left that ministry. See Mihule, Martinů, 374, 390, and chapters 6 and 8 in the present book.

Chapter Three 1. 2.

Svatos.indd 200

I discuss the Nejedlý School’s opposition to Martinů’s theater project in Svatos, “Clash.” See Kuna, “Korespondence,” 231–33.

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notes to pp. 35–40 3.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

❧ 201

Writing to Talich just before Křička was named to the post, Martinů suspects that Novák’s successor will be chosen “po domácku,” or “the way it works at home,” reflecting his pessimism about the nepotistic ways of Prague’s music scene. See ibid., 232. See Martinů’s 1941 Autobiography (chapter 11 in the present book). See also my discussion in Svatos, “Reasserting,” 67–70. On the Martinů–Kaprálová relationship, see my study in appendix 3 of the present book. Martinů provides a short musical example of this style in “A Ruined Accompaniment,” found in his Essays from 1945 (chapter 14 in the present book). The musical example comes from his own Cello Sonata no. 2, H. 286. Martinů first used these chords in his opera at the moment Michel “finds” Julietta, the girl of his dreams. See Martinů, Julietta, 78, system 4, measures 7–8. Published as Šafránek, Bohuslav Martinů: The Man. See ibid.

Chapter Four 1. 2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

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See Šafránek, Bohuslav Martinů: Život and Bohuslav Martinů: His Life. Mistakenly dated by Šafránek to 7 July 1958; see Šafránek, Bohuslav Martinů: Život, 44. My translation here is derived from the original letter, archived at the CBM under PBM Kmš 876. Ibid. The opening measures of his sketch to this work are found in Šafránek, Bohuslav Martinů: Život, 54. One way we can interpret this term is as a “sensation à attitude.” In other words, Martinů wants to capture the idea of a “sensation” (which the composer seeks to stabilize and secure) transforming into an attitude (through which the composer can begin selecting and shaping the musical material for that particular work). As Martinů explains further on in his diaries, a composition’s emotional value should be determined on the basis of its functional relations and the decisions the composer makes to ensure consistency within the work. He encourages us to consider such elements in place of the clichéd emotional values of romantic psychology—i.e., sorrow, longing, joy, etc. Documented in chapter 12, note 9, of the present book. See Meyer, “Sport.” This comes from the reminiscences of the American composer H. Owen Reed, who studied with Martinů during the early 1940s. The anecdote is from a letter by Reed from 25 October 1998 to Eckart Rohlfs, editor of the Neue Musikzeitung. My thanks to Mr. Rohlfs for sending me a copy of Reed’s letter, along with several other written reminiscences that were commissioned for the NMZ article. Another facsimile page of his sketch to his Second Symphony is found in Šafránek, Bohuslav Martinů: The Man. Regarding how to sketch, one of Martinů’s students noted, “He showed five or six ways . . . not of writing Martinů’s music, but of writing my own music . . . Freshness,

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10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

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❧ notes to pp. 40–42 freedom, spontaneity, were very important to him.” Another student relates, “If he had any method at all, it might have been in teaching us how to sketch rather than putting everything down all at once.” See Renton, “Martinů.” From a letter by Elias Tanenbaum, who studied with Martinů for about eight months in 1954. It is notable that this remark concerned Martinů after his accident in 1946, which, according to many who knew him (e.g., David Diamond), changed his personality a great deal. Tanenbaum’s letter, from 4 November 1998, was written to Eckart Rohlfs of the NMZ. See note 7 above in the present chapter. See, for example, entries 135–37 in Simon, Bohuslav Martinů, 93. See Halbreich, Bohuslav Martinů; Červinková, Bohuslav Martinů; and Mihule, Survey. Martinů completed the third movement of his First Symphony, where he quoted the “Julietta Chords” for the first time, on 14 July 1942. A few months later, in October 1942, he quoted the chord progression again in his Variations on a Theme by Rossini for Cello and Piano, H. 290. See Martinů’s 1941 Autobiography (chapter 11 in the present book). Ibid. On his Sixth Symphony forming a “break” in his compositional development, see Šafránek, Bohuslav Martinů: Život, 291–92 and Bohuslav Martinů: His Life, 271–72. See Breton, Selections, 161ff. Relating to the subliminal state by which Martinů produced the score to Julietta, we have the following reminiscence by Georges Neveux, the author of the original play. Having not been in touch with Martinů for some while, Neveux suddenly received a letter from the composer in June 1936, in which Martinů invited him over to hear his setting at the piano. Martinů wrote, “I recently reread your play Juliette ou la clé des songes, and before I knew how it happened, I realized that I had already set the first act to music.” See DBM, 251–52. The extent to which Martinů was fascinated by the subconscious was noted by his wife Charlotte in that the first thing he would say in the morning might often be, “What did you dream about?” Related by the Martinů scholar Harry Halbreich (who spoke with Charlotte personally) at the 2009 conference in Prague, Continuity of Change: Bohuslav Martinů in 20th Century Music History. The story of the opera deals with the dream of the traveling bookseller Michel, who searches for the woman—Julietta—who had once enchanted him with her singing. In act 1, upon his arrival in the seaside town where he hopes to find her, he realizes that the town’s inhabitants have no memory, leading to a string of bizarre situations. In act 2, he meets Julietta, who confesses her love for him and relates her many cherished memories of the time they spent together, even though they had never actually met. In act 3, Michel suddenly finds himself in the “Bureau of Dreams” and is encouraged strongly to leave the office and not dream about Julietta anymore. Instead, he chooses to continue dreaming about her, but now in a permanent state of insanity. For more on the importance of Julietta in Martinů’s oeuvre, see Svatos, “Clash.” See Šafránek, Bohuslav Martinů: Život, 336 and Bohuslav Martinů: His Life, 324.

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notes to pp. 43–53

❧ 203

20. Some have pondered the place in his creative development of his Toccata e due canzoni (1946), which was interrupted in midstream by his near-fatal accident. As a result of the accident, Large suggests a decline in the quality of Martinů’s output over the ensuing years. See Large, Martinů, 94–96.

Chapter Five 1.

In a radio interview from 1942, Martinů cites the English madrigal as an important influence on his style, along with Debussy and Czech folk music. See Large, Martinů, 140. 2. See Van Loon, Van Loon’s Lives. The book’s full title reads Van Loon’s Lives: Being a true and faithful account of a number of highly interesting meetings with certain historical personages, from Confucius and Plato to Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson, about whom we had always felt a great deal of curiosity and who came to us as dinner guests in a bygone year. 3. A fine example of where Martinů puts this principle into practice is in the second movement of his Symphony no. 5 (1946), H. 310. Here we find monumental gradations for full orchestra that are not climactic in nature (mm. 63–74; 161– 83). Instead, the movement’s climax takes shape in a quieter passage with reduced orchestration—i.e., in the canonic interplay between the trumpets and violins in measures 108–18. 4. The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980), s.v. “Martinů,” by Brian Large. 5. See Březina, “Klaviertrio,” 37–41, and Dostálová, Řecké, 31–49. 6. In an earlier mischaracterization of Martinů’s relationship to his works, Large calls him “a bad parent who had no time for his children once they had been brought into the world.” See Large, Martinů, 139. 7. Rybka, Bohuslav Martinu. 8. See ibid., ix. 9. From an e-mail I received from Professor Kerman in December 2004. One of Kerman’s earliest publications is a review of a Martinů chamber music concert at Princeton. See Kerman, “Current Chronicle.” 10. See Rybka, Bohuslav Martinu, vii, 156–57, 316. 11. In what is often a medical study, Rybka’s book leaves unaddressed the fact that Martinů was a chronic cigarette smoker and how his psyche and social stamina were probably affected as a result. 12. When I make this statement, some readers who know Martinů’s music—which can be at times quite romantic in tone—might be perplexed, as they would be inclined to see Martinů himself as a romantic in terms of his personality. What is important to realize, however, is that the resulting sound of Martinů’s music actually comes from his anti-romantic approach. As we have noted in chapter 4, for Martinů, the relations of the musical material create the passion, but the resulting music is not

Svatos.indd 203

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204

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

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❧ notes to pp. 54–55 the personal expression of the composer. Furthermore, in order for the composer to create the musical relations, he needs to keep his distance from the affect that the music produces. Thus by discussing him as an “anti-romantic,” I am restricting myself to his values for the discipline and craft of composition. Whether Martinů’s formulations in his diaries themselves are at times “romantic” is something I will leave for a different discussion. Under suspicion by the communist regime, Antonín Svoboda was restricted in his ability to continue his research, leading to his permanent emigration to the United States with his wife and son Tomáš in 1964. Tomáš Svoboda (b. 1939) became a successful composer, serving for many years in the School of Music at Portland State University. For more on Antonín Svoboda, see “Oral History Interview with Antonín Svoboda,” 5 November 1979, interview by Robina Mapstone, UMedia Archive, accessed 25 May 2018, http://umedia.lib.umn.edu/. See Šafránek, Bohuslav Martinů: Život, 268. See ibid., 310–11n65, and Šafránek, Bohuslav Martinů: His Life, 298n183. Interpolated in “Our Solutions Occur in Time and Space” in the Ridgefield Diary, documented in chapter 13, note 10, of the present book. This significant passage is omitted from DHS (see p. 163). It may have been removed due to Svoboda’s emigration from Czechoslovakia in 1964, after which he—like other émigrés to the West—became a persona non grata for the communist regime. An amateur violinist, Einstein played through some of the work for Martinů with the French pianist Robert Casadesus. In response to the dedication, Einstein gave Martinů an autographed copy of his book The Evolution of Physics, which the composer marked in several places with musical symbols. See Einstein, Evolution, and Mihule, Martinů, 348–49. Regarding further intellectual influences on him while in the United States, Šafránek notes that Martinů attended meetings of the Committee on the Integration of the Sciences and Humanities (of which Šafránek himself was a member), which brought the composer into contact with a spectrum of contemporary thinkers and inspired his interest in a number of areas. See DHS, 244. Documentation for this committee can be found among the Oliver Reiser Papers, 1930–74, UA.90.F10, University Archives, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh. In this collection, note folders 97 and 373. See http://digital.library.pitt.edu/. Regarding the profusion of serialist works in the European concert halls, Martinů wrote the following from Switzerland in 1958, making his impatience quite clear: “If the new wave of twelve tones will prevail, the new generation has something to look forward to. There is plenty of it here. Each piece is worse than the last. I don’t even want to write about it. We’re not going to listen to it.” Letter from Martinů to Frank Rybka from 6 July 1958, as cited in Rybka, Bohuslav Martinu, 264. For more on Martinů’s thoughts about serialism, see ibid., 199–200, 326, and Mihule, Martinů, 426. Regarding Martinů being relieved from Princeton, Mihule notes that a contributing factor was the decline in enrollment at all American universities at that time due to the conscription of young men into the Korean War. See Mihule, Martinů, 414–36.

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notes to pp. 55–58

❧ 205

20. See Babbitt, Collected. Late in life Babbitt expressed disdain for the fact that Martinů was the closest thing to contemporary music being played on a local radio station: “The public stations that we have in Princeton are preposterous with the exception of WKCR which we now can’t get. Contemporary music is represented by, at best, Villa-Lobos, or who’s the other one they play all the time? Martinů.” See “The Future of Sophisticated Music” in “Milton Babbitt: A Discussion in 12 Parts,” held at the Juilliard School of Music on Tuesday, 16 October 2001. Videotaped and transcribed by Amanda MacBlane, accessed March 2013, http://newmusicbox.org.

Chapter Six 1.

2.

3. 4.

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Rybka writes, “In order to avoid prison himself, Novák had been forced to divorce his Jewish wife and abandon their two children. As anguishing as this had been, what he did not know was that all three of them would end up exterminated at Auschwitz. Novák died a broken man after this.” Rybka, Bohuslav Martinu, 139. According to Martinů’s brother František, Novák eventually succumbed to a brain tumor: “His flat was shot up by the Germans during the uprising. He lost many rare items, including two violins. This was a huge blow, and he did not survive much longer.” Mihule, Martinů, 367. After the death of his close friend, Martinů came closer to Stanislav’s brother, Karel Novák (1902–68), also a violinist in the Czech Philharmonic, and corresponded with him to the end of his life. In DHS, 203, Šafránek notes that—due to his nomination to teach in Prague— Martinů declined an offer at that time to teach “at the conservatory in Baltimore.” Based on the assumption that Šafránek meant the Peabody Conservatory, I contacted Peabody’s archivist Tracey Melhuish, who—after an exhaustive search through their extant files—found no record of a job offer to Martinů; my great thanks for her effort. See also Mihule, Martinů, 368. See Mihule, Martinů, 374. In a later passage bearing the caption “The Cult of Emotion Began in the Nineteenth Century,” Martinů notes how responses are made out of politeness in society but often amount to little more than conditioned reflexes that conflict with the individual’s real state of mind; he notes how the name “Bach” often elicits such inauthentic responses. Towards the end of his summer entries—with the subject of swindle coming to mind—he reflects playfully, “I’d like to note a story. There once was a rich English lord who had a collection of world-renowned pocket watches of all shapes and sizes. Once, when he was in Switzerland, he asked a famous watchmaker to make him a watch where, on the front, there would be a garden, a house, and a dog with a doghouse. And the instructions were that when you look at the watch, the dog would crawl into the doghouse! After thinking about it for quite some while, the watchmaker agreed, but demanded a long time to work on it and a huge sum of money. A year later the lord returned to Switzerland and the watchmaker gave him the watch. The lord looked at it, he saw the house, garden, and doghouse, but asked, ‘Where’s the dog?’ The watchmaker replied, ‘Well, the dog

