Bard Music Festival Explores Life and Times of Preeminent 20th-century Czech Composer in “Martinů and His World” (August 8–17), as Part of Bard SummerScape 2025

 

Bohuslav Martinů (photo: courtesy of Bohuslav Martinů Centre, Polička)

 

“Part boot camp for the brain, part spa for the spirit.”

          – The New York Times on the Bard Music Festival

 

(May 1, 2025, Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.) — This August, the Bard Music Festival returns with an intensive two-week exploration of “Martinů and His World.” In eleven themed concerts featuring its boldest and most adventurous programming to date, the festival’s 35th season examines the life and times of Bohuslav Martinů, the 20th century’s foremost Czech composer, whose music is nonetheless largely unfamiliar to U.S. audiences today. Weekend One considers Martinů as A Musical Mirror of the 20th Century (August 8–10), and Weekend Two investigates the stand he took Against Uncertainty, Uniformity, Mechanization (August 14–17). Aside from Program Six, held in nearby Rhinebeck, all concerts take place in the stunning Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and other venues on Bard College’s idyllic Hudson River campus. Six programs will also stream live to home audiences worldwide on the Fisher Center’s virtual stage, and chartered coach transportation from New York City will be available for the final performance (see details below). Presented as a centerpiece of the 22nd Bard SummerScape festival, the Bard Music Festival is set once again to prove itself “the summer’s most stimulating music festival” (Los Angeles Times).

 

Since its inception in 1990, the Bard Music Festival has enriched the standard concert repertory with a wealth of important rediscoveries. This is owed in no small part to its founder and co-artistic director, Leon Botstein. “One of the most remarkable figures in the worlds of arts and culture” (NYC Arts, THIRTEEN/WNET), Botstein serves as music director of both the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO) and The Orchestra Now (TŌN), Bard’s unique graduate training orchestra. At this year’s festival, TŌN performs under his leadership in Weekend One, and the ASO in Weekend Two. As in previous seasons, the Bard Festival Chorale takes part in all choral works, under the direction of James Bagwell, and this year’s final program – a concert performance of Martinů’s eighth and most adventurous opera, Julietta – features vocal soloists including Erica Petrocelli, Aaron Blake, and Alfred Walker. Bard’s other orchestral, chamber, and vocal programs boast a comparably impressive lineup of guest artists.

 

Martinů and His World

In the mid-20th century, Bohuslav Martinů (1890–1959) was considered one of the world’s leading composers. Unusually prolific, he wrote almost 400 works, including six symphonies, 14 operas, numerous ballets, close to 30 concertos, and a wealth of chamber, vocal, and instrumental music. As a prominent figure on the U.S. cultural scene, he held teaching posts at Princeton, Curtis, Mannes, and Tanglewood; received a string of prestigious commissions that saw five of his six symphonies premiered by either the Boston Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, or Philadelphia Orchestra; and was elected to life membership in the National Institute of Life and Letters.

 

Rooted in the folk traditions of his long-lost homeland yet imbued with such recent innovations as neoclassicism and jazz, Martinů’s music is deeply cosmopolitan, registering the tensions of his complicated life and times. Born and raised in the Czech village of Polička, he studied in Prague and pursued his career in Paris before fleeing wartime Europe for the United States. Although he eventually found his way back to Western Europe, the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia prevented his returning, as hoped, to his homeland, and only posthumously were his remains restored to Polička. Today, his music is venerated in the Czech Republic and increasingly performed elsewhere. As BBC Music magazine writes, “His output is a veritable treasure-house of creativity, full of jewels which deserve to be displayed more often.”

 

To explore Martinů’s life and world in all their complexity, the festival presents a broad sampling of his oeuvre, including the Second and Sixth Symphonies, such choral masterpieces as The Epic of Gilgamesh and Field Mass, and the original version of his one-act opera Mariken de Nimègue, which receives its long-overdue world premiere. These will be heard alongside music by composers including Martinů’s predecessors Antonín Dvořák and Leoš Janáček, teachers Josef Suk and Albert Roussel, students Vítězslava Kaprálová and Jan Novák, compatriots Erwin Schulhoff and Rudolf Firkušný, fellow École de Paris members Alexandre Tansman and Alexander Tcherepnin, American colleagues Aaron Copland and David Diamond, and successors, from Joan Tower to Frank Zappa. Two thought-provoking panel discussions and a series of informative pre-concert talks will illuminate each concert’s themes. There will also be two social events: an Opening Night Social at Bard’s picturesque 1916 Ward Manor House (August 8) and a Summer Soirée at Blithewood, its turn-of-the-century mansion overlooking the Hudson River (August 16).

