Tuesday Tones

I don’t know if this composer has ever been featured on this blog at all, either in this incarnation or in the Byzantium’s Shores era. So I’ve just done a search, and it turns out that not only have I not featured his music at all, but I’ve only even mentioned him twice.

So: enter Bohuslav Martinů.

Who?

Martinů was a Czech composer of the Modern era who lived 1890 to 1959. And he wrote a lot of music. Music poured out of the guy. Over a dozen operas and ballets each. Six symphonies. A ton of standalone orchestral music. Concertos. Chamber music. Keyboard music. Vocal music. About the only major genre of music that Martinů seems to have not made any contribution is sacred music.

And of all that music, I have heard just a tiny number of works. In fact, that number might now, with this post, stand at 2. I know I’ve heard his oratorio based on the Epic of Gilgamesh, and now I’ve heard The Parables, a suite for large orchestra. Martinů wrote The Parables late in his life. The work is in three movements:

1. The Parable of a Sculpture (Andante pastorale)
2. The Parable of a Garden (Poco moderato)
3. The Parable of the Labyrinth (Poco allegro)

I have not been able to find a great deal of program information about The Parables, which I suppose is at least partly a function of the composer’s relative obscurity. Martinů may be experiencing an era of reassessment now, though, so maybe more will be forthcoming. I did find this brief passage:

The Frescoes of Piero della Francesca, H 352, and The Parables, H 367, represent the culmination of the late Neo-Impressionist orchestral output of Bohuslav Martinů, marked by a fantastic, kaleidoscopic style. Martinů transforms his extramusical (visual, literary) inspirations into the principles of musical forms, which are open to associations from mood setting to philosophical inquiries into the essence of human existence.

…

Martinů wrote the first two movements of The Parables in July 1957; he returned to the work after a break in early 1958 (completing the final, third movement on 8 February). The Parables were premiered in Boston on 13 February 1959 by Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The mottos of the first two movements of The Parables reference The Wisdom of the Sands (Citadelle) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. For the third movement, Martinů created a motto from loosely associated excerpts from Georges Neveux’s play The Voyage of Theseus, which later provided the subject matter for the opera Ariadne, H 370 (1958). Although the music of The Parables relates to the mottos only abstractly or, in the case of the third movement, perhaps somewhat accidentally, these texts are nevertheless an integral part of The Parables.

That is helpful. I found Martinů’s musical language dreamy and evocative, lyrical at times and forcefully depictive in others. He seems to be writing in a vein that’s a blend of late Romanticism, Impressionism, and Modernism, which is a heady mix to be sure.

Here is The Parables by Bohuslav Martinů.

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