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206

❧ notes to pp. 58–60

is in the doghouse—once you looked at the watch, it crawled into the doghouse!’ That’s like the well-known anecdote about Hitler and the left-handed teacup.” 5. Archived at the CBM under PBM Na 72; transcribed in DHS, 201–2. 6. In 1961, Šafránek noted that he had typed up the document but did not know whether it was ever sent on to Prague. Yet in 1966, he states that he had sent it on to a relevant government agency (date unclear) but received no response. See Šafránek, Bohuslav Martinů: Život, 268n30, and DHS, 201–2. In 1961, Šafránek might have been reluctant to show his involvement in Martinů’s project out of political considerations; in 1966, in the more politically liberalized years leading up to the Prague Spring, he might have felt freer to be more forthcoming. 7. Lucký, “Česká.” The composer Štěpán Lucký (1919–2006) was engaged in the resistance against the Nazis and imprisoned throughout much of the war. A critic for several periodicals during the 1950s, he became known primarily as a film composer; he became the director of musical broadcasting for Czechoslovak Television in 1954. “He was an educated and serious composer of strict methods, selection, and style, but his concert works gained little circulation.” See Československý 1:844–45. 8. The eminent journalist of the First Republic Ferdinand Peroutka (1895–1978) was close to the first Czechoslovak president Thomas G. Masaryk and the writer Karel Čapek. He was incarcerated in Buchenwald during World War II, went into exile in 1948, and worked for Radio Free Europe thereafter; he lived in the United States from 1950 onwards. Martinů probably had in mind Peroutka’s essay collection Jací jsme [The Way We Are], reissued in Peroutka; O věcech, 19–70. 9. See Helfert, “Bohuslav Martinů.” Reprinted in Pečman, Vladimír Helfert, 147, and Helfert, Vybrané, 262–63. 10. Ibid. The notion of his purported isolation in France was clearly a sore point for Martinů. But Helfert’s remark should not be seen as malicious, or as an outgrowth of his past ties to the Nejedlý School; by the time he wrote this review of Martinů’s works, Helfert had long since swept away Nejedlý’s ideas from his writings. After relocating to Brno in 1922, Helfert began to challenge his former teacher, which we see in his scathing review of Nejedlý’s book Zdeněk Fibich’s Erotic Diary, where Nejedlý poeticizes Fibich’s music in relation to Fibich’s love for a student; this Helfert pans as voyeuristic trash. Also showing his complete independence from Nejedlý is the fact that Helfert began to devote a large portion of his scholarly work to Leoš Janáček, who, as a fierce critic of Smetana as a young man and a personal friend of Dvořák, had long been on Nejedlý’s black list. Finally, we can note that following his break with Nejedlý, Helfert came into agreement with Martinů in that Czech music is still appraised too much along programmatic lines, or that critics still demand that composers express philosophical ideas in their music. See Nejedlý, Zdeňka Fibicha, and Helfert, “Zdeněk Nejedlý.” The latter is reprinted in Helfert, Vybrané, 73–83. Fibich inscribed the individual pieces of his piano cycle Moods, Impressions, and Reminiscences with descriptive titles based on his romantic experiences with his student Anežka Schulzová (1868–1905); this formed the basis for Nejedlý, Zdeňka Fibicha. Nejedlý had studied composition with Fibich during the four years before the composer’s death in 1900, accounting for his firsthand knowledge of Fibich’s

Svatos.indd 206

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notes to pp. 60–64

11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

❧ 207

personal life. On the preference of the Czech critics for “philosophical” music, see Helfert, “O tzv. ideovosti.” Reprinted in Helfert, Vybrané, 93–97. From Martinů’s 1941 Autobiography (chapter 11 in the present book). For a facsimile of the first page of this essay, see the back cover of the present book. Remarking on this essay in a letter to Šafránek from 6 May 1958, Martinů wrote that “only he who is looking for that unknown creative element will understand it.” See DHS, 212–13. That the composer works in relation to a compositional wavelength also supports his ongoing argument that programmatic interpretations cannot be made with any accuracy. In other words, by strengthening the abstract wavelength, the composer becomes increasingly disconnected from any extramusical stimuli that might have initiated his creative process. For those readers who wish to work with Beethoven’s score, I will outline Martinů’s analysis of invariable and variable conditions as follows: Mm. 1–5: = invariable Mm. 6–16 = variable Mm. 16–28 = invariable Mm. 29–52 = variable Mm. 53– = [invariable] The original program to this concert, featuring Bruno Walter as conductor and Rudolf Firkušný as soloist, can be found in the New York Philharmonic’s online archive at http://archives.nyphil.org. See Benedict, Patterns, first published in 1934. It is unclear which edition Martinů had in his possession. Benedict writes, “. . . no amount of knowledge even of all three of its elements in all the forms they take in the natural world will demonstrate the nature of gunpowder.” See ibid. Also notable in her chapter “The Integration of Culture” is that she ends with a discussion of Spengler’s Decline of the West, a book that had influenced Martinů’s cultural-historical thought over many years. See ibid.

Chapter Seven 1.

2. 3.

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Apart from his role as the Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, the high-ranking Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich (1904–42) also served as the chair of the Wannsee Conference, which decreed on the Final Solution of the Jews in Nazi dominions. Heydrich was assassinated in Prague on 4 June 1942 by members of a Czech commando unit who had been covertly parachuted into Bohemia from Britain. See Mihule, Martinů, 367. In his letter of defense written just before his imprisonment, Talich depicts himself during the war as having worked in the national limelight, attempting to sustain morale through high quality performances while constantly needing to defend

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208

4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

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❧ notes to pp. 64–67 himself from being exploited politically. See Masaryková, ed., Václav Talich, 199– 206. See also Křesťan, “Srdce.” In a gesture of solidarity with Talich after his ordeal, Martinů attempted to secure conducting engagements for him in the United States. See Mihule, Martinů, 372–73. It is reasonable to speculate that Martinů wanted to lay the groundwork for Talich’s emigration to the United States. See Mihule, Martinů, 375. See Rybka, Bohuslav Martinu. See Large, Martinů, 101. This nuance probably emerged because Charlotte had served as one of Large’s primary sources. See DHS, 216. Needing to issue his later publications in communist Czechoslovakia, where Martinů had been publically censured as a traitorous émigré, Šafránek probably wanted to show that Martinů’s true allegiance was with his native land but in a way that could bypass the geopolitical conflict between East and West, or the communist and capitalist blocs. See Henderson, “Martinů’s Mysterious Accident” and Rybka, Bohuslav Martinu, 157–58. Presented in a Czech translation in DHS, 224–26. Originally written in French, Martinů sent a copy of this essay (dated 19 November 1946) to Šafránek, who had permanently left the United States for Czechoslovakia by that time. Martinů wrote that the essay collection would be issued by Princeton University Press, but Šafránek notes that he was mistaken and that the composer actually meant Yale University Press. See Šafránek’s commentary in ibid. I have yet to find this text in a publication by either PUP or YUP, and I am led to believe that such a volume was never released, or that Martinů’s contribution was never printed. Ibid. Ibid. This is quoted from the chapter “The Integration of Culture” in Benedict, Patterns. Transcribed in DHS, 227–67; originals archived at the CBM under PBM Na 32. Translated from Martinů’s English into Czech in DHS, 262–63; see also “Theory and Facts” from his Essays from Fall 1945 (chapter 14 in the present book). From the original manuscript, archived at the CBM under PBM Na 32. See Notes from 1947, excerpts (chapter 16 in the present book). Earl George (1924–94) served as a professor of composition at Syracuse University for many years. Deposited in the Syracuse University Archives (see http://archives. syr.edu), the manuscript of George’s work is dated “July–August 1946”; the top of the title page bears the dedication “For Bohuslav Martinu.” George’s success with this work undoubtedly helped him launch his career, as it won the third annual George Gershwin Memorial Prize and received performances under conductors Charles Munch and Leonard Bernstein. For more, see the program of the New York Philharmonic of 15–16 November 1947, when George’s work was performed under Munch (http://archives.nyphil.org). See Notes from 1947, excerpts (chapter 16 in the present book). See “Advice to the Composer” from Martinů’s Essays from Fall 1945 (chapter 14 in the present book).

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notes to pp. 67–70

❧ 209

19. See “The ‘Pastoral’ Symphony: What Are Invariable and Variable Conditions?” from Martinů’s Notebook from New York (chapter 15 in the present book). 20. See Notes from 1947, excerpts (chapter 16 in the present book). 21. See Šafránek, Bohuslav Martinů: Život, 310–11, and Bohuslav Martinů: His Life, 298. 22. See “‘Creating’ Culture” in Martinů’s Ridgefield Diary (chapter 13 in the present book). 23. See DHS, 227. 24. See ibid. The best place to trace Martinů’s aesthetic thought during the 1950s is his extensive correspondence with Šafránek over the details of the second biography.

Chapter Eight 1.

2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

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Mihule points out from Martinů’s correspondence that the composer was unimpressed with the 1946 offer from HAMU. What caught Martinů’s attention about the offer is that two other composers, Jaroslav Řídký and František Pícha, would be receiving the exact same position with the same conditions. Mihule explains in detail how Martinů’s accomplishments internationally had made him peerless among Czech composers of that time and that Martinů should have been offered a higher status. In the end, the meager offer probably affected Martinů’s thinking about whether to leave the United States. See Mihule, Martinů, 390–91. See Svatos, “Sovietizing.” Sychra, Stranická. The composer Viktor Kalabis (1923–2006), who had waited to study at HAMU under Martinů, recalled the absurdity of the politically reoriented curriculum, where one of his assignments had been to reorchestrate Janáček—a preposterous endeavor for those who saw in Janáček’s textures a treasure of twentiethcentury folk modernisms. Personal communication from Kalabis, Prague, 1999. For more on Jiránek, see Svatos, “Sovietizing,” 26n165. In Československý 1:647, Bohumil Karásek (1926–69) is described as having “battled tirelessly for the progressive directions in our music.” Translated and cited from Mihule, Martinů, 420; originally in Hudební rozhledy 2, no. 6 (1950): 168. Officially, the moment when Czech musicians learned exactly who was censured or sanctioned by the communist regime came in the form of Miroslav Barvík’s speech to the Union of Czechoslovak Composers in April 1950 entitled “The Composers Go with the People.” See Barvík, Skladatelé. Karásek’s review of Martinů’s Fourth Symphony, which I cite in the present chapter, effectively reiterates the way Barvík censured Martinů in his speech. I have dealt with Barvík’s speech at length in Svatos, “Sovietizing”; for Barvík’s formulations about Martinů in this speech, see pp. 12–14. See Mihule Martinů, 420–21. See Martinů, “Bohuslav Martinů.”

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❧ notes to pp. 71–75

10. Nejedlý’s ministerial posts included Minister of Education and Culture (1945–46), Minister for the Protection of Labor and Social Care (July 1946 to February 1948), Minister of Education and Culture (February 1948 to January 1953), and Minister without Portfolio (October 1953 to 1962). Derived from Knapík, Kdo, 172–73. The important biographical dates of Nejedlý’s entire career are outlined in Křesťan, Zdeněk Nejedlý, 433ff., and Červinka, Zdeněk Nejedlý, 371ff. On Nejedlý’s last years in politics, see Křesťan, “‘Poslední,’” 9–44. 11. See Martinů, “Bohuslav Martinů”; reprinted in DHS, 351–53. 12. Prague National Archive, Archive of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Folio 05/3, Vol. 50. 13. Barvík’s periodization of Martinů’s works from the year 1921 seems to be based on his error that Martinů arrived in Paris this year instead of 1923. See my translation of Barvík’s report in appendix 2 of the present book. 14. The original Czech inscription on his tombstone reads, “Z těch dědů a bab, co vodám písní cestu otvírali, z nich jsem a vracím se k nim znova. Z ruky do ruky si podáváme těžký klíč, klíč od domova.” 15. Hrabal, “Bohuslav Martinů.” 16. Vojtěch, “Martinů.” 17. In my interview with him, Vojtěch clearly regretted the matter. See Svatos, Interview.

Chapter Nine 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

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See Rybka, Bohuslav Martinu, 241ff., and Serebrier, “Bohuslav Martinů’s ‘Student’ José Serebrier.” See also Svatos, “Reasserting,” 66–70. See ibid. and DHS, 297. See Dostálová, Řecké, 31–49. See ibid. Paul Sacher married Maja Hoffmann-Stehlin, the heiress of the Hoffmann-La Roche pharmaceutical company, and became the head of the family fortune. Sacher founded and conducted the Basler Kammerorchester (1926–87) and commissioned numerous notable works from the greatest names in twentieth-century music, premiering them with the chamber orchestra. For more on Sacher, see Rybka, 95–96n22. I have said little about Sacher’s support of Martinů in my opening study. Yet it is important to note that Sacher was particularly instrumental in the arrangements he made for the composer to escape Europe with his wife Charlotte after the fall of France. Martinů’s capacity to win the support of so many influential figures in music is a testament to the respect he commanded during his time. See Kapusta, Neuvěřitelná. The book’s subtitle reads, “The true story of how on 17 August 1979 the remains of the composer Bohuslav Martinů were transferred from far-off Switzerland to his native Polička.” Březina, Martinů.

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notes to pp. 76–79 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

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❧ 211

Ibid. A strong advocate of Bartók, Martinů brought the Hungarian composer’s music to his composition lessons for discussion. Earlier, during the late 1930s, Bartók’s influence is never far from the surface in Martinů’s Fifth String Quartet and Double Concerto. By the 1940s, on the other hand, Martinů’s enthusiasm for Stravinsky had declined, which we can we see in his remark to one of his students during a composition lesson: “Nice tune. Why, Stravinsky would give his right arm to have a tune like this!” See Renton, “Martinů,” 273. For more about Martinů and his thoughts on Bartók and Stravinsky at this time, see Mihule, Martinů, 431. When asked why Martinů was omitted from his five-volume Oxford History of Western Music, Richard Taruskin responded, “My sole criterion for inclusion was pragmatic: does this or that figure or example further the narrative and the issues that drive it? Those issues transcend personalities, although some personalities indispensably exemplify them.” See Rybka, Bohuslav Martinu, 342. Webster’s New World Dictionary (1979), s.v. “automatism.” See Walters, “Boulez.” See “Self-Forgetting,” parts 1–3, in his Ridgefield Diary (chapter 13 in the present book). See Martinů’s 1941 Autobiography (chapter 11 in the present book). For a more comprehensive discussion of Prague’s musical life during the 1920s, see Locke, Opera. Discussed in more detail in Svatos, “Clash,” 23–31. See chapter 1 in the present book. On Martinů and imitation, see Knaus, “Bohuslav Martinů.” For more on the story of this opera, see note 18 in chapter 4 of the present book. On the culture of the American concert hall and its impact on his style, see Jonté, Bohuslav Martinů. On the impact of serialism on musical thought in postwar America, see Straus, “Myth,” and Shreffler, “Myth.” See Blom, “Martinů.” See Hrabal, “Bohuslav Martinů.” His diaries also make clear which methods of analysis we should avoid. In Rybka, Bohuslav Martinu, a number of Martinů’s works are given programmatic readings, with which Martinů would probably disagree. See, in particular, his essays “On the Creative Process” (chapter 12) and “The ‘Pastoral’ Symphony: What Are Invariable and Variable Conditions?” from his Notebook from New York (chapter 15) in the present book; Schoenberg, Musical; Schoenberg, Style; and Reti, Thematic. One point that he does not articulate here but seems to be part of his case is that— compared with later musical styles—liturgical polyphony was relatively “athematic” in nature, a feature that went hand in hand with its subordinate role and functional purpose. Martinů, as we have seen, dismissed a “thematic” view of his own works, insisting that themes function as a part of the work and do not represent simply the more salient features.

