An Old Song [H 74], together with the Song on an Old Spanish Text [H 87] (1914), belongs to the numerous vocal miniatures that Martinů devoted himself to composing in his twenties. They represent the more 'traditionalist' pole of his composing at the time, but at the same time they are at odds in their individual ways with the compositional techniques that the young composer, who wanted to be à jour, applied much more intensively in his 'experimental' compositions, brought to life by his fascination with Debussy's music.
The Song on an Old Spanish text, H 87, is characterised by a looser harmonic plan – including tonal digressions and a conclusion where, after a dominant chord, the piece closes on a subdominant, although the vocal voice tends towards a tonal prime. The melodic line is based on the Romantic cantilena, but the sparing use of quasi-oriental melodic devices, based on the descending step of the augmented second, recalls Martinů's orchestral scores of the time and his popularity of oriental themes. The light nostalgia of the piece represents the salon tone in the young Martinů's oeuvre, a kind of belated and later abandoned resonance of the maturing fin de siècle.
Iša Popelka, Bohuslav Martinů: skladby pro Poličku. Praha: Supraphon, 1973, s. 12–13.