Martinu and His World

A collection of essays and documents illuminating the work of Bohuslav Martinů, published in collaboration with the Bard Music Festival.

Bohuslav Martinů was one of the most extraordinary and prolific composers of the twentieth century. Martinů and His World offers a portrait of the composer in all his complexity. Born in the present-day Czech Republic, Martinů was rendered stateless as a result of events around World War II and the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia. He lived for more than a decade in the United States, where he had great success, and died in Switzerland.

Martinů composed more than four hundred works in all genres of instrumental and vocal music, and infused each with a special combination of the lyrical and the dramatic. Alongside an unerring sense of form, his works draw on a kaleidoscope of elements from such sources as Dvořák, American jazz of the 1920s, English Renaissance madrigals, the late Baroque concerto grosso, French Impressionism, Czech and Moravian folk songs, and the contemporary music of his day.

This volume pays special attention to Martinů’s little-known operatic works and presents for the first time both a recently discovered personal diary and a series of interviews with important figures who were part of his American years.

Martinů and His World reveals the composer as an essential voice of his time, an original thinker about music past and present, who lived through the political complexities of the twentieth century and stood up to them both as a human being and as an artist.

Michael Beckerman is Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor in the Department of Music at New York University. He has edited two previous volumes in the Bard Music Festival series: Janáček and His World and Dvořák and His World. He is the author of Martinů’s Mysterious Accident and New Worlds of Dvořák. Ales Březina is a Czech composer and director of the Bohuslav Martinů Institute in Prague and chairman of the Editorial Board of the Bohuslav Martinů Complete Edition. His critical edition of The Epic of Gilgamesh earned the Best Edition award from the Association of German Music Publishers in 2016.