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❧ notes to pp. 83–87

Chapter Ten 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

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See Svatos, “Martinů.” See DHS, 129. See ibid., 131. See ibid., 155, 359. The passage in question, which I have entitled “Musical Knowledge,” is found in the opening essay of his Ridgefield Diary. See chapter 13 in the present book. See DHS, 174–79. See ibid., 164, lines 11–12; probably lines 13–14 as well. I reproduce the passage in question in my endnote to the aphoristic passage I have entitled “Specialization” in his Ridgefield Diary. See chapter 13, note 15, in the present book. From his many years abroad, Šafránek had one of the most enviable collections of foreign literature in Prague. But my feeling is that—working from behind the Iron Curtain—he still did not have access to the specific titles from Martinů’s personal library and was unable to find better solutions for DHS while facing a publication deadline. See, for example, DHS, 134–36, 191. See Svatos, “Martinů.” In our discussions of the manuscripts, Iša Popelka proposed that Martinů’s use of vocabulary reflecting multiple planes of thought (i.e., “levels,” “fields,” and “directions”) might reflect the influence of the 1920s Prague linguistic school of formalism, whose ideas became disseminated throughout the Czech intellectual world during the entre deux guerres. One notable example of this comes at the beginning of his essay “The Question of Rhythm” from his Ridgefield Diary. See chapter 13, notes 19 and 20, in the present book. While I realize that referring to a composer as an artist is certainly possible in English, I also feel that semantically, it elevates the composer’s status in an affected way and that Martinů would disagree with this. In his writings, Martinů generally downplays the status of composers in an effort to demystify them. One exception to this is the opening of his essay “The Influence of Dynamism on Form” from his Essays from Fall 1945. See chapter 14, note 8, in the present book. Archived at the CBM under PBM Na 24. See Šafránek, “Bohuslav Martinů.” For Šafránek’s literal transcription, see DHS, 317–24. About how he lost track of his works, we have the following anecdote as recalled by one of his students from his American years: “One day Martinů telephoned me quite late and invited me to attend a concert of the Kroll chamber group with him that evening. I rushed right over and we got to the hall at the last moment. We hastily got into our seats without having time to look at the printed program when the music began. Then, at one point, Martinů nudged me with his elbow, ‘Nice idea, isn’t it?’ he whispered. I replied, also in a whisper, ‘Yes, very nice.’ Some minutes later he whispered again, ‘Pleasant, isn’t it? Lovely sound.’ He went on making approving remarks four of five times during the course of the piece. At the end

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notes to pp. 87–88

16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

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❧ 213

he turned to me and asked, ‘What was that?’ ‘Maître!’ I exclaimed, ‘That’s your Quintet!’ [String Quintet, 1927]. Then he became genuinely embarrassed. ‘No one will ever believe—you won’t believe—that I didn’t know my own composition!’ Then he added, in a somewhat self-deprecating way, ‘You know, I’ve written so much music in my life. I thought it sounded familiar, like an old friend, this music, and I liked it very much. But I didn’t know it was my own. If I had known, I wouldn’t have said such complimentary things!’” From Renton, “Martinů,” 275. The work in question is Martinů’s String Quintet for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Cello (1927), H. 164. Martinů’s Violin Concerto no. 1 (1933), H. 226, remained unknown until the late 1960s. See Halbreich, Bohuslav Martinů, 303–5. Archived at the CBM under PBM Na 6. Martinů made entries into his Notebook from Darien from both front and back. His essay “On the Creative Process” is found on pages 21–27, written in the direction in which most entries are found; in the other direction we find a few entries that he dates to fall 1944. The notebook contains numerous aphorisms and attempts at essays, some of which Martinů worked out in detail over the next years. The pages are 20.5 x 25 cm. and formatted with twenty-three lines; the notebook has a light brown cardboard cover sheet. Martinů’s entries are written variously in black ink, blue ink, and pencil. It also has several markings by Šafránek; those passages that Šafránek underlined with yellow crayon correspond to the changes he made to the text in DHS. See Šafránek, Bohuslav Martinů: The Man, 110–15; Šafránek’s literal transcription of the original is found in DHS, 128–33. See the letter from Rebecca Clarke to Šafránek, dated 10 December (probably 1945), archived at the CBM. Remarking with dismay about the publisher’s objections to her edited version, Clarke writes: Dear Mr. Šafránek, I have been thinking over what you told me yesterday, and I am awfully sorry to hear about it. I wish you could tell me, what was the specific objection? It is puzzling to me, for I have never had an editor change anything I have written in more than a few details. As regards style, I naturally tried—as I told you I would—to keep as much as possible to yours while putting your ideas into correct English. Do you think that perhaps the many after-thoughts or alterations may have disturbed the general form? I must admit that I have all along been rather worried about the section on his “Creative Process” and also the rewriting of Martinů’s ideas on opera in Part Three; I would like to suggest something. Will you give these two parts—including the whole of Part Five—to one of Knopf ’s editors, to be rewritten from the original translation with which I worked? I shall really feel happier that way, and would of course gladly relinquish any payment for my work on these. I also think that they should be more drastically cut; but that of course is for Knopf to decide. For more on Clarke, see the website of the Rebecca Clarke Society, accessed 25 May 2018, http://www.rebeccaclarke.org. Archived in Polička under PBM Na 7. The parameters of these forty-one pages, which are formatted with forty-two lines and a two-centimeter blank margin at the top, are

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214

21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

❧ notes to pp. 88–91 28 x 21.5 cm. The paper has a two-centimeter-wide protective cloth ribbon on the left-hand side with two punch holes for placement in a spiral binder; the cloth ribbon bears the marking “STANDARD B&P NO TEAR.” Almost all of Martinů’s entries are written in fine black ink; most pages have handwritten entries on both sides. Indicating that he had been composing full time and that writing essays was not at the top of his agenda, he notes at the top of page 32, “Since 1 June—finished the Fourth Symphony (fourth movement), the Sonata for Flute, and the Czech Rhapsody for [violinist Fritz] Kreisler with piano.” These works were all completed by 19 July, thus his entries at Cape Cod come from after this date. The full titles of these works are Symphony no. 4, H. 305; Sonata for Flute and Piano, H. 306; and Czech Rhapsody for Violin and Piano, H. 307. Much of his reading notes from Cape Cod come from the essay collections Huxley, Music and Texts. Archived at the CBM under PBM Na 26. See DHS, 140–53. Although he writes simply “June 1944” ahead of his second essay entitled “Musical Perception,” it is probable that Martinů’s first entries in his Ridgefield Diary come from after 14 June 1944, the date he completed his Symphony no. 3, H. 299. He arrived in Ridgefield on 1 May and he worked on the symphony between 2 May and 14 June. Found in his Essays from 1945, after “Advice to the Composer,” in the section I have marked “Further Thoughts.” See chapter 14 in the present book. See Šafránek, Bohuslav Martinů: The Man, 109. In his prefatory remarks to the Ridgefield Diary, Šafránek seems to admit that he altered the chronology of the first eight pages. He writes, “We present Advice to the Composer first (it was written in June 1944) but by no means due to the importance of its contents.” See DHS, 140. 5 December 1945 is the date of the earliest typed document by Martinů at the CBM; it is a letter to his family in Polička, archived under PBM Kr 331. Archived at the CBM under PBM Na 30. The typed text is on onionskin leaves. It is transcribed in DHS, 206ff. Archived at the CBM under PBM Na 32. Martinů dates several pages from this collection to the period of September–November 1947. Other writings from Martinů’s early American residence that I discuss in my opening study but do not present in translation in the present book include his “Proposal” for a national publishing house in Czechoslovakia (summer 1945; see chapter 6) and his essay for the unknown university press publication from 1946, which I will call “What Makes for a Good Work?” (November 1946; see chapter 7). See figure 5 for a photograph of Martinů with his personal library. For more on his reading from the war years, see Mihule, Martinů, 349.

Chapter Eleven 1.

Svatos.indd 214

Smaczny notes that Martinů deputized with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra from 1913 before playing as a full member during the years 1920–23. Martinů took

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notes to pp. 91–94

2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

Svatos.indd 215

❧ 215

a hiatus from the Philharmonic during the later years of World War I, when he took refuge in Polička due to the increasing material shortages in Prague and to evade conscription (see fig. 2). Exactly how much he played with the ensemble before this time is unclear. See the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed. (2001), s.v. “Martinů,” by Jan Smaczny; Mihule, Martinů, 62ff. Refers to his string quartet Three Riders (1902), H. 1. Here, it seems, his dates are not quite right. According to Halbreich’s Werkverzeichnis, Ishtar (1921), H. 130, was premiered at the Prague National Theater on 11 September 1924, and Who Is the Most Powerful in the World? (1922), H. 133, was premiered at the Brno National Theater on 31 January 1925 as the opener to Janáček’s Cunning Little Vixen; H. 133 received its premiere at the Prague National Theater on 17 February 1927. See Halbreich, Bohuslav Martinů, 199–202. This suggests that his lessons with Suk were part of a formal course of study; the Martinů literature typically implies that this was more of an informal arrangement. He actually left Paris in June 1940 due to the German invasion, fleeing to the south of France; he managed to leave France entirely in 1941. His last visit to Czechoslovakia was in 1938. Here he notes, “This is when Debussy’s influence took hold, like Mozart before this time, and Mozart would continue to influence him to the present day.” Refers to his Rhapsody for Large Orchestra (1928), H. 171. Here he notes in parentheses, “the strong influence of German music.” Here he notes, “For that matter, the issue of ‘national’ musical expression is a vast complex that needs extensive revision.” Refers to the orchestral portion of the ISCM’s annual festival that was held in Prague in 1925. See chapter 2 in the present book. Here Martinů writes erroneously that La Bagarre was premiered in New York. The first performance of La Bagarre, under Koussevitsky in Boston, was with the Boston Symphony Orchestra on 18 November 1927. See Halbreich, 255–56. This refers to his Rhapsody for Large Orchestra (1928), H. 171. Here, too, Martinů writes erroneously that this work was premiered in New York (see previous note). The first performance of H. 171, under Koussevitsky in Boston, was with the Boston Symphony Orchestra on 14 December 1928. To add to the confusion, it was actually premiered under the title La Symphonie instead of “Military Symphony,” as he writes here. See Halbreich, 256–57. In his enumeration of works, Martinů wants to demonstrate the many different kinds of works he has composed rather than refer to specific compositions. Here he is writing in reference to his Piano Concerto no. 2 (1934), H. 237; Concerto for Cello and Orchestra no. 1 (1930; 1939), H. 196 I, H. 196 II; Concerto for Harpsichord and Small Orchestra (1935), H. 246; Duo Concertante for Two Violins and Orchestra (1937), H. 264; Concerto for Flute, Violin, and Orchestra (1936), H. 252; Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra (1931), H. 207; and Concerto for Piano Trio and String Orchestra (1933), H. 231 / Concertino for Piano Trio and String Orchestra (1933), H. 232. Martinů produced a third version of H. 196 in 1955, cataloged in Halbreich as H. 196 III. He composed H. 232 to

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216

14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

❧ notes to pp. 94–98 replace H. 231, which Schott rejected for publication. On H. 231 and H. 232, see discussion in chapter 5 of the present book and Březina, “Klaviertrio.” Refers to his Duo for Violin and Cello no. 1 (1927), H. 157; Piano Trio no. 1, Five Short Pieces (1930), H. 193; and String Trio no. 2 (1934), H. 238. Refers to his Bergerettes for Violin, Cello, and Piano (1939), H. 275; Promenades for Flute, Violin, and Harpsichord (1939), H. 274; and String Quartet no. 5 in G Minor (1938), H. 268. With the last three works in his enumeration he is referring to his String Quintet for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Cello (1927), H. 164; Piano Quintet no. 1 (1933), H. 229; and his String Sextet for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Two Cellos (1932), H. 224. With these three works, he has leapt back in his chronology from the works he listed just before, which are from the late 1930s. See previous note. Refers to his Serenade no. 1 (1932), H. 217 / Serenade no. 2 (1932), H. 216 / Serenade no. 3 (1932), H. 218 / Divertimento (Serenade no. 4 for Chamber Orchestra, 1932), H. 215; Partita: Suite no. 1 for String Orchestra (1931), H. 212; and Inventions (1934), H. 234. Most likely refers to his Piano Concerto no. 2 (1934), H. 237, which—rather than his Piano Concerto no. 1 in D Major (1925), H. 149—follows more closely chronologically after the works he names before. See Halbreich, Bohuslav Martinů, 294–96. Here—in what is somewhat redundant—he writes, “He abandons his ostensibly universal outlook and composes exclusively for the Czech theater.” Here he probably means that characteristically Czech elements, e.g. the style of Czech folk music, Czech costumes, a Czech village setting, etc. appear in relation to the stock characters of Harlequin and Columbine that are typically found in commedia dell’arte. It is unclear which work he means by “Symphony.” See Editorial Remarks (chapter 10 in the present book). Refers to his Sonata no. 1 for Cello and Piano (1939), H. 277. Here—in his transcription of this text in DHS, 317—Šafránek gives the ascription “New York, Spring 1941.”

Chapter Twelve 1.

2. 3.

Svatos.indd 216

Here he writes, “. . . you do not even know its response or realization in sound (not that you have found a motive, when you find a motive, you are already far on the path of conscious concentration, even though it still may be indefinable), but this conception forces itself upon you and I think that, by itself, it helps you concentrate in a certain way.” For more on this term, see chapter 4, note 4, in the present book. Here he writes, “. . . it cannot be controlled in any way. What is important is your ability for concentration that lets you focus on this invisible and ineffable detail.”

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notes to pp. 99–108 ❧ 217 4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

Martinů writes the question mark here for a lack of a specific term. After this sentence he notes, “I have already said that this is not possible to describe or define, but in spite of this, I am still trying to define it.” Here he notes in parentheses, “I do not mean in our memory.” The source for the term “common denominator” might have been Lang’s Music in Western Civilization, where he marked this term in his personal copy on p. 137. Lang’s book was given to him by his wife Charlotte as a birthday present in 1941. See Lang, Music. My thanks to Jaroslav Mihule, who allowed me to leaf through Martinů’s personal copy of the book, now in his possession. Here he notes in parentheses, “these are questions from a different field.” Here he notes in parentheses, “these are emotions very different in quality and quantity.” Here he indicates that the following statement, which he writes at the end of this essay, should be dropped into the text at this point, “I would almost say that we continuously think subconsciously and that we become aware only when we focus our attention or interest and that our conscious thoughts bring into circulation an entire complex of unknown, deeply subconscious operations and ideas that are unknown to us and inconcrete.” Here he notes in parentheses, “an emotion of this kind has the function of sleep.” At this point Martinů gets ahead of himself in what seem to be remarks about writing out the sketch and score, which he discusses further on, “Here we come to what is called craftsmanship—i.e., the battle with the material and the exhaustion of the possibilities of the medium and idea in one direction, style.” Here he notes in parentheses, “the listener will still carry away a certain impression of the work as a whole.” Refers collectively to the subjects he has discussed to this point—i.e., the subconscious creative process, the true nature of emotion, inspiration, etc. Here he adds, “And by technique, I do not mean virtuosity. It is the same way with language: a phrase you feel intensely suddenly looks poor once you say it or write it down in words—i.e., in a certain, given material. But this departs from this essay.”

