Bohuslav Martinů

The distinctive music of Bohuslav Martinů can be traced to a childhood lived high in a church-tower apartment, imparting an emotional distance and disorientation to all his most important works. Born in 1890 in Polička (then in Bohemia), he was a talented violinist, but was expelled from the Prague Conservatoire and found little success until his Czech Rhapsody (1919), which marked the establishment of Czechoslovakia. After Martinů moved to Paris in 1923, his operas drew upon cinema techniques and his ballets used jazz idioms. Some of his best works followed, such as the opera Julietta (1936), with its surrealist take on self-identity, and his Double Concerto (1939), reflecting crises political and personal. In 1941 he sought exile in the U.S., where his symphonies and concertos met with critical and public success; the 1948 Communist coup in Czechoslovakia prevented his return home. From among his last works, the orchestral Fantaisies symphoniques (1953) and the opera The Greek Passion (1959) reveal his music at its most imaginative and expressive. He died in Switzerland in 1959.