 

Weekend One: A Musical Mirror of the 20th Century (August 8–10)

The festival launches with Program One, “A Career Beyond Borders.” Harnessing Bard’s unusual ability to integrate orchestral, vocal, and chamber works within a single event, this is the first of three programs devoted exclusively to Martinů’s own music. Although none of the featured works were composed in his homeland, all testify to its profound spiritual importance to him. Set to Czech folk texts, the nostalgic song cycle Petrklíč / Primrose draws on the modes and rhythms of Moravian dance. Czech folk influences likewise color the Fantasia, in which oboe and theremin function as dueling soloists, illustrating Martinů’s creative approach to timbre. Commissioned for The Cleveland Orchestra to celebrate Czechoslovakia’s 25th anniversary, his Second Symphony uses Czech motifs to achieve its pastoral lyricism. By contrast, the contemporaneous First Piano Quartet evokes the drama and turbulence of its wartime creation, and the Double Concerto for string orchestras, piano, and timpani, completed on the day of the Munich Agreement, seems to capture the tension of impending war. A concerto grosso whose dark-hued final movement concludes with an unresolved dissonance, this powerful work is one of the composer’s crowning achievements. (This concert will be livestreamed.)

 

Martinů came of age as a composer in the musical melting pot of Paris, where his Czech influences would absorb more international ones. Program Two, “The French Connection,” examines the worlds that shaped him, contextualizing the composer among his teachers and peers. These include Jaroslav Řídký, with whom he had played in the Czech Philharmonic, and their teacher Josef Suk, whose youthful yet confident First Piano Quartet is dedicated to Suk’s own teacher (and soon-to-be father-in-law), Antonín Dvořák. Two of Martinů’s earliest Parisian works – the ragtimey Foxtrot and assured First Piano Trio – will be heard alongside chamber works by his teacher Albert Roussel, one of the most prominent French composers of the interwar years; the Polish émigré Alexandre Tansman, like Martinů a leading light of the so-called École de Paris; and their elder luminary Maurice Ravel, whose writing would influence the Czech composer’s string quartets.

 

Martinů’s life was upended by the Nazi invasion, but his compatriot Erwin Schulhoff, a Jewish Communist, suffered the worse fate of dying in a concentration camp. Drawing on influences from neoclassicism to jazz, Schulhoff’s commanding Second Symphony opens Program Three, “Music and Freedom,” the festival’s first all-orchestral concert. Martinů’s masterly and original Fourth Piano Concerto, “Incantation,” was dedicated to his great friend and fellow exile, the concert pianist – and subsequent mentor to Botstein – Rudolf Firkušný, whose own Piano Concertino receives just its third performance to date. Two more of Martinů’s own works complete the program: the Memorial to Lidice, a searing symphonic response to the Nazis’ annihilation of a Czech village, and his Sixth and final Symphony (Fantaisies symphoniques). Written to celebrate the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 75th anniversary, this was recognized with the New York Music Critics’ Circle Award and represents one of the pinnacles of his work in America. (This concert will be livestreamed.)

 

In a thoughtfully curated concert with commentary, Program Four, “Martinů’s Distinctive Voice,” scholars-in-residence Michael Beckerman and Aleš Březina present chamber works by Martinů and his gifted composition student Vítězslava Kaprálová, with whom he was in love. Folk idioms permeate Kaprálová’s accomplished First String Quartet, as they do so much of Martinů’s music, from the six instrumental miniatures of Les Rondes, which include some of his earliest uses of Moravian folk song, to the Variations on a Slovak Theme for cello and piano, written just months before he died. Yet Martinů’s characteristic sound reflects a wide and eclectic range of influences. The composer reveals a Stravinskyan approach to rhythm and dissonance in Les Rondes; draws on his love of Renaissance madrigals in the heartfelt slow movement of his Seventh String Quartet, “Concerto da camera”; and experiments with pentatonic harmonies in The Fifth Day of the Fifth Moon, written for Lee Hsien-Ming, the first female pianist to graduate from the Shanghai Conservatory, and the wife of his friend Alexander Tcherepnin.

