Symphony No. 2

Bohuslav Martinů began composing when he was still a child, but he was a late bloomer when it came to the symphony: he embarked on his First Symphony in 1942, at age 51. Once he embraced the form, however, he did so with remarkable intensity, completing all six of his symphonies over the next dozen years.

Born in 1890 in the quiet Bohemian border town of Polička — the name means “Little Fields” — Martinů was trained as a violinist but remained mostly self-taught as a composer. After early years playing in the Czech Philharmonic, he relocated in 1923 to Paris, where he absorbed an immense range of influences — Stravinsky, jazz, Neoclassicism, Renaissance polyphony — without becoming anyone’s disciple. Childhood memories of Czech folk music also entered the mix. By the time Martinů reached America, he was fusing these elements into a language unmistakably his own: rhythmically vital, pungent, closely layered in harmony, clear in design, and animated by an acute ear for orchestral color.

Martinů’s late symphonic flowering was inseparable from exile and nurtured by American institutions and émigré communities. Having fled Nazi-occupied France in 1940, he reached the United States the following year with little more than a handful of scores. The Boston Symphony Orchestra under Serge Koussevitzky commissioned the First Symphony in 1942 (and would later premiere the Third and Sixth symphonies).

A year later, the American Friends of Czechoslovakia in Cleveland, working with The Cleveland Orchestra, assembled the funds to commission what became Martinů’s Second Symphony. By 1910, Cleveland had the world’s fourth-largest Czech population, and Czech musical organizations had long been integral to the city’s cultural life.

The new symphony was intended to mark the 25th anniversary of Czechoslovak independence; the score is dedicated “To My Fellow Countrymen in Cleveland.” Written in Darien, Connecticut between May and July 1943, The Cleveland Orchestra premiered the symphony with Music Director Erich Leinsdorf on October 28, 1943 — the anniversary itself — on a program that included a Czech classic, Smetana’s Moldau from Má vlast.

The Second Symphony carried several burdens at once. It was a new work in a genre only recently taken up by the exiled Czech composer, written to pay homage to a republic established in the aftermath of the First World War but since dismembered by Nazi Germany. Everything about the occasion might have encouraged grandeur, pathos, or at least an element of bombastic patriotism.

In a statement he wrote for the Cleveland premiere, Martinů remarked on the inflation of expectations around the symphony from Beethoven onward: even in contemporary hands, it was still treated as the expression of something “grandiose, tragic, or pathetic,” often dependent on a “program.” But he distrusted attempts to express tragedy through “mechanical means and dynamic design,” which could end “simply in noise.” Such effects, he argued, act “upon the nerves alone,” rather than serving “the purpose of music and beauty.”

His own description of the Second Symphony’s essential character as “calm and lyric” is disarmingly simple and deliberately uninflated. That Martinů had, in fact, applied the very same epithet to the First Symphony — a work markedly different in character and ambition — suggests that he had in mind an aesthetic principle rather than a particular mood.

The Second is the most compact of Martinů’s symphonies, closer at times to chamber music. It begins in a kaleidoscopically swirling cloud of D minor, with shapes gradually gathering definition from the surrounding motion. In lieu of the drama of Brahmsian motivic development, Martinů foregrounds his French inheritance by spinning out threads of changing texture and instrumental exchange across the large ensemble. The first movement builds to a striking, tam-tam-reinforced climax before the music subsides gently, leaving a sense of ideas still awaiting transformation.

The second movement narrows the palette, leaving aside the heavier brass and percussion and expressively blending winds, horns, strings, and piano (with a momentary triangle glint). The piano’s role in the symphony is not soloistic but coloristic, adding a percussive edge and a brightening attack within the orchestral fabric. Two contrasting ideas shape the movement: a stepwise, folk-inflected wind melody and a broader string theme. Their interaction gives the movement its enigmatic drama.

The full ensemble is enlisted to underscore the bracing energies of the third movement, cast as a march rather than a scherzo. Its syncopated dance impulses bring Martinů’s Bohemian roots to the surface. Near the end, a trumpet alludes obliquely to “La Marseillaise,” though the flashing reference is hardly enough to turn the Second into a programmatic “war symphony.”

The finale sets contrasting ideas in a kind of perpetual motion, its prismatic timbres propelled by infectious rhythms. The orchestra eventually rallies all its forces in a rousing D-major coda — not superficially affirmative, but bright and triumphant. More than 80 years after The Cleveland Orchestra introduced the Second Symphony to the world, Martinů’s belief still resonates: “simple events and simple things” can become in music “quite as spectacular and just as inspiring” as any grandiose program.

— Thomas May

Thomas May is a writer, critic, educator, and translator. A regular contributor to The New York Times, The Seattle Times, Gramophone, and Strings magazine, he is the English-language editor for the Lucerne Festival.