Half-Time [H 142] was written at Polička in the summer of 1924. Martinů was a keen follower of football, and this ten-minute piece is a direct impression of his enthusiasm for the game. It is intended to represent the excitement of a crowd between the two halves of a match, and has often been compared with Honegger’s more famous piece Le Rugby, which appeared four years later. The contrast with Martinů’s previous orchestral works is stark and uncompromising: the rhythms are lithe and athletic, the refined and opulent textures of Impressionism replaced by harsh and brittle sounds. The piano returns to his orchestra for the first time since the Ballade [on Böcklin´s Painting “Villa by the Sea”, H 97], but is treated far more percussively and less soloistically. Brass instruments are more prominent than in any other work of his, and the percussion is also unusually active. Critics had already heard what they regarded as the damaging influence of Stravinsky in Martinů’s ballet Who is the Most Powerful in the World? [H 133]. When Half-Time received its premiere under Talich in Prague in December 1924, they were quick to point out the transparent debt Martinů owed to Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka. Although Martinů defended himself vigorously in print, I feel that in Half-Time he threw away some of the gains he had recently made in forming an individual voice, and came closer to outright plagiarism than he had ever done before or would do again.
Half-Time bears the sub-title ‘Rondo for large orchestra’ – a description which can be confusing when one first listens to the music. The technique of thematic variation is employed far more radically in the scant ten minutes of this work than it is, for instance, in the Istar suites [H 130 A, H 130 B]. The rondo theme appears seven times, enclosing six episodes, but in such varied guises that it can be difficult to recognise. The transformations blur the distinction between rondo and episode: whenever the main theme changes shape, new melodic fragments are generated which break away from it and become the chief substance of one or more episodes. This thematic interpenetration of rondo and episode is a source of considerable fascination while listening to Half-Time: a touch of genuine originality, and one of the chief strengths of the composition.
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In Half-Time, Martinů is less fixated with interval than Stravinsky but, in allowing his themes to change shape on each appearance, to exploit different rates of motion and to borrow elements from one another, he seems to have learned many valuable lessons from the Russian. It has to be admitted that Half-Time is no masterpiece […]. Its obvious plagiarism and the plainness of some of its materials deny it the highest rank. Nonetheless, for the f irst time in Martinů’s music there is a genuine symphonic current, a sense of urgency and clear argument which bode well for the future and which he took much further in his next composition for large orchestra – La Bagarre [H 155], completed in May 1926.
Michael Crump, Martinů and the Symphony, Symphonic Studies No. 3, Toccata Press, London, 2010, s. 54–59.