Chapter Thirteen 1.

2. 3.

Svatos.indd 217

In the opening pages of his Ridgefield Diary, Martinů notes passages from Kahler, Man; Barzun, Romanticism; Bridgeman, Intelligent; “The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man” as found in Jung, Modern, 200–225; and McCabe, Riddle. Martinů’s source readings are listed in appendix 1 of the present book. Refers to the picture we may piece together of the composer at work through secondary readings. Here, suggesting an alternative to how we should view the composer at work, he notes, “Instead, the composer is more like a scientist, who is concerned with the consistency of his formulae and not with describing a real feature of nature, or like a mathematician, whose formulations exist in the ‘objective’ world and who is

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218

❧ notes to pp. 108–111

concerned primarily that his constructs are consistent, or the logician, who is not concerned with the truth of his conclusions but only with the rigor of the logical process.” His thoughts here are based on McCabe, Riddle, 221. In his reading notes from the opening pages of his Ridgefield Diary, we also find the following related material from McCabe: “Einstein very frankly tells us that he is concerned only with the consistency of his formulae and not with describing real features of nature.” Ibid. See also my discussion of Martinů and scientific method in chapter 5 of the present book. 4. Here he remarks, “In any case, the illusion of the composer with his ‘head in the clouds,’ something I experienced in Boston, shows how the audience adheres to certain prejudices and how difficult it will be to strip them of these and other illusions.” In Boston, Martinů apparently encountered music enthusiasts who thought of composers as above the common man, or witnessed an incident that left him with this interpretation. My guess is that it was he himself who had been the subject of this view, but it could have been another composer. 5. Here he notes, “This is a question of religion, which was related to music at that time.” 6. Here he remarks, “The question of understanding music is not a question of knowledge, and form is not something we can statistically define. Form is functionally connected with the work. We do not arrive at a whole through the construction of the parts: ‘as a whole, the properties of the gestalt are something other than a linear summation of the properties of the constituent parts.’” The definition in the latter part of this passage appears in Reiser, Philosophy, 140. 7. In his original, Martinů writes mistakenly “Indian gamelan.” 8. After writing the date, Martinů notes down several passages from Heard, Pain. 9. What is written from the beginning of this segment to this point is in an EnglishCzech polyglot. The formulations Martinů makes with equations are written in English; they show some similarity to those in the chapter “The Meaning of Numbers” in Spengler, Decline, 53ff. My best guess is that they are related to the discussions on semantics he had been having with Svoboda at this time. See chapter 5 and Editorial Remarks (chapter 10) in the present book, and the following note. 10. Here Martinů interpolates, “If we talk about detachment = distance = space (time). We ask questions in this sense as well. I once asked Ing. Svoboda: ‘What would happen, if light did not land on me, if it were not caught by any object?’ He responded: ‘You see, those are the questions! What would happen = time, if it did not land = space. Formulate your question differently.’ I asked him: ‘Are those particles, or waves?’ He answered: ‘and what is ‘are?’” Martinů’s partner in dialectics here is the computer scientist Antonín Svoboda. See my discussion in chapter 5 of the present book. 11. Refers to Bedřich Smetana’s Piano Trio in G Minor, op. 15. 12. Here he notes, non sequitur, “During the correct creative process, all of the elements become directed automatically towards the creation of an organic form in which all of the elements create a living whole. We have to ‘see’ it, and not only hear it.”

Svatos.indd 218

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notes to pp. 111–114 ❧ 219 13. Gathering ideas from his reading, Martinů notes down the following after this point: “Significance lies not in something, but in the way it is used. Effort for something = Gothic. Effort against something = Renaissance. Outline. Define the material (drawing). Color tone interpret space. Each culture believes that its own feeling is the normal expression of human nature. Define shapeless!” Derived in part from Spengler, Decline, 238. 14. Here Martinů notes the following statements, which he attributes to Max Planck: “. . . we do not construct the external world to suit our own ends in the pursuit of sciences, but the external world forces itself upon our recognition with its own elemental power.” “The truth or falsity of an idea and the question whether it has a definite meaning is relatively unimportant. What matters is that it shall give rise to useful work.” Originally, these quotations come from Planck, Where, 198, and Philosophy, 116; it is unclear whether Martinů noted these down from the original or from secondary sources. See my discussion of Martinů and scientific method in chapter 5 of the present book. 15. Here, from his reading, Martinů notes, “The scientist of the past forced on nature the limitations of the human mind, identifying their picture of reality with reality itself.” From Muller, Science. Then, in Czech, Martinů notes, “This concerns explaining on the basis of absoluteness and losing awareness of the living organism in the logic of explanation and often in a discussion ‘over words.’” Most likely, this is an extemporized translation from his reading, possibly again from Muller. On Martinů’s notes from Muller, see Editorial Remarks (chapter 10 in the present book). 16. Toward the beginning of this sentence, Martinů crosses out the remark, “(Sakharoff in Lisbon).” Thus what he discusses here is probably related to a performance of the Sakharoff dance ensemble that he had attended in Portugal, where he and Charlotte had waited for several weeks in early 1941 before departing by steamship to the United States. 17. Here he notes, “An acquaintance of mine who is a good dancer and happens to listen to the music took pride in how fast she adapted and ‘danced through’ a passage from one of my compositions when the trumpet came in a few measures early.” From the gender inflection of the Czech-language original, Martinů’s reference is to a female dancer; it might have been Zora Šemberová (1913–2012), with whom he corresponded. 18. Here Martinů notes the following from an uncited English-language source: “[The] history of human culture must be awakened from time to time. The past changes according to the present. If the present changes, our view of the past changes as well.” In his own words, he then remarks in Czech, possibly based on his reading, “If we tell someone he is lacking in substance, he will furiously defend himself without actually knowing what substance is. Is this egotism?” 19. Here Martinů begins interpolating thoughts on the introduction of bar lines into Western musical notation and the detrimental effect it has had on our appreciation of medieval and Renaissance polyphonic styles; he discusses this topic elsewhere in his Ridgefield Diary in essays such as “The Mysterious Change in Mental Reaction”

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220

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

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❧ notes to pp. 114–123 and “Public Opinion of the Composer.” He writes, “It is clear that bar-line divisions brought an entire era of musical comprehension to an end; they bother us in performances of the old polyphonic compositions.” See previous note. Here he interpolates, “The rhythm, or the general motion, has been written out for him visually and has become a mechanism. But what process was in place for the performance of polyphonic compositions with independent voices?” By writing “experts,” he means sarcastically someone who analyzes rhythm by simply noting the departures from the regular meter. Here he notes, “This example has a certain kind of symmetry and there is much more we could analyze.” As earlier, Martinů writes mistakenly “Indian gamelan.” See note 7 above in the present chapter. Here he notes to himself, “Still analyze the rhythm of polyphony.” Here he notes in parentheses, “as perhaps today with film music.” From Van Loon, Van Loon’s Lives, 247–48. Here he writes, “The expression of an era can become manifest in one composer, but this is the result of a long period of work and a great number of others.” Here he notes down the following, which he ascribes to Van Loon: “They worshipped two ideals—faithful craftsmanship and tradition—and that typically Chinese virtue—patience—that could only have been born out of a complete lack of any sense of time. It must have taken a lifetime to acquire that particular dexterity which allowed the artist to say so much with a few lines. Every form of art is the direct result of its own technique.” Here he remarks, “The assumption of having a knowledge of culture—of all the literature, etc., this is something no one has.” Then, from Van Loon, he notes, “They failed to notice any real advantage of making the whole world available to all the people, regardless of their ability to understand it or appreciate it or even admire it.” Here he adds, “If two listeners disputed this question, both would be telling the truth.” Here he adds, “The same holds true for the analysis of harmony and rhythm.” As an afterthought, possibly based on his reading, he adds, “We cannot explain the human body through logic, but we can explain it in terms of an organism and function.” From Van Loon, Van Loon’s Lives, 689. Here he remarks, “It’s like crossing a footbridge a thousand times until someone tells us it’s badly worn down and we suddenly get nervous and careful. Perhaps a bad example.” Here he remarks, “The question of egotism can lead all the way to Hitler, who actually thinks of himself as a benefactor of humanity. In the end, one could do nothing else than become an awakener of the nation, a savior. Soccer players, athletes, etc., they all represent nation and national progress, and it is the fortune of the civilized world that we have this. I have often read the tremendous praise bestowed upon someone who firmly expresses his conviction and acts honorably—as if honor were

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notes to pp. 123–128 ❧ 221

36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41.

42.

43.

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a gift that is tremendously rare. But this is only parenthetical. What I want to discuss here are the particular results of this in music.” Here he notes, “These are merely formulas that lead to a work of confession.” From here Martinů sketches the following: “Another slogan is ‘vitality,’ or ‘vital.’ Another slogan is ‘self-sacrifice’ (but only on paper). Another slogan is ‘dynamism’ (in most cases noise). On the response of the audience later.” Here he notes, “Intensity that is a real contribution can be called intense intensity, dynamism, dramatism (life as a drama!—a questionable point of view).” Here he interjects, “Is this a modern-day neurosis?” Here he sketches, “The common person cannot comprehend art in the intellectual and complicated form in which we present it today (aesthetics). The work as a fait accompli.” Here he notes the following: “Not only do we restore older works, but we revise them as well. We often accept without thinking an opinion that became established over time that could be false or very different from the original opinion, for example Aristotle and what has come to be known as Aristotle . . .” This is probably derived from a secondary source that he does not cite, the second sentence in particular. Here he notes the following, which could be based on a statement by Max Planck: “We cannot imagine weight (of an orange, for example).” Then, from Planck, Where, 198, he notes, “. . . we do not construct the external world to suit our own ends in the pursuit of sciences, but . . . the external world forces itself upon our recognition with its own elemental power.” Then, from Planck, Philosophy, 116, he notes, “The truth or falsity of an idea and the question whether it has a definite meaning is relatively unimportant. What matters is that it should give rise to useful work.” It is unclear whether Martinů noted Planck’s maxims from the original or secondary sources; my guess is that he derived them from Muller, Science, 87, 90. Then, in his own words, Martinů exclaims, “Get away from specialization! Do you understand? If I like the sunset, does that mean that I understand it?” Then, from an uncited source, he notes, “To lose sight of the living organism in a logical dispute over explanation.” This is found in Muller, Science, 106. Then, in his own words, he writes, “Music as the expression of emotion (non-emotion). While composing, I can employ emotions that no longer exist at that moment.” All of this material is written out in a Czech-English polyglot. On Martinů’s notes from Muller, see my Editorial Remarks (chapter 10 in the present book). Here Martinů notes the following based on Spengler, Decline: “A feeling felt is not the same as a feeling imagined. Feeling for form, however definite, is not the same as form itself. There is a distinction between experience as lived and an experience as learned, between the immediate certainty given by the various kinds of intuition (inspiration, illuminations, artistic flair, experience of life). Goethe, ‘Exact percipient fancy and the product of rational procedure and technical experiment’ (Spengler, 56).” He then notes, in his own words, “Analyze the confused idea of the ‘fighting artist’ (Beethoven) as a contemporary demand. Fixing a page sometimes takes more work than composing it; from all the material, sometimes only ten percent remains. Impulse to express (Direction); Impulse to communicate (Extension).”

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❧ notes to pp. 128–136

44. Here Martinů notes, “We want to explain everything! The common point of view that each person has a certain kind of personal philosophy is not considered ‘education.’” 45. Cited from Spengler, Decline, 124. Martinů also notes the original Latin from Spengler, “Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio.” 46. Martinů’s citation is from Spengler, Decline, 59. 47. Refers most likely to the advent of the pianoforte. 48. Here Martinů notes in parentheses, “see Spengler on the development of numbers and mathematics.” This is in reference to the chapter “The Meaning of Numbers” from Spengler, Decline, 53–90. 49. Then, in parentheses, Martinů repeats this line in French: “Tenez vous aux notes, les vagues c’est moi qui va les faire.” From here he continues writing in French until the word “because,” where he reverts back to Czech. 50. Here he notes in parentheses, “except for works that are played frequently and where performing becomes almost mechanical and the player does not even try to evoke the conventional emotional response—i.e., when he has lost interest in the work.” 51. Here he notes in parentheses, “the ordinary emotional response that we have to any given event does not require further thought.” 52. After a few notes to himself and sketches for further essays, Martinů remarks in French, “The question of emotion is like the air we breathe—it is everywhere yet no one knows what it is. There is subtle music that overflows with all kinds of emotions, but just talk to the musicians who play it. Orchestral musicians are very discreet about their emotions and do not talk about them. Because, if you start talking about emotions, everything gets mixed up. Because we are subject to emotions!” 53. We are left to guess which Mozart flute concerto Martinů means here. 54. Refers to Diran Alexanian (1881–1954), an assistant to Casals at the École Normale de Musique in Paris between the wars; Alexanian then taught at a number of prominent institutions on the American East Coast during the war. For more on Alexanian and his relationship with Martinů, see Rybka, Bohuslav Martinu, 55, 227. 55. Here Martinů notes the following from his reading: “If we were differently constituted or were set in a different world environment, the same motion to which we react in vision and color might conceivably cause a reaction of a different and now inconceivable kind. Ultraviolet rays, the X-ray, never known before! Pg. 231, Einstein’s Theory of Physics.” Derived from Guggenheimer, Einstein, 231. 56. Cited from Spengler, Decline, 380; the emphasis is Martinů’s. Here Martinů makes a reference to the next page of his diary, where he writes an alternative elaboration to his quotation from Spengler: “But if something, a concept, is ‘capable only of being sensed,’ we are essentially crossing over from physics to psychology! Isn’t music, too, one of those concepts that ‘is capable only of being sensed?’ It is not exact knowledge, but a relation. Do we have a definition for this emotion? It is not a feeling or impression, but a ‘condition.’” Afterwards, he notes several passages on the subject of ancient Greek philosophy and its impact on Western civilization from McCabe, Riddle, and Benn, History.

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notes to pp. 136–149 ❧ 223 57. Here Martinů notes the following from his reading: “For Bergson, the vital impulse in the human being is transformed into spiritual intuition—i.e., ‘instinct that has become disinterested’ (an irrational reflective faculty). Einstein is reported as saying: “Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the will. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it, but how can I connect this with the idea of freedom? What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe? Another act of willing? (Where is Science Going?).” As found, most likely, in Planck, Where, 201. 58. My special thanks to Aleš Březina for helping me find a suitable translation for this final passage.

