On Music
SIMON, JOHN
On Music Operas in Waiting By John Simon Talent tends to be homogeneous and complacent; genius, complex, contradictory, riven. Take the extraordinary Czech composer Bohuslav Martinù...
...Eleanora flirts with him to arouse Saturn's jealousy...
...An even more significant duality lay in Martinù's love of Czech music, especially folk and Antonin Dvorak, but equal fascination with French music, notably that of Claude Debussy, whose Pelléas et Mélisande proved a revelation, and Albert Roussel, whose The Poem of the Forest similarly enchanted him...
...In 193 5 he wrote two one-actradiooperas...
...At 16, with money from his fellow townsmen, he went to the Prague Conservatory...
...The other, Comedy on the Bridge, is based on a classic Czech play by Vaclav Klicpera, wherein five disparate persons are caught on a bridge between warring armies on opposite shores...
...The music worked better when he adapted it into a Jazz Suite...
...The earliest operatic work, The Soldier and the Dancer (1926-7), with a libretto by the pseudonymous J. L. Budin, based on the Plautine comedy Pseudolus, remains unrecorded...
...There is, though, Lebrecht's dissenting opinion: "In fact, he was astonishingly consistent, incapable of composing badly...
...Regrettably unrecorded is the full-length Mirandolina (1954), after Carlo Goldoni's comedy La locandiera, a commedia dell'arte opera in Italian with text by Martinù, and, I gather, the high point of his comic output...
...Martinù's operas, well ahead of Bedrich Smetana's, deserve to take their place internationally beside Dvorak's and Janâcek's...
...He keeps going off to hunt, she tries dallying with young cousin Adolphe, who only wants her money...
...In 195 8, while engaged with his other masterpiece, The Greek Passion, the gravely ill Martinû sought respite in the one-act baroque trifle Ariadne...
...Her mother cannot distract her from him to another wooer, Satan, who must watch her marry Saturn, around whose dangling half the girl dances an amorous tango...
...It is clearly indebted to Pelléas et Mélisande, although a recurring "Moravian cadence," associated with the heroine, has been traced to Leos Janâcek...
...To support a family of five (later six), he took on the additional job of fire watcher, clock winder and bellringer in the tower of St...
...The concluding "Sister Pasqualine" tells of a young nun who, prompted by the devil, elopes with a knight...
...The rope tears and, under Mother's rapt gaze, Saturn throws himself on Eleanora's body...
...Michel seeks the beautiful Juliette, whom he hears again, and who finally appears, tempts and eludes him, makes an appointment with him in the nearby woods, and eventually shows up to relive phony shared memories bought from a memory vendor...
...His father was a cobbler in the small town of Policka...
...The Bohemian is vigorous and energetic, with a strong life force and pithy, robust humor...
...The Moravian, conversely, is more sensitive and dreamy...
...A fairy-tale movie is being shot...
...Juliette was always on Martimïs mind, quoted in his later works, and prompting an unfinished French translation on his very deathbed...
...This has haunted him ever since, but the town is changed: The inhabitants mostly remember only the last 10 minutes of their existence, and have no past or future...
...Slowly Bohuslav overcame extreme poverty and language difficulties...
...Standing at the center of the composer's creative career, it chronicles the confrontation of dream and reality...
...From 1953 to '55, the Martinùs lived in Nice, where they could freely indulge their love of nature and gardening...
...The ideal recording would combine elements from both, properly sung and balanced...
...his mentality, realistic...
...The complicated plot defies summary...
...Compression of the 400-page text forced Martinû into some choppiness...
...The wife asks for wealth, and promptly everything around her, even her hair, turns to gold...
...ditto Cato, Plautus, Molière, and even crockery and flatware (present too, in Martinu's marvelous Kitchen Revue of that period...
...In the Epilogue, at the wrap party in an improvised studio bar, reality imitates art...
...Juste extracts a fairy caught in a wolf trap, and takes her home...
...They envy what memory anyone has, purchase false memories, receive only old letters as aidemémoires, and shuttle between resenting Michel's memory and bestowing honors on him for it that they promptly forget...
...his music also bore kinship with that of his friend Arthur Honegger, and he belonged to a group Tansman and Tcherepnin were also quasi-affiliated with...
...He married a French girl, the seamstress Charlotte Quennehen, who was an ideal wife, and continued to sew professionally till late into their marriage...
...restraint, concision, and suggestion rather than literalness...
...James' church...
...His folk music is melodious, lyrical and elegiac, its rhythms sprightlier, and less heavily accented...
...Since Bohuslav was a frail child, his father usually carried him up the 193 tortuous steps, which kept most visitors away...
...The second is "Mariken de Nimègue," about a girl who marries the devil but, seeing a miracle play in the marketplace, repents and is saved by the Virgin's intercession...
...As Michel observes, a variety of clients acquire disparate dreams, but all involve someone called Juliette...
...in his case, it is often hypnotic...
...From 1936to '37, Martinû worked on the first of his two masterpieces, Juliette or the Key to Dreams, from a play by another surrealist friend, Georges Neveux...
