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"Music for me is the idea of light" a view of the life and music of Bohuslav Martinu.

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Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959) is one of the truly world famous "four" among Czech composers, together with Bedrich Smetana, Antonin Dvorak and Leos Janacek. He is also considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century. Over his lifetime Martinu wrote more than four hundred compositions of every type and genre: symphonies, operas, cantatas, oratorio, ballets, chamber works, film and stage music. He is the author of sixteen operas, fifteen ballets, around thirty concertante works, and almost a hundred chamber works all the way from duets to nonets. He composed a hundred and sixteen vocal-instrumental works, including three melodramas and one oratorio. Among his orchestral works let us mention his six symphonies and another near fifty compositions for large and chamber orchestra.

"For the rest, I believe greatness consists in how naturally we express our idea."

(B. Martinu, USA, Ridgefield, 1944)

Composing was the focus of Bohuslav Martinu's life and apart from a few years when he worked as a teacher of composition, it was his only source of livelihood. This is one reason why he was so unusually prolific as a composer. His extraordinary energy is attested by the vast number of surviving letters from his correspondence with important conductors and musicians, representatives of publishing houses, friends and of course with his family in Policka and friends in the then Czechoslovakia.

A brief biography of the composer could serve as the subject for a screenplay. Martinu's birthplace was Policka, a small town in the hilly countryside of the Vysocina (Uplands) on the border between Bohemia and Moravia. He was born here on the 8th of December 1890. At the time his family was living in a humble one-room dwelling in the tower of St. James's Church, where the whole family had moved when Bohuslav's father became a tower watchman, who watch for fires in the area and rang the bells as well as carrying on his original trade as a cobbler. The Martinus moved out of the tower in 1902, when Bohuslav was twelve. In 1906 he entered the violin class at the Prague Conservatory as a promising young talent but after four years he was expelled for indolence. He stayed in Prague and became a member of the Czech Philharmonic as one of the second violins under the direction of the outstanding conductor Vaclav Talich. In 1923 he went to Paris, where he studied composition with Albert Roussel, whose symphonic pieces had entirely captivated him when he encountered them in Czech Philharmonic's repertoire. He lived in Paris from 1923 to 1940, when he and his wife Charlotte were forced to flee from the Nazis to Portugal and then overseas. In the years 1941-1953 he lived in the USA, where apart from composing he taught composition at various music academies, universities and master classes. In the USA he won an enormous reputation as one of the most important composers of his time. After the Second World War he began to take trips back to Europe and from 1953 to his death in 1959 he divided his life between France, Italy and Switzerland. The last twenty years of his life he therefore spent abroad; in 1952 he became an American citizen and subsequently never returned to his homeland even for a visit.

"New and great horizons have opened up for me here"

(Paris, 1924)

What made Martinu move to Paris and stay there for the next seventeen years? One decisive moment was his visit to Paris on a concert tour with the orchestra of the National Theatre in 1919. For the young musician, Paris was a synonym for creative freedom, liberation from the humble conditions of his birthplace and from the traditionalist environment of Prague, dominated on the one hand by the German Neo-Romanticism and on the other by Czech National Revivalism. After half a year in Paris he wrote: "New and great horizons have opened up for me here, I don't seem to be the same as I was just six months ago." Martinu found himself in the company of the most...

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