Military Sinfonietta

When Vítězslava Kaprálová completed her Military Sinfonietta in 1937, Europe was on the precipice of its second global conflict in less than 40 years. In her native Czechoslovakia, Hitler’s increasing insistence on acquiring the Sudetenland to “protect” its German-speaking population was destabilizing a new and fragile independence following the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. The composer’s own description of her work stated that the sinfonietta “does not represent a battle cry, but it depicts the psychological need to defend that which is most sacred to the nation.” 

Kaprálová was born in Brno in 1915 to composer Václav Kaprál and voice teacher Vítězslava Uhlířová. She received her musical education first at the Brno Conservatory and later in Prague, where she studied with Vítězslav Novák. A year after completing her second degree, she continued her education at the École Normale de Musique in Paris, where she studied with another Czech composer, Bohuslav Martinů (the two were also briefly lovers). Although it remains unconfirmed, Kaprálová’s biographers agree that, while in Paris in 1940, she likely also took at least one lesson with the great pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. Following the outbreak of World War II, Kaprálová made plans to apply to The Juilliard School in New York City, though it is unknown whether her application was ever submitted or reviewed. Despite her premature death at age 25, composer produced more than three dozen pieces, including piano works, chamber music, art songs, melodramas, and several symphonic works. She also crossed borders, both geographical and social, by becoming the first woman to conduct both the Czech Philharmonic and the BBC Orchestra. 

Kaprálová dedicated the Military Sinfonietta, her graduation piece for the Prague Conservatory, to the Czechoslovak president Edvard Beneš. The work received its premiere under the composer’s baton in the Czech capital in 1937 and was paired with the overture to Dvořák’s Šelma sedlák and Josef Suk’s Aesrael Symphony. This program suggests the perceived promise her music held for the Czech canon and, according to her own program notes, her intention was to use “the language of music to express her emotional relationship towards the questions of national existence, a subject permeating the consciousness of the nation at the time.”

The sinfonietta also brought her recognition beyond her homeland. It was selected for performance by the BBC Orchestra at the opening of the 1938 International Society of Contemporary Music Festival in London, where Kaprálová once again conducted.  

Despite its title, Kaprálová’s single-movement Military Sinfonietta is less militaristic than it is striving. Indeed, the work initially opened with a funeral march, a possible homage to fellow Moravian-born composer Gustav Mahler, whose own symphonies battle for interior victory rather than external confrontation. On Novák’s advice, however, Kaprálová changed the opening, and it begins instead with a more conventional drumroll and an ascendant brass fanfare. The full orchestra enters shortly thereafter with what the composer called “the aggressive main theme” placed in the violins. Yet the theme’s intensity is not threatening but evocative, particularly of the aspirational sonic worlds of early jazz and old Hollywood. The “tender singing” second theme is led by the oboe, once again mediating any sense of conflict. The exposition closes with a punctuated return of the strings. Accented motives amplified by percussion and piano offer the closest we have come so far to any sense of musical showdown. 

Introduced by “the deep singing voices of the basses and cellos,” the work’s middle section initially takes on the expressive character of a separate slow movement. However, according to the conventions of sonata form, the development also teems with variety and experimentation. A contrasting, major-mode melody ripples through the strings and winds before pulsating repetitions throughout the orchestra suspend the work’s momentum. The entry of a solo violin offers a new direction, its smooth, meandering melody leading the orchestra to ever higher registers. But this progress, too, is cut short. The entry of dancing rhythms in the piccolo and bassoon, accented by the snare drum, ultimately destabilizes the ensemble, and the return of the reflective melody in the trumpet only temporarily clears the path to the recapitulation.

Like sides of a battle, several further contrasting characters alternate, including a battery of ominous percussion and sharp dotted rhythms that finally express the work’s martial dimension, before the exposition returns in full. The fragility of this arrival at a resolution is underscored by one more menacing interjection. Rescued by a final fanfare, the sinfonietta’s primary theme drives the work to a triumphant close. 

— Leah Batstone 

Leah Batstone is a musicologist and visiting scholar at the Jordan Center at New York University. She is also the founder and creative director of the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival, which takes place each spring in New York City.