This arrived in the mail the other day, as I continue to ramp up my preparations for this summer’s Bard Music Festival, to be devoted to the still undervalued Czech master Bohuslav Martinů.
This is the first Martinů biography in English, written by the composer’s friend, Miloš Šafránek. While I expect it to be fairly authoritative, then, it is certainly not the last word on the subject, as the book was published in 1944, when the composer was still very much alive. (He died in 1959.) Not only does it NOT take in his entire career (he’d only written two of his six symphonies up to that point), surely there’s a mountain of information amassed by scholars over the intervening decades. So our knowledge of the man and our perspective and assessment of the composer’s accomplishments are bound to be quite different. Still, it will be interesting to read this first-hand account.
It’s also a fun piece of history, as there’s a printed apology from the publisher in the front, explaining that wartime paper shortages have led to the decision to decrease the actual number of pages by increasing the number of words per page. The lean 127-page volume is illustrated with musical examples and glossy black-and-white photos and bolstered by a list of the composer’s “chief works,” a bibliography, and an index. So really, the text fills only about 120 pages.
I had this book in my inventory back in the 1990s, but I sold it to cellist Steven Isserlis. What goes around comes around, and in February – some 30 years later – I heard Isserlis perform Martinů’s Cello Sonata No. 1, with pianist Connie Shih, on a concert of the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society!
The Bard Music Festival, “Martinů and His World,” will be held at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, over two weekends, August 8-17.
For more information, follow the link.
https://fishercenter.bard.edu/whats-on/programs/bard-music-festival/
And in case you missed my article on Martinů and Einstein in Princeton:
Fisher Center at Bard
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