...Thus is Michel, Martinù's avowed alter ego, in constant pursuit of the eternal feminine beauty, the ideal, and something stable such as true memories...
...The couple and friends, including Adolphe and his fiancée, the rich hunchback Eblouie, set sail for a golden island...
...A new genre for Czech opera, it combined operetta, ballet, revue, musical comedy, and topical references, with the action spilling over backstage and into the auditorium...
...Martinu's entrancing tangos, foxtrots, and Charlestons seem to me wasted on the by now totally dated Ribemont-Dessaignes libretto...
...it is an early essay in his beloved theme, split personality...
...In 1941, the Martinùs emigrated to the United States, where the composer gradually prospered but never felt fully at ease, least of all in New York City...
...The cyclist's head splits open: He is Satan...
...the Zurich variant is narrower in scope, concentrates on the main characters and is more lyric...
...Blending them individualistically, the assiduously and rapidly composing Martinù was to amass an oeuvre of some 400 diverse items...
...In exchange for her liberty, she grants the couple three wishes...
...He embarks on a ship that turns into a dream office, where the clerk dispenses dreams by strict rules and quotas...
...All his works after 1932 are accomplished, eloquent, and individual...
...Policka is geographically Bohemian, ethnically Moravian," Harry Halbreich points out in his book on Martinù and catalogue of his works...
...to console his wife, Juste wishes youth for her, which only unites her with Adolphe...
...The Zurich one (Supraphon 3611) has an old-voiced Manolios in John Mitchinson and other odd casting choices, yet sounds better...
...Favorite motifs used are a play within a play, and doubling ofcharacters,here into singers and dancers or body and soul...
...Repentant, she is saved from the burning stake by Mary and returns to the convent, where she was not missed: Mary herself had replaced her...
...Sun, moon, stars, clouds, streetlamps play their roles...
...His face breaks open: He, too, is Satan, and disappears blowing kisses to Mother as Eleanora weeps, "What a wretched, misunderstood woman am I." The opera features much spoken dialogue and an offstage accordion, a Martini...
...Most writers about him, such as his friend Milos Safrânek in two books, and Brian Large in the important Bohuslav Martinu, consider his ample output uneven, as do I. It includes 16 operas (two unfinished), 15 ballets, six symphonies, seven string quartets, and numerous other orchestral, concertante, chamber, and instrumental works...
...Martinu called the predominant form "spoken melos," on the borders of spoken dialogue and full-blown melody, exemplifying his principle of "horror of insistence"—i.e...
...the Prologue consists of studio hubbub...
...trademark...
...at 10, he started composing...
...His folk music is, above all, rhythmic and danceable...
...The devil eventually kills the knight and makes Pasqualine take the rap...
...At seven, he learned the violin from the local tailor...
...In his book on Martinu, Brian Large persuasively argues that Juliette also stands for Vitèzslava Kaprâlovâ, a beautiful and talented student of Martinù's, to whom he was bound in a passionate but platonic relationship, and whose career as composerconductor was cut off by death at 25...
...Be that as it may, the music of Juliette is a multifarious song of dreaminess and longing, of passionately happy moments of orchestral splendor and stretches of often comical, speech-influenced arioso...
...Debussy's impressionism was an influence, as was, early on, jazz, and later, the baroque concerto grosso...
...A black cyclist appears, circling around...
...Juste, abandoned, wishes to be loved, whereupon the unsightly Eblouie, now a tattered beggar, throws herself upon hirn.Furious at Juste's apathy ("Life is difficult," the wretch keeps moaning), she kills him...
...The orchestration, too, shows great diversity, with solo instrumental passages, acappella ones, plus spoken narration...
...The clerk warns Michel that if he stays after closing, he will end up like some of the gray wraiths who flit by, forever locked into their dreams...
...But she escapes and Michel shoots her in the back—or does he...
...One, The Voice of the Forest, to a libretto by the poet Vitêzslav Nezval, is a romantic tale of a young woman saving her lover from robbers in the woods by joining them in disguise...
...MARTINO NEXT did a short one-act opera in French, The Tears of the Knife, with a text by his friend, the dadaist-surrealist Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes—not a happy choice in my view...
...It ends in a dance hall with a Dixieland band and megaphone-wielding chorus exhorting the spectators to join in the black bottom...
...If some consider Martinù's operas insufficiently dramatic, Jaroslav Mihule, in his charming monograph, has the answer: "It would be equally easy to blame Chekhov for the lack of action in his works— Do they not contain sufficient other great things...
...After that there was France, Italy, the U. S. again, and mostly Switzerland with the conductor Paul Sacher and his solicitous wife in their Alpine domicile, where Martinù was to die painfully of stomach cancer...
...The work is the culmination of what Halbreich terms Martinù's Moravian side, where "dream became for him the revealer, the key to the puzzling out of life's enigmas...
...The Martinùs, plus an assistant, lived in one room just under the spire...
...another TV opera of the same year, The Marriage, based on Gogol, is recorded, but only intermittently interesting...
...Martinû worked fairly closely with Kazantzakis on the English libretto, but various tentative productions buffeted the text in different directions...
