The third stage work, entitled Christmas Carol (Koleda, H 112), subtitled "Old Christmas Traditions of the Czech People", is a surprising and unexpected work and a key work in Martinů's oeuvre. It represents a sudden turn to folklore and stands out fully from his youthful compositions, of which there were more than a hundred up to the year 1917, when he composed it. These are mostly piano pieces and dozens of songs, but there are also a few touches and attempts at chamber and orchestral works. None of these youthful works (with the perhaps not insignificant exception of four artificial songs on folk and national texts from 1912) have anything to do with folklore and folk expression. [...]
The Christmas Carol is also quite different from his earlier stage works, the ballets The Night (Noc, H 89) and The Shadow (Stín, H 102) and not only in its sources of inspiration. In Christmas Carol, Martinů returns deep into his childhood, to his grandfather's songs and carols at the Polička Tower, remembering and recalling local Christmas traditions. But the key significance of the Carol lies above all in its sudden, unexpected creative intention, in its simple, almost raw conception, which marks a complete departure from his previous extensive, artificial and complex compositional work. In Martinů's life, this is a return to the certainties of life and in his work the first, although imperfect, attempt at Czech folk expression.
The score of Christmas Carol is lost until now. [In addition to the manuscript libretto, the composer's recording of the song "Šel jest pánbůh", sung by grandfather Stodola at the Polička Tower, has been preserved. This fragment is written at the beginning of the first page of the sketch [...].
The score is lost until now. [Miloš Šafránek suspects that Stanislav Novák hid it.] In addition to the manuscript libretto, the composer's recording of the song "Šel jest pánbůh", sung by grandfather Stodola at the Polička tower, has been preserved. This fragment is written at the beginning of the first page of the sketch [...].
It can also be speculated that other songs sung by the grandfather at the tower [...] are also in Martinů's possession, both textually and musically, from oral performances; this can be suggested by some textual adaptations in the comparison with the texts of the Českého lidu (Hra o třech králích [The Game of Three Kings]) and also with texts by Sušil and Erben. Of Sušil's three settings of "Šel jest pánbůh", Martinů did not use any of them and kept to his grandfather's local version. Twenty years later the same song appeared in the cantata Kytice, H 260, in a completely different setting. The chorale of the first picture (Christmas), "Chvála Bohu na výsosti“', is from the Cancionale; the opening chorus of the third picture, „Ejhle, naše chasa“, is a most expressive Wallachian carol which Martinů could not well recompose without breaking the overall plainchant character of the piece.
[...] The work consisted of a prologue and 4 acts (26 scenes). The full-length work was probably an important predecessor of the Špalíček, H 214, also because of the vocal and instrumental cast (female chorus in the orchestra). The importance of the Christmas Carol would emerge in full light fifteen years later in Špalíček, The Plays of Mary, H 236, and the Theatre Behind the Gate, H 251 – three Czech national plays, as their composer called them. [...]
Miloš Šafránek. Divadlo Bohuslava Martinů. Praha: Editio Supraphon, 1979, p. 20–21.