Chapter Fourteen 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

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By writing “we,” Martinů is taking a kind of collective responsibility for the norms of Czech music criticism. In his original manuscript, Martinů crosses out everything from the beginning of this paragraph until this point. On Peroutka, see chapter 6, esp. note 8, in the present book. Here he adds, “So the entire process became easier, only certain things from Western culture were chosen to the exclusion of others.” Martinů appended this phrase to the end of this essay, thus I use it as the title. Refers to Thomas G. Masaryk (1850–1937), the first Czechoslovak president. By writing “an entire novel,” Martinů is most likely expressing himself tongue-incheek in reference to his essay “Something about that ‘French’ Influence.” On this passage, see also my Editorial Remarks (chapter 10 in the present book). In this essay, Martinů clearly intends to problematize two different concepts but alternates between the two so often that it brings confusion; a reorganization of the sentence order and the removal of redundancies was necessary to make it clear. Here he adds, “We can note many ‘endings’ and codas of this kind.” Here he notes, “These are all superstitions, and in art, there is less opposition to superstition than change.” Here he writes, “These conclusions arise from statistical observations that are seldom fit for art and the creative process.” It is unclear what he means by “statistical observations.” By this he might mean the statements by composers that are selected by certain musical writers to support embellished views of the creative process. Here he writes, “As a player, I watched the reaction of the audience from the stage, and often the reaction of the critics and aestheticians, who afterwards ------------.” By drawing a line, Martinů—in disgust—prefers not to put into words what the critics and aestheticians do. Here he notes in parentheses, “reversibility.” Here he notes, “We cannot bring back a conception of how our tooth hurt yesterday.”

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❧ notes to pp. 149–156

15. Here he adds, “We could examine other things, for example the attitude of the player in the orchestra. This is something else I could describe. And here I mean those emotions that are disregarded but are just as ‘psychological’ and important, even though they do not seem sufficiently ‘serious.’ And what is it like for the composer himself? This is another story altogether.” Martinů probably means that we could also provide an account of the player’s frame of mind while he or she performs a piece of music, and likewise with the composer while composing. 16. The musical example is from his own Sonata no. 2 for Cello and Piano (1941), H. 286. 17. It is not clear whether Martinů means “we musicians” or “we Czechs,” but probably the latter. 18. Refers to the newspaper of the exiled Czechoslovak government in London. See DHS, 205. 19. Refers to Jaromír Vejvoda (1902–88), the composer of the song “Škoda lásky,” more well known in English as “The Beer Barrel Polka.” 20. Here he notes, “The motive is a ‘cellule’ in itself, but in a composition, it suddenly gains a different function. Define the meaning of organism. Environment certainly has an influence, but it cannot change a mouse into a cat.”

Chapter Fifteen 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

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The italicized items are the invariable conditions; those in parentheses are the variable ones. Here he notes, “Modern psychology (i.e., gestalt, psychoanalysis, etc.) goes quite deeply into this question.” Most likely refers to his essay “On the Creative Process” from his Notebook from Darien (chapter 12 in the present book). Here, in parentheses, he notes, “motion is also a bad term, perhaps rate, or tension would describe this better.” Martinů did not write in this musical example. I have taken the liberty to add it here myself. Here he notes in French, “Et quand Beethoven répète quelque chose, cela veut dire qu’il en a besoin” [And when Beethoven repeats something, this means it was necessary]. Here Martinů writes, “Now tell me if you see how Beethoven uses the given material (I call them cellules). Sometimes he uses only , sometimes , and sometimes . Why, when, and how? Listen attentively, and you will see why.” Martinů did not fill in these three places with music examples. In Beethoven’s score, he is referring to the material from measures 53ff.; I am not at liberty to suggest exactly which musical passages he means. Šafránek writes that when he asked the composer about the musical examples in a letter from 1957, Martinů replied humorously that he did not have any notes in his typewriter. See DHS, 212–13.

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notes to pp. 156–165 ❧ 225 8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

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Here, returning to his thoughts on musical creation, he remarks, “So much that seemed to demand great effort and tension came to the composer on its own. Of course at one point, it did demand exertion, patience, and perhaps the effort of many years, but not at that moment. This is a kind of conditioned reflex, a kind of energy that is expended at a certain moment that becomes instinctive and commonplace. Here only a great expert of the whole work could make a proper judgment, but it would still be someone’s personal point of view.” Here Martinů had prepared to write out passages from the opening of the four movements of his Fourth Symphony by writing: 1st movement: 2nd movement: 3rd movement, Andante: 4th movement, Allegro: As in the passage above (see note 7 in the present chapter), he did not fill in these spaces with musical examples. Here he remarks, “Vehement emotional pathos is still ‘in fashion.’” On this passage, see my discussion in chapter 6. Martinů probably has in mind the discovery of the concentration camps in Europe, or the time the full proportions of the Holocaust were realized. After some sketches he notes, “We should analyze not only masterworks but failureworks too.” For his citations from the New York Philharmonic concert program, I have consulted the original, retrieved from the digital archives of the New York Philharmonic, accessed 25 May 2018, http://archives.nyphil.org/. Martinů writes what follows from this point in English; I have edited it for grammar and style. Here, probably poking fun at the pronunciation of colloquial English, he interpolates, “During the premiere of my Fourth Symphony, when the first theme came in, the person next to me suddenly said, almost out loud: “Now, Hi got it” (accompanied by the American gesture with the hand, as if you were shooting a pistol). Hi certainly was listening.” From here he continues in Czech. Here, in parentheses, he notes, “see R. Benedict, p. 47.” He is referring to his edition of Benedict, Patterns, specifically, to her chapter “The Integration of Culture.” In her text, Benedict notes the example of gunpowder as a compound substance that cannot be understood according to its individual elements. See my discussion in chapter 6 of the present book. Ibid. Here he notes, “The response to many things often comes from the same background.” Here, from an unknown source, Martinů implants the English-language theoretical term “first principles,” but I was unable to find a semantically workable solution for including it. Refers to the superficial knowledge we have about the artist in question, or what is commonly said about that artist.

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❧ notes to pp. 166–175

Chapter Sixteen 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

Refers to Martinů’s student Earl George. See discussion in chapter 7 of the present book. Possibly a reference to his Sonata no. 3 for Violin and Piano (1944), H. 303. This anecdote is found in Šafránek, Bohuslav Martinů: His Life, 258–59; my translation is based on Martinů’s original. Here in parentheses he notes, “instead I gulped down Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Russian and Scandinavian literature.” Here in parentheses he notes, “see French art.” Here he remarks, “They considered me a nobody, or someone superficial.” Here he begins an incomplete thought, “Their upbringing (my mother was quite different from our generation) . . .”

Appendix Two 1.

2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

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A leading member of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Jiří Hendrych (1913–79) played a key role in cultural politics, supporting or eliminating reform-minded individuals and liberal streams in the arts according to the needs of the Party at any given time. See Knapík, Kdo, 98. Martinů actually left Czechoslovakia for France in 1923. Martinů actually left Paris in 1940. Martinů actually returned to the United States for the 1955–56 concert season. There is no evidence to suggest that he “refused” to reside in the United States based on political or ideological grounds. How much he feared for his situation in the United States during the 1950s, like so many artists and intellectuals at that time due to the overblown investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee in its search for communists, is a different matter. To my knowledge, Martinů never expressed any sympathies for communism. Refers to the Prague Spring International Music Festival. Ironic here is the fact that Barvík was a primary instigator of the “tendentious battles over formalism,” from which he distanced himself just a few years later in this memorandum. See Svatos, “Sovietizing.” To my knowledge Martinů never spoke on Voice of America. Czechoslovak exiles who spoke on the service were noted by the communist intelligence apparatus as dissidents; their families, friends, and associates who remained in the country often endured repression as a result. Translates to “The [Czechoslovak] State Publisher for Fiction, Music, and Art.” Abbreviated in the present book as SNKLHU.

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notes to pp. 177–180 ❧ 227

Appendix Three

1. 2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

Svatos.indd 227

This text is based largely on Svatos, “On the Literary.” Reprinted in the present book with permission. See Mucha, Podivné (1988). At one point, for example, Mucha recalls how he and his friends, in jest, had come to call Martinů “flinta,” or “bayonet,” as Martinů would join them on social occasions but would remain silent in the back of the room, similar to the way a weapon is thrown aside by a soldier and kept out of sight and out of mind. See Mucha, Podivné (1988), 232. See Mucha, Podivné (1988), 434–35. This includes, most notably, the prurient novelette Ona a Martinů, by Jindřich Uher, 220 (1995 ed.); 172 (2002 ed.). A passage from the excerpts also appears in Henderson, “Imaginary,” 102. For a study that speculates on how Martinů might have immortalized Kaprálová in his music, see Lambert, “Desperately.” See Sayer, Prague, 353. Mucha, Podivné (1988), 434–35. Ibid. See Mihule, “O Podivných.” See Lužický, “U Tří.” For my discussion of “At Tři Studně,” see my translation at the end of the present appendix. See Mihule, “O Podivných.” Ibid. This relates to Barvík’s work during the years 1948–53 in particular. See Svatos, “Sovietizing.” Ibid, 27–28. A facsimile of Barvík’s article “At Tři Studně” can be found in Svatos, “On the Literary.” Ibid. Barvík actually left several clues that he is the author of “At Tři Studně.” His installment of “Saturday Reading about Music” for that issue is an ode to his deceased friend and Brno Conservatory classmate Milan Harašta (1919–46), who is mentioned in “At Tři Studně” in the Kaprál letter. What is more, Barvík begins his ode to Harašta by writing, “We first met in Hodonín.” Barvík’s native village was Lužice u Hodonína [Lužice near the town of Hodonín], and it was from the name of his village that he derived his pseudonym for “At Tři Studně,” i.e., “Zdeněk Lužický” [Zdeněk from the village of Lužice]. See Ludvík Kundera, Václav Kaprál, 41–43. Here Kundera cites at length an homage Barvík wrote about Kaprál, which shows how close Barvík was to his former teacher. Describing the utmost devotion that he and his fellow students had for Kaprál, Barvík describes Kaprál as a strict yet compassionate teacher who brought

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228

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

Svatos.indd 228

❧ notes to pp. 180–185 out in his students individuality, the ability to think for themselves, and the capacity to give and receive honest and well-founded criticism. Barvík relates that Kaprál was not only a teacher to his students, but also a spiritual mentor whose moral values they honored and respected. They considered him a friend and even a kind of father figure in whom they could confide their most personal issues. Furthermore, their relationship was not restricted to the conservatory, as they would frequently visit him on Sundays at his Brno apartment and accompany him on walks in nature. Finally, Barvík remarks that, during the years of Kaprál’s imprisonment by the Nazis (1942–45), they would visit him whenever they could at the hospital in Uherské Hradiště, where Kaprál was sent by sympathetic doctors who provided him sanctuary from the demoralizing conditions of the prison camp. Barvík captures this detail about Kaprál escaping to the hospital in his Kaprál letter in “At Tři Studně.” See translation in the present appendix. See Barvík, “Nad pozůstalostí.” Ibid. Ludvík Kundera (1891–1971), a renowned Czech musicologist and father of the famous novelist Milan Kundera. See Martinů’s 1941 Autobiography (chapter 11 in the present book). Showing how nostalgic the work was for him, Martinů dedicated The Opening of the Springs to “Miroslav Bureš and our native region”; Bureš (1909–68) was the author of the original, eponymous poem that forms the libretto to this work. In a letter to Bureš (4 July 1955), Martinů’s nostalgia is also evident in his suggestion that the work’s premiere might take place in his hometown of Polička with the thought that, “in this way, at least part of me will be able to return home.” See Martinů, Dopisy, 146–47. See Martinů’s 1941 Autobiography (chapter 11 in the present book). According to soprano Sylvia Kodetová, Barvík’s widow, Barvík never forgave Martinů for not helping Kaprálová escape France. Personal communication from Kodetová to the author in 2007. How much this came directly from Kaprál is unclear, but Barvík certainly witnessed Kaprál’s devastation over the loss of his daughter. Whether Martinů could have helped Kaprálová in her difficult circumstances before her death is something we will leave open to question. See Milan Kundera, Ignorance. See Mihule, “O Podivných.” See Lukeš, Stalinské, 29–59. See Mucha, Au seuil. See Mucha, Podivné (1988), 430–31. The excerpt goes from the very beginning of the Kaprálová letter to the words “free and unrestrained.” It then continues with the words “Daddy, I’m lying here in front of our cottage at Tři Studně” and ends with the words, “an ominous premonition that I don’t want to believe whirls my heart about.” See translation above. Portions of this excerpt are transmitted in Uher, Ona (1995), 220; (2002), 172. The fact that this excerpt is imbedded into the narrative might lead us to believe that Mucha himself was responsible for implanting Barvík’s piece into his novel.

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notes to pp. 185–189 ❧ 229

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40.

41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

Svatos.indd 229

But we cannot rule out that this was the work of an editor and that an editor might even have added further lines to the narrative, particularly those describing how Kaprálová heard Martinů’s Julietta in the rain. Refers to Vítězslava Kaprálová, though her ashes were actually laid to rest in Brno after being transferred there in 1949 from her original grave site in Montpellier, France. What did make its way to Tři Studně is the cross from her original grave site in France, which was posted in her memory at the family’s summer home and remains there to this day. Accounting for each item of misinformation in Barvík’s article—whether made in error or for effect—is beyond the scope of my annotations here. A significant leftist newspaper, published in Brno, dating back to the First Czechoslovak Republic. Refers to Ludvík Kundera; see note 21 above in the present appendix. Kundera, like Kaprál, actually did attend Cortot’s master class in Paris. Refers to Cortot’s editions of Chopin’s music, published by Salabert. The slight that Josef Suk, the son-in-law of Antonín Dvořák, was something of a country simpleton dates back to the Nejedlý School of Czech music criticism. This idea streamed into the communist-era musicological literature and leaked out unwittingly into a number of international sources. See, for example, the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980), s.v. “Josef Suk,” by John Tyrrell. Refers to Martinů’s Half-Time; whether Barvík’s misspelling is intentional and derogatory is unclear. Although the Kaprál letter is purportedly from 1945, Barvík might be making an allusion to the aftereffects of Martinů’s accident at Tanglewood in 1946, or any number of lifelong afflictions that Martinů had suffered from, which Rybka explores in detail. See Rybka, Bohuslav Martinů. Refers to the Svatobořice internment camp in southeastern Moravia, established after Reinhard Heydrich’s assassination in 1942 for the purpose of rounding up relatives of Czech soldiers fighting for the allies. On Heydrich, see note 1 in chapter 7 of the present book. See ibid. Kaprál’s internment at Svatobořice, however, was not due to Kaprálová’s residence in France, but due to his brother Bohumil Kaprál (1895–1976), who had fought the Nazis with the Czechoslovak Army in France and Britain. See Ludvík Kundera, Václav Kaprál, 44–45. See note 17 above in the present appendix. A jab at Martinů, who—according to this letter—never produced a native school of composers of his own. Apart from Kaprálová, Martinů’s other Czech student of note was Jan Novák (1921–84), who studied with him in New York during the late 1940s. Refers to Milan Harašta, Miroslav Barvík, and a third student named Karel whose identity is unclear. On Harašta, see note 17 above in the present appendix. The abbreviations refer to the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (AMU) and the Czechoslovak Republic (ČSR). On Martinů’s burial and reburial, see discussion in chapter 9 of the present book.

