At the first glance, the pentatonic starting point of The Fifth Day of the Fifth Moon, H 318, appears to be a tribute to the work's dedicated, the Chinese pianist Hsien-Ming Lee Tcherepnin, the wife of Martinů's long-time friend Alexandr Tcherepnin. The motto in the work's heading, however, indicates deeper connections with both Martinů's inner world and the external world surrounding him at the time of its origination. It comes from the Chinese poet Lin Yutang. The composer found it in the book "The Gay Genius" and considered it so significant that he also included it in the printed score. "The landscape of Westake tops the world. Tourists of all classes, intelligent and otherwise, find and appreciate each what he wants. But who is there, that can comprehend the whole? Alas, in my stupid honesty, I have long been left behind the world. I gave myself completely to the joys of hills and water...".
The Second World War had made Martinů an emigrant who had to leave behind everything he had built up until that time and escape, near destitute and without the majority of his scores, to the USA. During the war, his mother, as well as a number of friends, dies, among them one of his closest, the violinist Stanislav Novák, the composer's boyhood friend, and his favorite pupil, Vítězslava Kaprálová, a talented young composer. Yet, the worst was still to come. In July 1946, Martinů fell from the terrace of Seare's Castle in Great Barrington, where he was staying at the time while teaching composition at prestigious summer courses in Tanglewood. He stayed in the hospital for five weeks and was never to get over the after-effects of this injury - partial deafness, loss of balance, and a constant buzzing in the head. By the time he had convalesced to such a degree as to be able to travel and visit post-war Czechoslovakia, power in his homeland had been taken over by the communists, and the official representatives of the new regime immediately branded Martinů a traitor and renegade. His closest friends (for example, the outstanding conductor Václav Talich) were imprisoned and unjustly sentenced, the former foreign minister Jan Masaryk, well-disposed ti Martinů, died under mysterious circumstances, falling from the window of his study. In light of this chain of events, the inertia and peculiar emptiness of the outer parts, as well as the stiff dramatic nature of the middle part of The Fifth Day of the Fifth Moon, would appear to be a reflection of the mindset of the composer, shell-shocked by the world's post-war historical development.
Aleš Březina, Martinů / Jeux, © 2008 Supraphone