 

Like Martinů, both Arthur Honegger and Aaron Copland achieved prominence in Paris between the wars, and all three subsequently taught under Serge Koussevitzky’s auspices at Tanglewood. Program Five, “From Paris to New York,” juxtaposes Honegger’s sparkling Concerto da camera and Copland’s introspective Sextet with four of Martinů’s own compositions: the witty ballet La revue de cuisine, which casts its dancers as kitchen utensils and uses the Charleston, tango, foxtrot, and Dixieland jazz to satirical effect; the dazzling Harpsichord Concerto, a work first premiered by Kaprálová; the freely contrapuntal Tre ricercari, which draws on 18th-century models; and the First Piano Sonata, a late work characterized by its bold harmonies and freedom of rhythm and form. (This concert will be livestreamed.)

 

Weekend Two: Against Uncertainty, Uniformity, Mechanization: Music in the Mid-20th Century (August 14–17)

 

Following the past two seasons’ sold-out concerts in nearby Rhinebeck, the Bard Music Festival returns off-campus for two performances of Program Six, “The Spiritual Quest.” Featuring James Bagwell, the Bard Festival Chorale, and the renovated organ of the Episcopal Church of the Messiah, this program intersperses organ solos with masterworks of the Czech choral tradition. Two late Martinů works – Vigilie, his sole composition for organ, and The Mount of Three Lights, which sets texts from Czech folk song, contemporary travel-writing, and the New Testament – will be heard alongside the opening movements of Dvořák’s Mass in D, in which old church modes meet modern harmonies; the finale from Musica dominicalis, an organ symphony by the late Czech composer Petr Eben; three works for male voices by Leoš Janáček; and an organ solo from the same composer’s Glagolitic Mass, long recognized as a celebration of Slavic culture.

 

Bard’s second all-Martinů event, Program Seven, “Faith and Folklore,” opens with one of the composer’s greatest choral works. A Czech-language cantata written to honor the Czech volunteers who fought in the French army, Martinů’s Field Mass had him blacklisted by the Nazis. Set to texts by Jiří Mucha, passages from Bohemian folk poetry, and lines from psalms and the liturgy, this powerful anti-war protest anticipates such later works as Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem and Leonard Bernstein’s MASS. Folk poetry is also the basis for Martinů’s Brigand Songs, which use Moravian tales of feudal tyranny to address the Soviet invasion of Hungary. The program concludes with the world premiere of the original French version of Martinů’s one-act opera Mariken de Nimègue (“Mary of Nijmegen”). Based on a medieval Dutch miracle play, and better-known in the later Czech version for which he won the Czechoslovak State Prize for Composition, Martinů’s original is set to French text by Henri Ghéon and features different orchestration as well as extensive original musical material that has never previously been published or performed. (This concert will be livestreamed.)

 

Program Eight, “Tradition and Innovation,” celebrates Martinů’s gift for synthesizing the old and the new. Named for Renaissance part-songs and inspired by Mozart, the First Duo from his “Three Madrigals” is nonetheless contemporary in its idioms; his lyrical Third Cello Sonata features both traditional and progressive harmonies; and his Second Nonet, composed in his final months, finds fresh colors and textures within its neoclassical form. These will be heard alongside mid-century chamber works by two of Martinů’s younger contemporaries. David Diamond, a friend and colleague whom he had known in Paris, is represented by the energetic and tonally centered Quintet for flute, piano, and strings. By contrast, the Évocations de Slovaquie by Pulitzer Prize laureate Karel Husa – another Czech who settled in France before emigrating to the States – is already atonal and forward-looking, despite dating from the composer’s Paris years between the wars.