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Index of Martinů’s Musical Works Action! (Natáčí se!, 1927; H. 163), 26 Amazing Flight, A Mechanical Ballet (Podivuhodný let, 1927; H. 159), 26, 199n31 As Midnight Passes, A Cycle of Symphonic Poems for Large Orchestra (Míjející půlnoc, 1922; H. 131), 13, 14, 92 Bagarre, La, Allegro for Large Orchestra (Vřava, 1926; H. 155), 25, 92, 93, 199n31, 215n11 Bergerettes for Violin, Cello, and Piano (1939; H. 275), 216n15 Cello Sonata No. 2 (1941; H. 286), 36, 87, 201n6(1) Chamber Music No. 1 for Clarinet, Violin, Viola, Cello, Harp, and Piano (1959; H. 376), 75 Comedy on the Bridge, A Radio-Opera in One Act (Veselohra na mostě, 1935; H. 247), 95, 187 Concertino for Cello, Brass, Piano, and Percussion (1924; H. 143), 195n48, 215–16n13 Concertino for Piano Trio and String Orchestra (1933; H. 232), 52 Concerto for Cello and Orchestra No. 1 (1930, 1939, 1955; H. 196 I, H. 196 II, H. 196 III), 94, 215n13 Concerto for Flute, Violin, and Orchestra (1935; H. 252), 94, 215n13

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Concerto for Harpsichord and Small Orchestra (1935; H. 246), 94, 215n13 Concerto for Piano Trio and String Orchestra (1933; H. 231), 52, 94, 215–16n13 Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra (1931; H. 207), 94, 215n13 Concerto Grosso for Chamber Orchestra (1938; H. 263), 1, 34, 96, 97, 191n1 Czech Rhapsody for Orchestra, Baritone, Mixed Choir, and Organ (Česká rapsodie, 1918; H. 118), 13–14, 91, 92, 194n24, 194n26 Czech Rhapsody for Violin and Piano (Česká rapsodie, 1945; H. 307), 214n21 Divertimento, Serenade No. 4 for Chamber Orchestra (1932; H. 215), 94, 216n18 Double Concerto for Two String Orchestras, Piano, and Timpani (1938; H. 271), 34, 35, 41, 42, 70, 74, 76, 92, 93, 96, 97, 211n9 Dream of the Past for Large Orchestra (Sen o minulosti, 1920; H. 124), 13 Duo Concertante for Two Violins and Orchestra (1937; H. 264), 94, 215n13 Duo for Violin and Cello No. 1 (1927; H. 157), 94, 216n14 Estampes for Orchestra (Rytiny, 1958; H. 369), 74

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❧ index of martin ů ’s music al works

Fantasia for Theremin, Oboe, Piano, and String Quartet (1944; H. 301), 54 Field Mass, Cantata for Baritone, Male Chorus, and Orchestra (Polní mše, 1939; H. 279), 35, 70, 92 Five Madrigal Stanzas for Violin and Piano (1943; H. 297), 55 Fresques de Piero della Francesca, Les, for Large Orchestra (Fresky, 1955; H. 352), 74 Gilgamesh, Oratorio for Soloists, Mixed Choir, and Orchestra (Gilgameš, 1955; H. 351), 41, 73, 74, 182 Greek Passion (Řecké pašije, 1957, 1959; H. 372 I, II), 52, 74, 75, 182 Half-Time, Rondo for Large Orchestra (1924; H. 142), 17–20, 25, 92, 93, 182, 187, 196n55, 196n60, 196n63; ISCM’s choice of, 21, 197n4; significance of, 19–20; Stravinsky’s influence on, 4, 15, 17; as “unexpected work,” 41–43, 93 Inventions (Invence, 1934; H. 234), 94, 216n18 Ishtar, a Ballet in Three Acts (Istar, 1921; H. 130), 14, 18, 91, 92, 215n3 Julietta, or the Key to Dreams (Julietta aneb snář, 1937; H. 253), xvi, 34, 41, 74, 78, 93, 95, 96, 97, 202nn17–18 Kitchen Revue, A Jazz Ballet in One Act (Kuchyńská revue, 1927; H. 161), 25–26 Madrigal-Sonata for Flute, Violin, and Piano (1942; H. 291), 36 Memorial to Lidice (Památník Lidicím, 1943; H. 296), 35–36, 70 Night, Nocturne, A Meloplastic Scene in One Act (Noc, 1914; H. 89), 14

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Opening of the Springs, A Cantata for Soloists, Female Chorus, and Instrumental Accompaniment (Otvírání studánek, 1955; H. 354), 71–72, 182, 228n23 Parables for Large Orchestra (Paraboly, 1958; H. 367), 74 Partita, Suite No. 1 for String Orchestra (1931; H. 212), 94, 216n18 Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Major (1925; H. 149), 94, 216n19 Piano Concerto No. 2 (1934; H. 237), 94, 215n13, 216n19 Piano Concerto No. 3 (1948; H. 316), 55 Piano Concerto No. 4, “Incantation” (1956; H. 358), 74, 182 Piano Quartet (1942; H. 287), 36 Piano Quintet No. 1 (1933; H. 229), 94, 216n16 Piano Trio No. 1, Five Short Pieces (1930; H. 193), 34, 41, 93, 94, 96, 216n14 Plays of Mary, A Cycle of Miracle Plays (Hry of Marii, 1934; H. 236), 34, 60, 92, 94, 97 Promenades for Flute, Violin, and Harpsichord (1939; H. 274), 216n15 Revolt, The, A Ballet Sketch in One Act (Vzpoura, 1925; H. 151), 25–26 Rhapsody for Large Orchestra (1928; H. 171), 92, 93, 215n7, 215n12 Serenade No. 1 (1932; H. 217), 94, 216n18 Serenade No. 2 (1932; H. 216), 94, 216n18 Serenade No. 3 (1932; H. 218), 94, 216n18 Shadow, A Ballet in One Act (Stín, 1916; H. 102), 14 Soldier and the Dancer, A Comic Opera in Three Acts (Voják a tanečnice, 1926; H. 162), 25–26 Sonata for Flute and Piano (1945; H. 306), 214n21

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index of martin ů ’s music al works Sonata No. 1 for Cello and Piano (1939; H. 277), 97, 216n23 Sonata No. 2 for Cello and Piano (1941; H. 286), 224n16 Sonata No. 3 for Violin and Piano (1944; H. 303), 226n2(1) Špalíček, A Singing Ballet in Three Acts (1932, 1940; H. 214 I, II), 34, 60, 70, 94, 187 String Quartet in E-flat Major, (1917; H. 103), 71 String Quartet No. 2 (1925; H. 150), 27, 41, 93 String Quartet No. 5 in G Minor (1938; H. 268), 42, 211n9, 216n15 String Quartet No. 6 (1946; H. 312), 66 String Quartet No. 7, Concerto da Camera (1947; H. 314), 55 String Quintet for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Cello (1927; H. 164), 212–13n15, 216n16 String Sextet for Two Violins, Two Violas, and Two Cellos (1932; H. 224), 94, 216n16 String Trio No. 2 (1934; H. 238), 216n14 Symphony No. 1 (1942; H. 289), 1, 36, 42–43, 202n13 Symphony No. 2 (1943; H. 295), 40 Symphony No. 3 (1944; H. 299), 42 Symphony No. 4 (1945; H. 305), 69–70, 157, 209n7, 214n21, 225n9 Symphony No. 5 (1946; H. 310), 57, 65, 203n3

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Symphony No. 6, “Fantaisies symphoniques” (1953; H. 343), 1–2, 41, 42, 74 Theater behind the Gate (Divadlo za branou, 1936; H. 251), 95, 97 Three Madrigals for Violin and Viola, Duo No. 1 (1947; H. 313), 55 Three Riders (Tři jezdci, 1902; H. 1), 91 Three Wishes, or the Inconstancy of Life, A Film-Opera in Three Acts (Tři přání, 1929; H. 175), 26 Toccata e due canzoni for Small Orchestra (1946; H. 311), 74, 203n20 Toilers of the Sea (Dělníci moře, 1910; H. 11), 37–38, 40, 41–42, 49 Tre ricercari for Chamber Orchestra (1938; H. 267), 34, 96, 97 Trio for Flute, Cello, and Piano (1944; H. 300), 36 Variations on a Theme by Rossini for Cello and Piano (1942; H. 290), 202n13 Violin Concerto No. 1 (1933; H. 226), 87, 213n16 Voice of the Forest, A Radio-Opera in One Act (Hlas lesa, 1935; H. 243), 60, 95 Who Is the Most Powerful in the World? (Kdo je na světě nejmocnější, 1922; H. 133), 20, 78, 91, 215n3

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General Index Alexanian, Diran, 134, 222n54 American Academy in Rome, 74 American Diaries (Martinů), xi, xxi, 2, 4–6, 36, 85; “experts” criticized in, xiv, 79; Šafránek’s original translations, 5. See also Essays from Fall 1945; Notebook from Cape Cod; Notebook from Darien; Notebook from New York; Notes from 1947; Parisian Criticism; Ridgefield Diary, The American lyricism, 36, 43, 78, 79 Andersen, Hans Christian: The Song of the Nightingale, 196n53 Anteil, George: Ballet Mécanique, 195n48 anti-Semitism, 30, 207n1 Aristotle, 221n41 Asperger syndrome, 52 atonality, 16–17 Augustine, St., 129 Austro-Hungarian empire, Czech lands in, xiii, 11–13, 193n14 authority, dependence on, 144 autonomous work, composition as, 19, 43, 52, 53, 66, 74, 76, 107 Axman, Emil, 11, 32, 200n51; Piano Sonata No. 3, 32; Piano Trio, 32; Sonata for Cello and Piano, 32; String Quartet No. 2, 32 Babbitt, Milton, 55, 205n20 Bach, C. P. E., 130 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 122, 129, 130; Cello Sonata, 134; function of music, 107; preludes, 49, 125 Ballets Russes, 92

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Barstow, Rosalie, 64–65 Bartók, Béla, 75–76, 211n9 Bartoš, Josef, 10–11, 192n9, 197n4 Barvík, Miroslav, 189, 226n6(2), 229n44; “At Tři Studně,” xv, 90, 179–88, 227n17; “Composers Go with the People,” 32, 209n7; directive on Martinů’s works, 70; government positions of, 69, 180, 183; internal report allowing performances of Martinů’s works, 71, 72, 90, 175–76, 210n13; Kaprál and, 227–28n18; Martinů–Kaprálová correspondence forged by, 178–79, 183, 228–29n31; pseudonym of, 179–80, 185 Barzun, Jacques, 217n1 Beck, Conrad, 198n22 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 122, 129, 159; bad interpretations of, 48, 119; mixed elements in music, 105; Piano Concerto No. 3, 62–63, 160–61; Symphony No. 1, 126; Symphony No. 5, 120–21; Symphony No. 6, “Pastoral,” 6, 61–62, 152–57; Symphony No. 9, 124, 158 Bendová, A., 15 Benedict, Ruth, 66; Patterns of Culture, 63, 164, 225n17 Benn, Alfred William, 222n56 Berg, Alban: Wozzeck, 4, 11, 30–32, 199n38, 199n44 Bergson, Henri, 223n57 Berlioz, Hector: Symphonie fantastique, 74 Bernstein, Leonard, 208n16 Bláha-Mikeš, Z., 194n34 Bloch, Ernest, 28 Boettinger, Hugo, 193n16

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Bohuslav Martinů Memorial (Polička), 83 Bolzmann, Ludwig, 54 Boston Symphony Orchestra, 1, 74, 93, 215nn11–12 Brahms, Johannes, 12, 123 Breton, André, 42 Březina, Aleš, 75 Bridgeman, P. W., 217n1 Bruckner, Anton, 91 Bureš, Miroslav, 228n23 Burk, John N., 62–63, 160–61 Cape Cod, Massachusetts, 5, 55, 58 Čapek, Karel, 206n8 Casadesus, Robert, 204n17 Casals, Pablo, 51, 134, 222n54 Čech (periodical), 30 Černušák, Gracian, 20, 196n64 Červinka, František, 191n11, 210n10 Červinková, Blanka, 40 Československá republika (newspaper), 18 Chopin, Frédéric, 186 Clarke, Rebecca, 88, 213n19 Coli, François, 26, 198n31 commissioned works, public’s attitude toward, 48, 62–63, 118 Committee on the Integration of the Sciences and Humanities, 204n18 “common denominator” concept, 5, 50, 99, 108, 129 composer, romantic notions of, 47–49, 62–63, 101, 108, 117–18, 122–24, 136– 37, 150–51, 158, 160–61, 218n4 composing. See craft, composition as; creative process, Martinů’s ideas on; form, musical; musical notation, limits of; music education, Martinů’s ideas on; rhythm and meter conductors, Martinů’s views on, 51, 53, 117, 131–32, 135, 141–42 Constructeurs, Les, 42 constructivism, 27, 42, 93 Copland, Aaron, 55 Cortot, Alfred, 186, 229n35 craft, composition as, 6, 25, 29, 33, 39–40, 48, 49, 54, 60, 62, 100–101, 108,

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112–13, 119, 121, 125, 129, 130, 143– 44, 152–58, 165, 201–2n9, 217n11, 217–18n3, 220n28 creative process, Martinů’s ideas on, xxii, 5, 20, 35, 37–43, 47–49, 58, 60–63, 76–79, 83–84, 88, 92, 95–96, 98–102, 113, 125, 142–47, 150–57 Curtis Institute of Music, 35, 74 Czech critics and criticism: conservatism of, 198n24; “depth of expression” appraisals, 14, 22, 23–24, 28–29, 140; German romantic influence on, 3–4, 25, 26–27, 36, 67–68, 77–78, 91, 119, 140, 168– 69, 206n10; hostility to impressionism, 11, 14; Martinů and, xii–xiii, 3, 6, 11, 18–20, 21–25, 26–27, 34, 36, 59–60, 69–73, 77, 199n35; nationalism of, 3, 6, 12–13, 21–24, 29; Nejedlý’s centrality, 3, 9–13, 77; Wozzeck debate, 30–32. See also Nejedlý School; specific names Czech folk song and music, 71–73, 94, 182 Czech Music Fund, 75 Czech National Revival, 77 Czechoslovakia: independence of, 12–13, 15, 77, 91, 92; Martinů’s post-war reception in, 6, 69–73, 90; musical politics in post-war, 10, 21–22, 24–25, 31, 32, 58, 69–70, 175–76, 180–85, 209n7; Nazi occupation of, xiii, 32, 35, 64, 182–83, 191n9; post-war reorganization of music education system, 57, 209n1; socialist movement, 12, 24–25, 30–32. See also AustroHungarian empire, Czech lands in; Prague Czechoslovak Music Dictionary, 32 Czechoslovak (newspaper), 150 Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, 15, 18, 19–20 Darien, Connecticut, 4, 5 Debussy, Claude, 139, 194n23; La Mer, 50, 131; Martinů influenced by, 13–14, 92; Martinů’s break with, 4; Nejedlý’s dismissal of, 11 Descartes, René, 48, 119

