The great Martinů divide

The Moravian genius still splits opinions into fierce pros and cons, as testified by reviews (mine for The Arts Desk included) of Richard Jones’s ENO Julietta*, pictured above and below for English National Opera by Richard Hubert Smith. Many of us – a majority, it would seem -  love Martinů’s music to the point of the irrationality it seems designed to provoke. Others find it ‘not very good’, ‘superficial’, ‘anonymous’ and derivative, lacking ‘dramatic immediacy or distinction’.

I won’t single out the critics who number among the dissenting third, but the more I get to know Julietta, the more moving and coherent I find it, so naturally I want to challenge them. Of course surrealist treatment of someone else’s dream spread across three acts and nearly two hours of music has the potential to become one colossal, not to mention dated, bore. But protagonist Michel’s sleepwalking attempt to find the woman he heard singing at an open window surely provides the meaningful anchor one of those writers finds missing in the score. There’s an important ritornello in each act when he remembers and tries to bring to life that vision: music of heartache and pathos which stuck in my mind the first time I ever heard it (so much for unmemorability) and culminates in the fabulous cadence of the two ‘Julietta chords’**, rooted in Janáček’s Taras Bulba and going on to pepper Martinů’s six masterly symphonies of the 1940s and early 50s. I first quoted the chords here, musing on the Third Symphony; no harm in reproducing them again.

That refrain’s last playback leads to the ambiguous ending: to pursue his goal again, Michel must be lost to the real world, where others before him have gone insane. But is it worth it for sounds like this? Martinů’s painfully nostalgic musical resurrections of the past convince you (sorry, me) it might be. The three Julietta visions take place in three very different dramatic contexts. Jones and his fabulous designer Antony McDonald have taken the cue of the sentimental tune which kindles memories in an amnesiac dream-community to render a giant piano-accordion and to deconstruct it in various ways. I’m taking the liberty of giving the three stage pictures (dreamville, as I like to think of it, up top; the forest of Act Two below; accordion as filing-cabinet for the Office of Dreams further down). As in all of Jones’s work, design and production are hauntingly fused.

The wistful, very Moravian strains which the accordion conjures for the memoryless add a further layer of something to hold on to, akin to the impact of Ann Trulove’s lullaby on the tormented inmates of Bedlam in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. Again,  Martinů offers respite from the fidgeting absurdity of dreamville, a lyricism which in my view is far from ‘stubbornly earthbound’ (one of the dissenters again). I can’t imagine Georges Neveux’s original play being anywhere near as rooted; Martinů’s music,when it briefly settles, is balm for troubled souls. As for ‘its manifold derivations failing to cohere into a greater whole’, the composer's stylistic thumbprints transfigure every debt, from Debussy to Stravinsky. I need a whole chapter to show how, but the symphonic example at the foot of this post gives a taster of his unique musical world.

Dramatic incoherence? Up to a point: the non-sequiturs of the somnambulent world demand it***. But I’m always surprised by the urgent twists and turns of the longest act, where Michel meets up with his dream girl again in the wood at night. The act constantly seems to have reached its logical conclusion, but the music goes on eluding expectations, above all by settling not to the hectic brilliance of the orchestral passage which Jones and his movement director Philippe Giraudeau choreograph as a queasily humorous crocodile ballet, but to the serenity and beauty of a quiet musical curtain as Michel heads for the deep waters only.

Insubstantial subject-matter? I think not. The opera, begun in 1936, seems weirdly prescient for the fate in store for Martinů, a wartime exile from the country he loved so deeply and a lover constantly trying to revive in memory the times of happiness he shared with Vítězslava Kaprálová, the talented composer who died aged 25 in 1940. His own words on the opera written seven years after that clarify what it’s all about better than I could. The following would have been useful material for the ENO programme:

The whole story…takes place neither in reality nor in illusion, but on a very thin line between them, so that everything real seems to be fiction and all fictions have the appearance of reality. The whole network of unforeseen situations and illogical conclusions has one unifying theme, namely the human mind, memory, on which the history and actions of our lives relies. Here, however, a world is presented to us in which memory is abolished, displaced; here everyone longs to gain it back, to renew it, to retrieve reminiscences of the past as well as to acquire reminiscences of other people and accept them as one’s own, in order to be able at least to touch the past – to catch the irretrievable moment of time. Situations, however, become absurd; there is a sort of continuum of time and space, from which time, however, i.e. the past, has vanished. The world appears here only at the given moment, which is replaced by the next moment, and so everything rushes into emptiness. It is in essence a psychological problem and really a very old human problem: ‘What is man, what am I, what are you, what is truth?’

In a contemporary world where so many of us are grappling with the problem of Alzheimer’s somewhere in the family, the theme of memory has disturbing new resonances. Is Martinů’s music worthy of it? In its fleeting beauty and tenderness, I think it is. To conclude, and to meet one critic’s objection that the composer’s many threads never cohere, here’s the start of the symphonic adventure with No.1, and the essence of Martinů’s personal style - the chromatic bloodrushes, the syncopated dance music, even the Julietta chords - in the nutshell of the first minute. There are other movements from other symphonies I might have chosen, but the performances on YouTube don’t come up to the mark of Neeme Järvi’s great Bamberg cycle, of which this is the first instalment.  

*Plenty of ticket offers available, or at least there were before first night; the generally warm critical reception may have changed all that. One ENO 'special' entails phoning up the box office and saying the magic word 'dream'.

**If you want them parsed beyond 'Moravian cadence', Thomas D Svatos outlines 'a kind of plagal cadence from a dominant 13th chord on the subdominant to the tonic'

***28/10  Here's another contrary view I've just come across: the music 'proceeds in fits and starts'. Didn't they used to say that about Janáček? And actually it strikes me there's a very strong parallel with another dreamlike opera which only makes sense at the end: Janáček's Osud, where protagonist Zivny finally pieces it all together - at greater length, admittedly, than Michel, but to similar effect.