The radio cantata Kytice (Garland) was composed in the summer of 1937 and is dedicated to the painter Jan Zrzavý, a friend of the composer during his Paris years. Martinů wrote this cycle of pieces to texts from Czech folk poetry for solo voices, mixed choir, children's choir, and small orchestra on commission for Czech Radio, for which he had already composed the one-act operas The Voice of the Forest, H 243, and Comedy on the Bridge, H 247. The cantata Kytice consists of eight movements, arranged in pairs of which each contains one orchestral and one orchestral-vocal movement ("Overture" – "Sister Poisoner"; "Idyll" - "Cow Girls"; "intrada" - "Sweetheart Dearer than Family"), except in the case of the closing orchestral-vocal pair "Carol" - "Man and Death". Not onlz did Martinů employ two pianos in the small orchestra as he did in the Tre ricercari, H 267, and the Concerto grosso, H 263, he also added a harmonium. He chose the folk texts from the collections of František Sušil and (in the case of the "Carol") Karel Jaromír Erben.
The subject of death passes through Martinů's whole compositional output, from immature early attempts such as the symphonic overture La mort de Tintagiles, H 15,(designated as Op. 1 on the autograph) to the death of the shepherd Manolios in the opera The Greek Passion (1954-59), H 372. It is represented in all the cantatas and oratorios Martinů composed, including the Czech Rhapsody (1918), H 118, Kytice (1937), the Field Mass (1939), H 279, Mount of Three Lights (1954), H 349, The Epic of Gilgamesh (1954-55), H 351, and the four folk cantatas from 1955-59. In Kytice, however, Martinů devoted a whole movement to death, namely the last one which is the most important and longest: "Man and Death" accounts for almost a third of the whole cantata's duration. Whereas in the madrigal "In the World is Nothing Constant" (No. 3 in the Madrigals, H 380), death is treated in a mood of resignation, almost reconciliation, in the final movement of Kytice it is depicted as something frightful from which man tries in vain to escape. In accordance with his interest at the time in medieval folk theater, Martinů uses horrifying tone-painting effects - the repeated pounding of the woodwinds, brass, and both pianos conveying the words, "Then Death shot an arrow through his heart and marrow, Death struck without warning on that summer morning", engrave themselves in one's memory upon first hearing and remain there forever as an archetype of fear of death. As in every morality play, at the end, the fate of an individual is generalized into a warning: "Now, good friends, hear my plea, take a lesson from me: My sad fate you will share, for Death you must prepare". But this wouldn't be Martinů if he didn't finish the whole work with music that - despite its text - offers consolation.
Kytice is one of those works of Martinů that are still performed more in the Czech lands than abroad. Perhaps this is due to its textual basis - more comprehensible, after all, in the composer's homeland than elsewhere. Perhaps an obstacle to performance has been the complicated performing apparatus, requiring, besides orchestra, two large choirs. The complicated international political situation and the fact of the composer's exile, however, undoubtedly had a negative impact on the number of performances of this masterpiece. Twenty years after it was composed, in 1959, Martinů mentioned it in a letter to relatives in Polička: "Anyway our vacation period, too, is ending and I'm looking forward to returning to Schönenberg. There we feel more at home and our friends are already looking forward to seeing us. Recordings are waiting for us there, so finally we’ll hear something. Paul Sacher played them for himself and likes them a lot; he writes that they are recorded well. So I’ll hear at least Kytice, which I’ve never heard."
Aleš Březina, Bohuslav Martinů: Selected Masterpieces, © 2001 Supraphon Music a.s