dagesh, I would be surprised if Martinu had not taken an interest in Janacek's work on speech rhythms, etc. That could well be where he developed the approach from.

I reckon opilec will be along shortly to flesh this one out... 

I'm waiting with bated breath......  Hasn't that Ring thing finished yet?

Tommo

Then I hope someone has refreshments on hand for opi whilst he's listening.

Tommo

Tommo, I'm not sure what that breath's bated for!

Can't offer any insights into Martinu vis-a-vis Czech speech rhythms, as I inherited from my well-known supervisor his no doubt groundless antpathy to this composer's music. (Though I remember quite liking the Frescoes of Piero della Francesca.)

As far as Janacek's concerned, he at first struggled with them -- no Czech composer before him had really bothered with them. He only gradually ironed out some (but not all) of the mis-stresses (have to be very careful with that word! ) from Jenufa. The precise influence of Czech speech rhythms and patterns in Janacek's music is notoriously difficult to pin down, and there's been a great deal of rubbish written about it, not least by the Czechs. But in the mature works -- the late operas, Sinfonietta, the quartets -- it undoubtedly rubbed off on the musical material, as Ollie says: in the rhythms, but also in the motivic shapes.

But how this all applies to Martinu, I really can't answer.

Might post some more considered comments later: this is an interesting subject, but things are a bit fraught chez opi today!

I wonder if Martinu might have picked up ideas directly from Smetana, though?  Czech's similar enough to Russian that I can understand around 60% of it, but the stress-patterns are completely different.  (Just one example, from HOUSE OF THE DEAD - when the Prison Governor orders that Goryanchikov's fancy clothes should be sold off, he says "PRO-dat!", whereas the same word in Russian is stressed the other way as "pro-DAT'").

Even so, I haven't noticed that Smetana (whose operas appeared in the period 1866-1882, and is therefore the preceding generation to Janacek) is struggling to set Czech librettos?  

Unless I've misunderstood Tyrell's biography of Janacek seriously, I gained the impression that Janacek struggled for his entire career to emerge from Smetana's omnipresent shadow in the world of Czech music,  and that Smetana's works were continuously in the repertoire of all opera theatres in the country?  (Of course, we have to be careful to remember that Czechoslovakia didn't come into existence until 1918, only ten years before Janacek's death).  

Although perhaps "rightly" we've posthumously granted Janacek the pre-eminence he deserves, I have the impression that Martinu's models, and the music that he heard most frequently in the opera-house, would have been largely Smetana's works?   And for all my love for LJ, I have a sneaking regard for DALIBOR, LIBUSE, DVE VDOVY and HUBICKA,  not to mention the only work of Smetana's now much played outside his home country, BARTERED BRIDE.   They are very fine works, and we ought to be careful not to dismiss or pass them over merely because they caused poor Janacek such difficulty in getting his very different works staged

I'm not sure how much Martinu might have been influenced by Dvorak, though?  Certainly RUSALKA has become successful, but it's one of the few which have.  Dvorak's earlier works suffer from a fatal longwinded tendency to over-the-top grandeur and undigested Wagnerisms - anyone who's sat through DMITRIJ will know what I mean?  The result - in relation to the question asked in this thread - is a tediously melodramatic declamatory style in which cardboard characters recite cod-heroism in ye olden style.  It was only at the end of his career that he dropped writing this kind of folie-de-grandeur and did the opposite - embracing the world of weeds and seashells by way of ridiculing the stuck-up pomposity he'd once promoted as an ideal?   Even so, the charming conversational style of vocal writing that Martinu achieves so well doesn't seem to have roots in either DMITRIJ or VANDA, or amid the water-goblins and sprites of RUSALKA either.

(Sorry to bring this back onto Martinu, Ron 


Interesting.... one way in which you could say that Czech phrases sound 'short/ quick' is in comparison with the sound of Russian [fewer vowels, I suggest facetiously:)]. And, as Reiner said, the stress is very different from Russian and Polish in that the accent's always on the first syllable. But I always wondered whether Janacek got that sequential/ repeated phrases thing from Tchaikovsky...?

The other thing to remember about Martinu is that he studied in Paris from his 30s, and then was in exile from Czechoslovakia. So that would be another influnece to take account of, perhaps.