Throughout his career, Martinů wrote avidly for the stage. His output contains fourteen complete and two incomplete operas as well as fifteen ballets, not all of which survive. The series was inaugurated early in 1914 with the one-act ballet Noc (Night, H 89), which finds him wholly absorbed in the world of Impressionism. It is one of his most opulent scores, calling for a female chorus, piano, celesta, three harps and a large percussion section including xylophone and glockenspiel. The same sonorities dominate his next composition, an orchestral work the title page of which is missing. I shall refer to it as h90, after its position in Halbreich’s catalogue. […] As in Night, the piano, harp and celesta are constantly engaged in a kind of private dialogue. They work together to form a continuous colouristic background, indirectly anticipating the special role of the piano and harp in the first movement of the Second Symphony [H 295]. The four horns are the only brass instruments present, and the percussion is represented solely by a tam-tam.
The first four bars of the piece stand apart from the rest of the composition for a number of reasons. Their time-signature of 6/8 disagrees with the prevailing common time, and the material they present is not to be heard again. It might be thought that they represent the continuation of some earlier section, now lost, but for several reasons I feel that H 90 is indeed a complete movement. Its lack of an initial tempo indication is not unique among Martinů’s early works, nor is it of any particular importance, since the material readily suggests a moderate pulse. The presence of a time-signature in the first bar is a positive sign, as is the complete list of instrument names in the left-hand margin of the first page – in the following pages, the strings are never again labelled. Finally, a tam-tam stroke occurs in the first and last bars, enhancing the straightforward symmetrical structure of the piece.
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Martinů had come a long way since The Angel of Death [H 17] and learned his lesson well. The proportions of H 90 are slight, the melodic invention relatively simple. He had curbed his ambition and confined himself to a short work which uses the orchestral tutti sparingly and where the strenuous thematic development of The Death of Tintagiles [H 15] is but a distant memory. The harmonies have become less chromatic and mobile, but Martinů compensates with his heightened interest in orchestral colour. In this work of 151 bars, the first violins have the melody for little more than a dozen. For the rest of the time, they and the other strings are confined to subtle effects of timbre, to extended tremolando or tremolo effects, a world away from the careering virtuosity of the first two orchestral scores. On its own modest terms, H 90 is charming and rather successful, and was followed almost at once by another orchestral work [Nocturne No. 1, H 91].
Michael Crump, Martinů and the Symphony, Symphonic Studies No. 3, Toccata Press, London, 2010, s. 24–26 [shortened by Jana Burdová, 2024].