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general index Diamond, David, 75–76, 202n10 Dillard, Michel, 198n22 Doležil, Hubert, 31–32, 199–200n46 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 124 Dvořák, Antonín, 77, 96, 139; commemoration fifty years after death, 70–71; German fluency of, xiii; influence of, 29; Prague’s “battle” over, 4, 10, 11–13, 22, 27, 29, 192n9, 193n14, 193n19, 199n35; Requiem, 74 Dvořáková-Suková, Otýlie, 193n19 dynamism, 17, 19, 23, 27, 42, 60, 79, 93, 94, 111, 125, 144–46, 195n51 École de Paris, L’, 198n22 Einstein, Albert, 54, 55, 204n17, 218n3, 223n57 Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Prize, 94 Elman, Mischa, 1 “emotion-complex” concept, 5 emotion in music, Martinů’s views on, 17, 22, 23–24, 27, 28, 36, 37–39, 44, 45, 49, 50–51, 53, 99–101, 104, 108, 126, 131–33, 134–35, 140, 150, 162, 201n5(2), 205n4, 222n52, 224n15 Essays from Fall 1945 (Martinů), 6, 59–61; “Advice to the Composer,” 60, 67, 89; “For a Better Understanding of Music,” 60; “The Influence of Dynamism on Form,” 60; “An Orchestra is Not a Machine,” xv, 60, 141–42; “Reliving the Creative Process,” 60; “A Ruined Accompaniment,” 89, 201n6(1); “Something about that ‘French’ Influence,” 6, 9, 14, 59–60, 67–68, 89, 138–40, 192n4, 223n7; source for, 88–89, 89; “Theory and Facts,” 60–61 Fibich, Zdeněk, 11, 22, 77, 206–7n10; Moods, Impressions, and Reminiscences (Nálady, dojmy a upomínsky), 206–7n10 Firkušný, Rudolf, 1, 160–61, 207n16 Fischer, Christine, 184 Foerster, Josef Bohuslav, 11

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form, musical, 45, 46–47, 49, 60–62, 66, 92, 103–4, 111–13, 121, 123–25, 128, 143–46 formlessness, 46, 111–12 genres, distinguishing between, 46, 95, 96, 111, 113, 164 George, Earl, 166, 208n16; Introduction and Allegro for Orchestra, 66, 208n16 “German metaphysics,” xiii, 9, 14, 48, 58, 59, 67–68, 77–78, 119, 137, 138, 139, 168 German music and culture, Martinů’s views on, 4, 16–17, 22, 67–68, 91, 96–97, 119, 123, 140, 159, 168–69 gestalt, musical work as, 6, 38, 63, 65, 77, 98–99, 155, 163–64 Ghéon, Henri, 94 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 221n43 Groupe des Quatre, 25, 42 Guggenheimer, Samuel H., 222n55 Hába, Alois, xii Halbreich, Harry, 40, 202n17, 215n3 Hanslick, Eduard, xv, 12, 193n14 Hanuš, Jan, 70 Harašta, Milan, 189, 227n17, 229n44 Harsányi, Tibor, 198n22 Haydn, Franz Joseph, 100, 122, 130 Heard, Gerald, 218n8 Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, 54 Helfert, Vladimír, 11, 206n10; Czech Modern Music, 59–60; Our Music and the Czech State, 12 Henderson, Michael, 65 Hendrych, Jiří, 175–76, 226n1(2) Heydrich, Reinhard, 64, 207n1, 229n40 Hindemith, Paul: Gebrauchsmusik of, 2 History of Czech Musical Culture 1890–1945, A, xii, 31, 32 Hitler, Adolf, 182–83, 220n35 Hoffmann-Stehlin, Maja, 210n6 Holzknecht, Václav, 57 Honegger, Arthur, 15, 27–28, 197n14 Hostinský, Otakar, 11, 200n51

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246

❧ general index

Hrabal, František, 78; “Bohuslav Martinů: A Sketch of His Development and Significance in Modern Czech Music,” 72 Hudební rozhledy (journal), 69, 70–71 Hugo, Victor: Toilers of the Sea, 37 humanity, “serving,” 48, 119, 122–23, 140, 158–59, 220n35, 220–21n35 Huxley, Aldous, 214n21 hyper-neoclassicism, 42 ideovost concept, 4 impressionism, 11, 13–14, 18, 22, 25, 42, 67–68, 91–92, 93, 139, 194n23 Indonesian gamelan music, 110, 116 “initial impulse” concept, 37, 38–39, 67, 83, 98–100, 152–54, 169 “inner order” concept, 5, 51, 133–34 invariable and variable conditions, 6, 45, 61–62, 67, 79, 88, 152–55, 207n15 “irreversibility” (fait-accompli) concept, 5, 49, 52, 104–5, 126, 159, 166 ISCM festivals: in 1924, 4, 16, 93, 195n38; in 1925, 4, 21, 197n1, 197n6, 215n10 Janáček, Leoš, 29; The Cunning Little Vixen (Příhody lišky Bystroušky), 20, 215n3; folk influences on, 72–73; German fluency of, xiii; Smetana critiqued by, 206n10; speech melodies of, 2; Vogel’s studies of, 195n47 jazz, 26, 34, 77, 94, 110 Jiránek, Jaroslav, 69 “Julietta chords” progression, 36, 41, 42, 43, 201n7(1), 202n13 Jung, Carl Gustav, 217n1 Kahler, Erich, 217n1 Kalabis, Viktor, 209n3 Kaprál, Bohumil, 229n41 Kaprál, Václav, 178–79, 181–82, 185–88, 227–28n18, 229n41 Kaprálová, Vítězslava, 185–88, 228n25; death of, 177, 189, 229n32; Martinů’s involvement with, 35, 177–78;

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photograph of, 181; portrayed in Peculiar Loves, xv–xvi, 90, 177–79, 184–85 Karásek, Bohumil, 69–70, 209n7 Karel, Rudolf, 197n3; Sinfonie Démon, 21, 197n3 Kazantzakis, Nikos: Christ Recrucified, 74 Kerman, Joseph, 53, 203n9 Khrennikov, Tikhon, 69 Knopf publishing firm, 36, 213n19 knowledge, musical, 44, 45, 58, 66–67, 76–77, 103–6, 109–10, 120, 127, 128– 29, 142, 166–67 Kodetová, Sylvia, 228n25 Koussevitzky, Serge, 1, 93, 215nn11–12 Kreisler, Fritz, 214n21 Křesťan, Jiří, 191n11, 200n48, 210n10 Křička, Jaroslav, 35, 201n3(1) Kroll chamber group, 212n15 Kubelík, Jan, 193n20 Kubelík, Rafael, 75, 193n20 Kundera, Ludvík, 181–82, 186, 227–28n18, 228n21, 229n35 Kundera, Milan, 228n21; Ignorance, 183 Lang, Paul Henry, 217n6 Large, Brian: Martinů, 2, 65, 191n5; New Grove entry on Martinů, 2, 51–52, 203n6 Leinsdorf, Erich, 1 Lindbergh, Charles, 92 Listy Hudebni matice (journal), 27 Lucký, Štěpán, 59, 206n7 madrigal, English, 106, 203n1 Mahler, Gustav, 123; Martinů influenced by, 13–14; Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection,” 14, 194n24; Symphony No. 9, 62–63, 160–61 Mannes Music School, 35, 69 Marrast, Walther, 198n22 Martinů, Bohuslav: accident of, 65, 78, 202n10, 203n20, 229n39; American citizenship of, 32, 74, 175; attempts to return to Prague in 1930s, 35; attitude toward collective output, 40–43; composing speed and intensity, 52–53;

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general index Czech critics and, xii–xiii, 3, 6, 9, 11, 18–29, 21–25, 26–27, 34, 36, 59–60, 69–73, 77, 199n35; Czech cultural identity of, xiii; Czech revival of, 71–73; death of, 75; death of mother, 57; dismissal from violin program of Prague Conservatory, 194n20; early years in Prague, 13–15, 68, 91–92; extramarital affair of, 64–65; final years, 74–75; French musical influences, 6, 9, 14, 59–60, 67–68, 89, 92–93, 138–40, 175, 182, 194n23; on Gestapo black list, 35; lack of German fluency, xiii; legacy of, 75–76; life-long engagement with Czech music and aesthetics, xii, 3, 6, 33, 59–60, 68, 95–96, 198n21; music banned in Czechoslovakia, 32, 70, 73; musical style, 1920s, 4, 9, 13–14, 18–19, 67–68, 77–78, 92–93; musical style, 1930s, 34; musical style, 1940s, xv, 35–36, 55, 78; musical style periods, 42–43; in Nice, 2, 74, 175; as orchestral violinist, 14–15, 214–15n1; in Paris, xiii–xiv, xv, 4, 6, 9, 15–35, 60, 77–78, 91, 92–93, 144, 175; at Paul Sacher Estate, 75; personality of, 51–56, 202n10, 212–13n15, 227n2; photograph with Kaprálová and her father, 181; portrayed in Peculiar Loves, xv–xvi, 90, 177–79, 184–85; possible Asperger syndrome of, 52; post-war dealings with Czechoslovak government, 32, 64, 69–73, 90, 175–76, 183, 200n52, 208n7, 209n1; post-war situation, 6, 55–56, 57–58, 68; post-war status change of, 57, 69–70; reception history of, 1–2, 3, 6, 35–36, 51–52, 69–70, 74, 76–80; remains of, 75; request for rights transfer, 71, 175; scientific interests of, 53–55, 218n9; serialism disliked by, 55, 204n19; smoking habit of, 203n11; at Tanglewood Festival, 1, 35, 57, 65; teaching positions, 35, 53, 55, 69, 74, 204n19; unsociability of, 52–53; in US, xiv–xv, 1–6, 35–36, 44–74. See also specific ideas and topics

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Martinů, Bohuslav, compositions of: collective output, 40–43; milestone works, 43; Werkgruppe periodization, 41, 42. See also separate Index of Musical Compositions Martinů, Bohuslav, writings of: conceptual shortcomings to, xv; errors in Šafránek’s Czech-language transcription, xi–xii, 5, 83–84, 88–89; importance of, 79–80; lack of public knowledge about, 2, 78; “Proposal,” 58, 206n6; source readings, 89–90, 173, 217n1; sources, 87–90; translation notes, 85–87; “What Makes for a Good Work?,” 65–66, 214n30; writing style difficulties, 84–85. See also Essays from Fall 1945; 1941 Autobiography; Notebook from Cape Cod; Notebook from Darien; Notebook from New York; Notes from 1947; Ridgefield Diary, The Martinů, Charlotte (née Quennehen), 25, 35, 65, 74, 75, 87, 178, 188, 202n17, 219n16 Martinů, František, 205n1 Martinů and America (documentary), 75–76 Martinů Foundation, 75, 198n23 Martinů Institute, 75, 76, 83, 198n23 Masaryk, Thomas G., 144, 206n8, 223n6 McCabe, Joseph, 217n1, 218n3, 222n56 Melhuish, Tracey, 205n2 Mendelssohn, Felix, 27 messages in art, 48–49, 51, 122–23 meter. See rhythm and meter Mihalovici, Marcel, 198n22 Mihule, Jaroslav, 40, 72, 179, 204n19, 209n1, 217n6 Milcová, A., 15, 194n34 Morgan, Robert P., 2 Moyse, Marcel, 51, 133 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 49, 100, 122, 125; Flute Concerto, 133; function of music, 107; mixed elements in music, 105; “Rondo alla turca,” 154 Mucha, Alfons, 183 Mucha, Jiří, 227n2; Peculiar Loves, xv–xvi, 90, 177–79, 183–84, 228–29n31

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Muller, Hermann Joseph, 84, 219n15, 221n42 Munch, Charles, 1, 208n16 Munich Accord, 35, 97 Musical Academy of Performing Arts (HAMU; Prague), 57, 69, 175, 209n1 musical notation, limits of, 47, 67, 113–17, 118–19, 120–21, 126–27, 219–20n19 musical realism, 3, 28 music education, Martinů’s ideas on, xiv, 49–50, 79, 105, 113, 126, 128–29 Národní listy (newspaper), 30 nationalism, Czech, 3, 6, 12–13, 15–16, 21–24, 29, 59, 71–72, 138–40, 142, 182 Nazis and Nazi Germany, xiii, 32, 35, 59, 159, 168–69, 182–83, 191n9, 206n7, 207n1, 225n12 Nejedlý, Zdeněk: caricature of, 193n16; composition studies, 206–7n10; Doležil and, 199–200n46; as Dvořák opponent, 10; ideology of, 10; Janáček criticized by, 195n47; loss of power, 71; musicological career and aesthetics, 3–4, 10–13, 24–25, 30–32, 33, 67–68, 73, 77, 199n42, 200n51; as opponent of Martinů, xii, xiii, 9, 32, 33, 67–68; personal animosity toward Dvořák, 193n19; post-war ministerial position, 9–10, 32, 57, 64, 210n10; as Smetana’s champion, 3, 10, 11–12, 13, 15–16, 22, 193n14; in Soviet Union, 32, 199n42, 200n48; “Today’s Musical Crisis,” 24–25; on Wozzeck, 30–32; Zdeněk Fibich’s Erotic Diary, 206–7n10 Nejedlý School, 10–13, 15–16, 33, 77, 192n9, 229n37; conservatism of, 21; decline in influence of, 31–32; opponents of, 27–29; opposition to Martinů’s Julietta, 34; third generation of, 69 neoclassicism, 36, 42, 77, 93, 94 neo-impressionism, 42, 74 Neveux, Georges, 202n17; Juliette ou la clé des songes, 78, 95 New German School, 3–4