...The actors revert to their not very different selves, as Nina and Serge, who played Adolphe, drunkenly make out, and Arthur drinks alone...
...Of the 14 completed ones, only 10 are available on disc, and even these are not easy to find...
...Martinu's music is extremely varied...
...To jauntily syncopated hot jazz, Eleanora stabs herself, her head juggling with the dead legs...
...Trips to the homeland had to stop after the Nazi conquest, and what with the postwar Communist regime and various intrigues against him, Bohuslav, despite intense yearning, never again set foot on his native soil...
...But it, too, retains the opposing choruses—that of the native villagers led by the bad priest Grigoris, who, with a few exceptions, refuse to give land and sustenance to the refugees under good priest Fotis, wanderers since the Turks destroyed their homes, who constitute the second chorus...
...On the island, Adolphe is pursued by a black woman, Dinah...
...Neither version quite develops its characters...
...Upon receiving a modest grant in 1923, he hotfooted it to Paris for a brief sojourn that turned into 17 years in France...
...It nevertheless differs from the works of those three, who do not use dadaist nonsense in their particulars...
...He and the others selected either exhibit or develop strong parallels to their roles...
...In the film within the opera that follows, the married actors Arthur and Nina portray the middle-aged couple Juste and Indolenda, bored and unhappy...
...He liked to let it undulate, like the hills and meadows that join Bohemia and Moravia...
...His libretto, again based on a play by Neveux, argues that Theseus kills his own double in the Minotaur, the one who spent a passionate wedding night with the promptly abandoned Ariadne—a coloratura part written for Maria Callas, who never sang it...
...Loaded with too much gold, the boat sinks, but all are rescued by the fairy...
...twice), about a husband who woos his wife in disguise (rather as in Ferenc Molnâr's The Guardsman), while his portrait on the wall comments comically on the action...
...It concerns Michel, a traveling bookseller, who returns to a small harbor town where, three years earlier, he heard a girl singing at an open window...
...The first and third are the near-oratorios "The Wise and Foolish Virgins" and "The Nativity...
...The London one (on Koch/ Schwann 6950), a live recording from the Bregenz Festival, is less well sung and inadequately balanced...
...THE 1952 TV opera What Men Live By, based on Tolstoy, is unrecorded...
...Unable to accept cut and dried teaching, he proceeded to flunk out of various curricula, although he had some luck with lessons from Josef Suk...
...There is protest from a critic in the audience, dissension among singers, director and prompter...
...Also "the expunging of the concept of time, the superimposition of past and present, the doubling of the ego, and, finally, the imperceptible reversal between dream and reality...
...Here I must limit myself to his operas, less well-known and seldom performed outside his homeland...
...Years later this became a prize-winning production on American television...
...Eleanora is in love with her neighbor, the suicide Saturn, whose lower half can be seen hanging stage center...
...The main plot concerns the young shepherd Manolios, chosen to enact Christ in the forthcoming village passion play...
...In 1937 there appeared Alexandre bis (i.e...
...There survive essentially two versions: the longer one for London (where it was never performed), and the revised, shorter Zurich one for Paul Sacher, now always used...
...Certainly his inspiration, well into his final illness, never flagged, as witness the powerful EpicofGilgamesh(1958) and the exquisite Nonet (1959...
...For a while he informally studied with Roussel, becoming his pride and joy...
...The composer admired both the librettist's language and his cruel, macabre humor...
...Still, he remains, and the opera ends with its opening scene ominously repeated...
...the town whore Katerina becomes Mary Magdalene, the greedy tanner is Judas...
...Pasqualine awakens from what may have been a dream and dies a holy death...
...Shy and friendless at school, he spent five more years in the tower, also viewing much empty countryside...
...Michel's Juliette calls him from behind a locked door, where, however, there is no one...
...Considered a French answer to the jazz operas of Paul Hindemith, Ernst Krenek, and Kurt Weill, it is "driven by raging rhythms whipped up by jazzy syncopation," to borrow Halbreich's description...
...For his first six years, the boy saw the town and people in miniature from above...
...Such lack of incident can be soporific...
...The London Passion is more historical, political, epic...
...he and the chorus sing, "One can't live like this...
...The Plays of Mary (1934-5) consists of four miniatures based on texts from the Bible, folk tales, and works by Vitêzslav Nezval and Henri Ghéon...
...As often as his growing fame and finances allowed, he would revisit Prague and Policka...
...In 1929 composer and lyricist collaborated on a full-length opera that included a long film sequence, The Three Wishes or the Vicissitudes of Life...
...The Greek Passion, the final masterwork (1956-59), is based onNikos Kazantzakis' novel Christ Recrucified...
...This perspective lent his music an unearthly breadth and detachment," Norman Lebrecht has written...
...His favorite composer was Igor Stravinsky, some of whose neoclassicism he adopted...
...Take the extraordinary Czech composer Bohuslav Martinù (1890-1959...
...He gives us pastorales, wild devils' dances, choral church music, and moments of serenity or consuming passion...
Vol. 87 • March 2004 • No. 2