 

Program Nine, “The Epic Power of Tradition,” comprises choral and orchestral music by Martinů and perhaps his finest student, Moravia’s Jan Novák. Set to his own Latin text, Novák’s moving cantata Ignis pro Ioanne Palach commemorates a desperate young activist who immolated himself to protest the end of the Prague Spring. As a former professional violinist, Martinů wrote for the instrument with intimate understanding, and his Second Violin Concerto stands among his mature masterpieces. It was commissioned by the great Mischa Elman, who premiered the work with Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony, before performing it for many years, as did Isaac Stern and Josef Suk. Completing the program are an aria from Martinů’s one-act opera Ariane, a surrealist take on the Theseus myth that was inspired by Maria Callas, and The Epic of Gilgamesh, the composer’s only large-scale oratorio. Scored for narrator, soloists, choir, and orchestra, this takes its text from an English translation of the Mesopotamian saga, and is notable for some of Martinů’s most inspired choral writing. (This concert will be livestreamed.)

 

Although he established no stylistic school, we find Martinů’s methods reflected in the work of other composers. Program Ten, “Martinů’s Legacy,” pairs two of his chamber works with those of his peers and successors. Witold Lutosławski draws on the folk traditions of his Polish homeland in a number of early works, the last of which was the Dance Preludes, his “farewell to folklore.” Both the Russian-born Alexander Tcherepnin, Martinů’s friend in interwar Paris, and Jaroslav Ježek, another Czech exile in wartime New York, share his folk-inflected pianistic invention. The late Chinese-American composer Chou Wen-chung blends Eastern and Western traditions in works like the Suite for Harp and Woodwind Quintet, while avant-garde Czech musician Iva Bittová integrates popular idioms with East European sounds to create her “own personal folk music.” There are echoes of Martinů in the rhythmic drive and rich timbral variety of Joan Tower’s Petroushskates as well as in the bold eclecticism of American icon Frank Zappa, who enjoyed hero status during Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, receiving the title of “Special Ambassador to the West on Trade, Culture, and Tourism” from the new Czech leadership.

 

Many consider Martinů’s eighth opera to be his finest work. Based, like Ariane, on a French play by Georges Neveux, Julietta is a surreal psychological drama that explores the intersection of dreams and reality. In 2019, Botstein helmed the opera’s overdue American premiere at Carnegie Hall, where he led “a winning cast and the American Symphony Orchestra in a vibrant concert performance” that was selected as a “Critic’s Pick” by The New York Times. Now, Program Eleven, “The Opera of Dreams: Martinů’s Julietta,” presents the conductor and ASO in a semi-staged revival of the opera, featuring three members of that same winning cast: tenor Aaron Blake and bass-baritones Philip Cokorinos and Alfred Walker, who also appears in this year’s mainstage SummerScape opera. So too does soprano Erica Petrocelli, who headlines Julietta, lending her “searing intensity” (Los Angeles Times) to the opera’s title role. Anchored by Botstein and the ASO, their performance draws the Bard Music Festival – and all seven weeks of Bard SummerScape – to a gripping close. (This concert will be livestreamed.)

 

Supplementary events and companion book

Besides the eleven concert programs, there will be two free panel discussions: “Why Martinů: Understanding Classical Music, Past and Future” and “Music and Politics: From the Multinational Empire to Contemporary Populism and Autocracy.” These will be supplemented by informative pre-concert talks – all free to ticket-holders – to illuminate some of the individual programs’ themes. Bard SummerScape also presents the first fully staged American production of Dalibor, widely considered by fellow Czechs to be the greatest opera by Martinů’s compatriot Bedřich Smetana (July 25–August 3).

 

Since its founding, each Bard Music Festival has been accompanied by the publication of a companion volume of new scholarship and interpretation, with essays and translated documents relating to the featured composer and their world. Published by the University of Chicago Press, Martinů and His World is edited by Bard’s 2025 Scholars-in-Residence: Aleš Březina, director of Prague’s Bohuslav Martinů Institute, and New York University’s Michael Beckerman, editor of Martinů’s Mysterious Accident and of two previous Bard Music Festival publications: Dvořák and His World (1994) and Janáček and His World (2003).

 

Round-trip bus transportation from New York City

Chartered bus transportation from New York City is available for the festival finale, Program Eleven (August 17). This may be ordered online or by calling the box office at 845-758-7900, and the meeting point for pick-up and drop-off is at Lincoln Center on Amsterdam Avenue, between 64th and 65th Streets. More information is available here.

 

SummerScape tickets

Tickets for mainstage events start at $25 and livestreams are $20. Panel discussions are free of charge and open to the public. For complete information regarding tickets, series discounts, and more, visit fishercenter.bard.edu or call Bard’s box office at (845) 758-7900.