Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Notes to the Reader
- Introduction: Why Martinů the Thinker?
- Part One A Chronicle of a Composer
- Part Two The Composer Speaks
- Part Three Documentation and Further Reading
- Appendix 1 Martinů's Source Reading
- Appendix 2 Miroslav Barvík's Report on Martinů from May 1955
- Appendix 3 On the Literary Reception of Kaprálová and Martinů: Jiří Mucha's Peculiar Loves and Miroslav Barvík's “At Tři Studně”
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index of Martinů's Musical Works
- General Index
Appendix 2 - Miroslav Barvík's Report on Martinů from May 1955
from Part Three - Documentation and Further Reading
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 July 2019
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Notes to the Reader
- Introduction: Why Martinů the Thinker?
- Part One A Chronicle of a Composer
- Part Two The Composer Speaks
- Part Three Documentation and Further Reading
- Appendix 1 Martinů's Source Reading
- Appendix 2 Miroslav Barvík's Report on Martinů from May 1955
- Appendix 3 On the Literary Reception of Kaprálová and Martinů: Jiří Mucha's Peculiar Loves and Miroslav Barvík's “At Tři Studně”
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index of Martinů's Musical Works
- General Index
Summary
Report for Comrade Hendrych on Boh. Martinů
According to the Ministry of Culture's Secretary for the Division of Musical Institutions, Comrade Miroslav Barvík, Bohuslav Martinů (born in Polička on 8 December 1890; student of Suk and Roussel) has been living abroad since 1921. He first resided in Paris, where he studied on a stipend from the Ministry of Education, and he remained there until 1941. He fled from the Germans to the United States, he took American citizenship, but he returned to France in 1954 and now lives in Nice (he apparently refuses to return to the United States).
There were deliberations in 1947–48 about B. Martinů returning to the ČSR to become a professor at AMU. He promised privately several times that he would at least come and attend the festival in Prague, that he would teach for about half the year at AMU while continuing to live in France, etc. Apparently, under the influence of the tendentious battles over formalism in our country, he renounced his intentions, and he even spoke on a program for Voice of America. But he never actively engaged in battles against the new Czechoslovak Republic.
In fall 1953, B. Martinů—through his lawyer—sent a letter to the Státní nakladatelství krásné literatury, hudby a umění in which he states that his compositions are not being published and performed and that he wants to transfer all of the author's rights that he still has here out of the Czechoslovak Republic. Since it concerns a composer of international significance who is frequently performed, this question was of utmost importance both politically and monetarily. Through negotiations, we have succeeded in averting the exportation of his rights, and Martinů's compositions are being printed once again (primarily for export) and performed by orchestras. But the Ministry of Culture recommends only those works that are not typical of his creative output between the years 1921–36, when he submitted for the most part to French bourgeois modernism. Also, in honor of his sixty-fifth birthday, compositions by Martinů are being performed on the 1955 Prague Spring International Music Festival.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Martinu's Subliminal StatesA Study of the Composer's Writings and Reception, with a Translation of His American Diaries, pp. 175 - 176Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2018