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Musical theater was one of Martinů's greatest passions and accompanied him literally throughout his life. Already as a child he came to know theatrical operations in his native when he attended rehearsals and performances with his father Ferdinand, an active member of the local amateur Later, as a student at the Prague Conservatory, Martinů frequently attended both of Prague's major opera houses - the National Theater and the New German Theater. These experiences are documented by the composer's drawings in which he parodied scenes from operas he heard - yes, heard, not saw, because his limited financial means sufficed only for a visit to the "blind gallery" from which one could not see the stage. However, Martinů recalled later that this did not bother him in the least because he was always Interested mainly in the music, not in following the (often shabby) libretto.
Martinů started composing operas shortly after he began to feel sure of his skill as a composer. He wrote his first opera, titled The Soldier and the Dancer, H 162, in 1928 in Paris - a city to which he had come five years beforehand to study with Albert Roussel and where he remained until 1941. Already at that time, in the late 1920s, he set himself a bold goal which he then pursued step by step until his death: to rid opera of "psychological rubbish" and give it an order based on musical logic. His central idea was to supply those components in the development of Czech musical theater that in his opinion the Czech national revival movement had passed by. This is why the catalog of his operas includes opera buffa (The Soldier and the Dancer, Twice Alexander, H 255, and Mirandolina, H 346), the one-act surrealistic trifle The Knife's Tears, H 169, the opera-film The Three Wishes or The Fickleness of Life, H 175, a modern variant of medieval miracle plays titled Plays about Mary, H 236. the radio operas The Voice of the Forest, H 243, and The Comedy on the Bridge, H 247, the television opera The Marriage, H 341, the opera-ballet The Suburban Theater, H 251, based on the tradition of the commedia dell'arte, the lyrical surrealistic opera-dream Juliette, or The Key to Dreams, H 253, the pastoral television opera What Men Live By, H 336, the surrealistic drama with music anchored in early Baroque Italian operas titled Ariadne, H 370, and the lyrical drama The Greek Passion.
The Greek Passion exists today in two complete versions that differ from each other both musically and dramatically. The reason Martino reworked the opera was the rejection of the first version as being too radical first by the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden in London and then by the Municipal Theater in Zürich and the Viennese publisher Universal Edition. In Its second version the opera was premiered in Zürich in 1961. The firstmore dramatic - version, which the composer dismembered into separate sheets and distributed on various pages, was reconstructed and premiered at the Bregenzer Festspiele in 1999 and released a year later on compact disc.
Aleš Březina, Bohuslav Martinů: Selected Masterpieces, © 2001 Supraphon Music a.s
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