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New York Philharmonic, 62–63, 89, 160– 61, 225n14 Nezval, Vítězslav, 140 1941 Autobiography (Martinů), 2, 41, 60, 76, 87–88, 91–97, 182; source for, 87 Notebook from Cape Cod (Martinů), 5, 58, 88 Notebook from Darien (Martinů): “On the Creative Process,” 5, 37–41, 43, 83–84, 88, 98–102, 213n17; source for, 88 Notebook from New York (Martinů), 6, 61–63, 152–65; “Concluding Thoughts,” 63, 164–65; “‘Creating’ Culture,” 62; “Criticism and Craft,” 157–58; “Language and the Conception of Shape,” 159; “Mistakes,” 159; “Music ‘Saving the World,’” 158–59; “The ‘Pastoral’ Symphony: What Are Invariable and Variable Conditions?,” 6, 61–62, 67, 88, 152–57; “Playing the Critic,” 63, 161–63; “Practical and Ordinary Purpose,” 63, 164; “Program Notes,” 62–63, 89, 160–61; “The Soloist Today,” xv, 159–60; “Solutions in Gestalt,” 63, 163; source for, 89 Notes from 1947 (Martinů), 66–68, 166–69; “The Limits of Musical Knowledge,” 66–67, 89, 166–67; “My Latin Origins?,” 67–68, 89, 167–69; Šafránek’s receipt of, 68; source for, 89; “An Unwritten Law,” 66, 89, 166 Novák, Jan, 229n43 Novák, Karel, 205n1 Novák, Mirko, 197n8 Novák, Stanislav, 13, 20, 57, 78, 194n22, 205n1 Novák, Vitězslav, 29, 30, 35, 187; Grandfather’s Legacy (Dědův odkaz), 199n38; Toman and the Wood Nymph (Toman a lesní panna), 21 Nungesser, Charles, 26, 198n31 orchestral playing, xv, 60, 141–42, 222n52 originality, cult of, 23 Ormandy, Eugene, 1

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general index Ostrčil, Otakar, 11, 29; critique of Martinů’s impressionist works, 14; production of Berg’s Wozzeck, 30–32 Paris: 1920s contemporary music scene in, 23, 25–26, 198n22; Martinů in, xiii– xiv, xv, 4, 6, 9, 15–35, 60, 77–78, 91, 92–93, 144, 175; Straram and Triton concerts in, xv, 198n22 Parisian Criticism (Martinů), 2, 3–4, 9–20, 42, 85; “The Case of Half-Time, or the Tragedy of a Melodic Triad,” 17, 18–19; concert reviews, 4, 9; Czech critics unnamed in, xii–xiii, 3, 9; general principles in, 33; “On Contemporary Melody,” 26–27; “On Contemporary Music,” 23–24, 27–29; “On Music and Tradition,” 21–22; protests against Czech critics in, 9, 18–20, 26–27, 33, 34, 36; Stravinsky essays, 4, 15–18, 25, 194–95n35; thoughts on “Battle over Dvořák,” 4; thoughts on Schoenberg and German music, 4; “Towards the Criticism of Contemporary Music,” 22–23 Party Music Criticism, 69 Pavlas, Bohuslav, 198n23 perception, musical, 45–46, 60–61, 106–8, 126, 147–49, 161–63, 165 Peroutka, Ferdinand, 59, 206n8 phenomenology, 44 Piatigorsky, Gregor, 1 Pícha, František, 209n1 Planck, Max, 54, 219n14, 221n42 Podhajská, Zdenka, 25, 198n23 polyphonic music, 36, 47, 79, 109–10, 117–18, 211n26, 219–20n19 Popelka, František, “Iša,” 72, 83, 85, 212n9 Prague: 1920s musical milieu of, xii, 4, 9, 15–16, 30–32; Martinů in, 13–15; Smetana–Dvořák aesthetic battle, 4, 10, 11–13, 22, 27, 29, 192n9, 193n14, 193n19, 199n35 Prague Conservatory of Music: Martinů and, 32, 35, 57, 59, 64; Nejedlý’s discontent with, 12–13

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Prague linguistic school of formalism, 212n9 Prague National Theater, 15, 64, 187; production of Berg’s Wozzeck, 1926, 4, 11, 30–32, 199n38, 199n44; production of Martinů’s Julietta, 34 Prague Spring International Music Festival (1946), 59, 65, 175–76 Princeton University, 35, 53, 55, 69, 204–5nn19–20 program music, 11–12, 23, 36, 48–49, 74, 99, 128, 142, 150, 193n14 program notes, 62–63, 89, 160–61 Prokofiev, Sergei, 15, 186 psychology: gestalt, 63, 65–66; musical, 99, 103, 108, 141, 156–57; of romantic criticism, 36, 49, 60, 142, 201n5. See also “subconscious concentration” concept Quennehen, Charlotte. See Martinů, Charlotte (née Quennehen) Rabelais, François: Gargantua and Pantagruel, 48, 122 Ravel, Maurice, 15 Reed, H. Owen, 201n7(2) Reiser, Oliver Leslie, 218n6 Renaissance polyphony, 36, 47, 79, 219–20n19 Reti, Rudolph, 79 rhythm and meter, 27, 47–49, 79, 93, 110–11, 113–16, 118–19, 149, 219–20nn19–20 Ridgefield, Connecticut, 5 Ridgefield Diary, The (Martinů), 5, 44–56, 103–37; “Adding the Visual Element,” 126–27; “All Contact with Life is Affective,” 128; “Appraising Music,” 120; “Capable Only of Being Sensed,” 136; “‘Creating’ Culture,” 67, 118–19; disdain for “music experts,” 49, 55, 109, 115, 127–29; “Dynamic Performances,” 51, 117; “The Effect on Form,” 123–24; “Emotion,” 133; errors in Šafránek’s transcription, 84; “An Expression of World Feeling,” 130–31; “Faulty

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250

❧ general index

Ridgefield Diary, The (Martinů)—(cont’d) Practices,” 112–13; “Faulty Premises,” 126; “Feeling as a Technical Element and Not Knowledge,” 125; “A Feeling for the Whole,” 135; “Formlessness is a Contradiction,” 111–12; “The Function and Role of the Conductor,” 135; “Having a ‘Message,’” 48–49, 122–23; “Inner Order,” 133–34; insights of, 51–56; “Intensity and Dynamism Are Not the Same Thing,” 125; “Knowing the Technical Details,” 49–50, 127; “The ‘Logic’ of Analysis,” 121; “Musical Knowledge,” 45, 103–6; “Musical Perception,” 45–46, 106–8, 214n23; “The Mysterious Change in Mental Reaction,” 46, 47, 109–10, 219–20n19; “On the Aspect of Emotion,” 50–51, 131–32; organic relations as unifying theme, 5, 44, 46–47, 49, 50–51; “The Origins of the Rest,” 120–21; “Our Changing Emotional Response,” 126; “Our Solutions Occur in Time and Space,” 46–47, 54, 88, 110–11, 204n16; “Public Opinion of the Composer,” 47–48, 117–18, 220n19; “The Question of Rhythm,” 47–49, 113–16; “A Real and Fictitious Tragedy,” 134–35; “Revising a Musical Work,” 49, 126; “Self-Forgetting” (I), 51, 76, 134; “SelfForgetting” (II), 51, 76, 135; “SelfForgetting” (III), 51, 76, 136; “‘Serving’ the Human Race,” 119; “A Small Problem of Time,” 116–17; “The Sonata as a ‘Natural Expression of Order,’” 124– 25; source for, 88; “Specialization,” 112; synopsis, 45–51; “Universal Education,” 50, 128–29; “Why Do We Have So Few Good Composers?,” 51, 136–37 Řídký, Jaroslav, 209n1 Ries, Ferdinand, 63, 160 ritual, music and, 46, 79, 94, 107, 109, 117–18 Rodziński, Artur, 1 Rohlfs, Eckart, 201n7(2) Roussel, Albert, 14, 25, 42, 91, 194n30

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Rovnost (newspaper), 179, 180 Rudé Právo (newspaper), 30 Rybka, F. James, 52–53, 203n11, 205n1 Rybka, Frank, 52, 64–65, 74 Sacher, Paul, 75, 210n6 Šafařovič, Jaroslav, 199n41 Šafránek, Miloš, 58, 191n7, 192n15, 204n18; Bohuslav Martinů: His Life and Works, 9, 37; Bohuslav Martinů: Homeland, Music, and the World, xi, 2–3, 6, 83–85; Bohuslav Martinů: The Man and His Music, 5, 36, 52, 65, 88, 89; life of, 2–3; Martinů’s autobiographical essay and, 87; on Martinů’s impetus for essays, 5; post-war move to Czechoslovakia, 78 Sakharoff, Alexander, 113, 219n16 Sayer, Derek, 178 Schoenberg, Arnold, 2, 4, 16–17, 22, 79 Schott publishing firm, 52, 215–16n13 Schubert, Franz, 27 Schulzová, Anežka, 206–7n10 “self-forgetting,” 46, 51, 76, 134, 135, 136 semantics, xiii, 24, 28–29, 30, 36 Šemberová, Zora, 219n17 “sensation-attitude” concept, 5, 38, 98, 201n4(2) Serebrier, José, 210n1 serialism, 55, 78, 204n19 Seyfried, Ignaz Ritter von, 63 Shostakovich, Dmitri, xv–xvi, 186 Šilhan, Antonín, 30, 199n38 Six, Les, 92, 197n14 Smaczny, Jan, 214–15n1 Smetana, Bedřich, 77, 96, 139, 140, 195n40; The Bartered Bride (Prodaná nevěsta), 158; centennial birth celebrations of, 4, 15–16; cult of, 91, 144; German fluency of, xiii; influence of, 29; Janáček’s critique of, 195n47, 206n10; Martinů influenced by, 13–14; Nejedlý’s championship of, 3, 10, 11–12, 13, 15–16, 22, 193n14; Piano Trio in G Minor, 111, 218n11; Wagner’s influence on, 4

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general index Smetana (journal), 11, 16, 24–25, 31, 199n46, 200n51 socialist realism, 3, 32, 69, 70, 73 social status of composer, 47–49, 62–63, 101, 108, 117–18, 136–37, 218n4 soloists, 159–60 Šourek, Otakar, 196n55 Soviet Union, 32, 199n42, 200n48 Spengler, Oswald: Decline of the West, 50, 130–31, 136, 218n9, 219n13, 221n43, 222n45, 222n48, 222n56 Stalin, Josef, 200n48 Štěpán, Václav: “The Aesthetic Problem of Contemporary Music,” 27–29 Straram, Walther, 198n22 Strauss, Richard, 78, 91; Ein Heldenleben, 123; Sinfonia Domestica, 123 Stravinsky, Igor, 15, 157; embrace of serialism, 55; The Firebird, 195n48; L’Histoire du soldat, 75; Martinů influenced by, 4, 15–19, 25, 77, 78, 92, 93, 194–95n35, 195n48, 195n51; Martinů’s waning interest in, 211n9; Petrushka, 17, 18, 19, 140, 195n48; The Rite of Spring, 17; The Song of the Nightingale, 17, 196n53 stream-of-consciousness account of listening, 60–61, 66, 147–49 “subconscious concentration” concept, xi– xii, xxii, 5, 37–39, 42, 76–77, 78, 84, 93, 98–102, 134, 135, 136, 153–54, 196n63, 202n17 Suk, Josef, 29, 31, 91, 123, 187, 193n19, 215n4, 229n37; The Ripening (Zrání), 12 surrealism, 42, 76, 77 Svoboda, Antonín, 6, 53–54, 67, 88, 204n13, 204n16, 218nn9–10 Svoboda, Tomáš, 204n13 Sychra, Antonín, 69 Szell, George, 1, 191n1

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Talich, Václav: as Czech Philharmonic director, 14–15, 15, 18, 19–20, 21, 194n22, 194n33, 196n60, 197n4; as National Theater director, 31, 32, 34, 64; Nejedlý and, 10, 32, 64; post-war treatment of, 32, 64, 207–8n3 Tanenbaum, Elias, 202n10 Tanglewood Festival, 1, 35, 57, 65, 166 Taruskin, Richard, 211n10; Oxford History of Western Music, 2 Toscanini, Arturo, 50, 131 Uher, Jindřich, 227n4 “unexpected works” concept, 5, 20, 41–43, 93 United States: aesthetic shift in, 55, 78; Martinů in, xiv–xv, 1–6, 35–36, 44–74; music criticism in, xiv, 62–63, 79, 160–61 “unwritten laws” concept, 5, 66, 89, 132, 166 Van Loon, Hendrik Willem, 48, 84, 119, 122–23, 220n33, 220nn28–29 Vejvoda, Jaromír: “Beer Barrel Polka” (“Škoda lásky”), 224n19 Vinci, Leonardo da: Mona Lisa, 119 Vogel, Jaroslav, 4, 195n47, 195–96n53, 196n55; Martinů accused of plagiarism by, 17–19 Vojtěch, Ivan: “Martinů and Contemporary Czech Music,” 72–73 Volkov, Solomon, xv–xvi Vycpálek, Ladislav, 29 Wagner, Richard, 48; Czech music influenced by, 3–4, 11, 25, 34; Martinů’s dislike of, 96 Walter, Bruno, 160–61, 207n16 world-feeling, 104, 130–31 Zhdanov, Andrei, 200n48 Zich, Otakar, 11

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performed composers of the mid-twentieth century, renowned for such works as his opera Julietta; the Double Concerto for Two String Orchestras, Piano, and Timpani; and Symphony no. 6 (“Fantaisies symphoniques”). History books, however, rarely give a sense of what he stood for as a musician. Martinů’s Subliminal States fills this gap by discussing the political, cultural, and musical challenges that he faced. The book also offers, for the first time, a translation of the composer’s American Diaries, in which he set down his musical philosophy in direct and convincing terms. Martinů’s diaries are, in large measure, a quest to establish a new kind of discourse on music. In place of the Romantic sentiment that he found others invoking to explain musical inspiration, Martinů suggested looking for “emotion” elsewhere, such as in the technical decisions a composer makes while producing the score, or even in the composer’s ability to work “without conscious involvement.” And in place of the schematic formal analyses that were misleading listeners about a work’s “musical structure,” he urged that we treat the work as a Gestalt, or as a synergy of functional relations. Martinů’s diaries provide a unique contribution to the history of musical aesthetics and shed light on a composer who loomed large in the musical worlds of Europe and America. Thomas D. Svatos is assistant professor at Zayed University. Front cover image: Martinů in 1912. Courtesy of the Bohuslav Martinů Centre. Back cover image:

Martinů’s Subliminal States

Bohuslav Martinů (1890–1959) was one of the most productive and frequently

Facsimile page from Martinů’s essay “Theory and Facts” from the composer’s American Diaries.

SVATOS

668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.urpress.com

’ s ů n i t r a M l a n i m i l Sub s e t a St A Study of the Composer’s Writings and Reception, with a Translation of His American Diaries

THOMAS D. SVATOS