Notes for: August 8, 2017
The Bohemian composer Bohuslav Martinů’s life easily could have made his outlook dark. He lived in poverty in Paris, barely escaped the Nazis, spent many years in exile in the United States, and pined for his homeland, Czechoslovakia, from which he was barred by the Communist government. Yet the hundreds of compositions that he wrote over the years – including today’s Trio – are marked by a hard-to-resist vitality, optimism, originality, and joie de vivre.
Martinů’s life got off to an unusual start: His childhood was spent high up in a church tower in the Bohemian village where his father was the bell keeper. The experience shaped his worldview. Looking out from his aerie, he later said, he saw “everything in miniature…and above it all a great, boundless space. It was this space that I had constantly before me, and that I am forever seeking in my compositions.” Formal classrooms were not for him. He was drummed out of the Prague Conservatory for “incorrigible negligence.” But Paris, where he moved in 1923, was invigorating. He spent 17 years there, absorbing French modernism and jazz and neo-classicism, but also rediscovering his Czech roots. His works from the Paris years ranged from the Stravinsky-inspired Half-Time (1925), which depicted a football match, to the surrealist opera Julietta (1937), to the Baroque-inspired Concerto Grosso for Chamber Orchestra (1941).
In 1941, when the Nazis invaded Paris, Martinů fled to the United States. Serge Koussevitzky, the conductor of the Boston Symphony and a Martinů enthusiast, helped him get settled with a commission to write his First Symphony and the offer of a summer teaching position at Tanglewood. The symphony was the first of scores of new compositions that won for Martinů a large and enthusiastic American audience. Martinů went on to teach at Mannes, Princeton, and Curtis, before moving back to Europe in 1956.
Martinů wrote the Trio for Flute, Cello, and Piano in a holiday spirit during a New England summer, just after he finished his Third Symphony. It is an animated work propelled by Martinů’s distinctive musical voice. Among its highlights are the rhythmic inventiveness that drives the sunny first movement, with the three instruments exchanging brief rhythmic passages as they playfully chase one another; a meditative Adagio that is filled with yearning; an infectious finale in which Martinů continues to show his adeptness at writing for the flute; and throughout, rich harmonies and tonal colors, as well as hints of jazz and Czech folk rhythms. Virgil Thomson loved the Trio, calling it “a gem of bright sound and cheerful sentiment. It is tonally perfect, it sounds well, it feels good, it is clearly the work of a fine jewelry maker and it does not sound like any other music.”