A large part of the early works of Bohuslav Martinů, whether through their name or their content, refers to extra musical sources of inspiration, especially visual or literary ones. Among the pre-World War I literary movements, his work was the most strongly inclined towards Symbolism and the Decadent movement – composing, for instance, the music to Maurice Maeterlinck's marionette play The Death of Tintagiles [H 15]. For the subject matter of his Three Melodramas, H 82–84, (1913), he chose the poems of three very different French or Francophone Symbolist writers. According to the testimony of his French scholarship application, he was searching for “a new type of melodrama, where the form of the composition, unfettered by the dramatic detail of the text, allowed the mood of the poem a more powerful presence.” […]
For the accompaniment of his Impressionist melodramas, he chose the violin, viola, piano, and harp. The first part is titled Le Soir, H 82, with the caption “a lyrical melodrama ushered by harp”. The virtuoso solo harp accompanies the recitation of one of three poems titled Soirs by Albert Samain (1858–1900), one of the key poets of French Symbolism, whose elegiac texts with their lush sensual depictions and musical associations had captivated others apart from Martinů, such as Gabriel Fauré and Camille Saint-Saëns.
The second part of the cycle, Dragonfly, H 83, draws from a poem by the now forgotten poet Henri d'Orange, who was appointed Vice Consul of the French Consulate in Prague in the spring of 1913. According to the testimony of Martinů's biographer Miloš Šafránek, the composer sought him out immediately upon finding out that he was the author of the poetry collection Primavera, published in 1905 by the magazine Mercure de France. In this composition, the harp is joined by a violin and piano to create a dense mesh that imitates the restless buzzing of a dragonfly in the roasting summer heat.
The author of the inspirational source of the final part, Dancers from Java, H 84, was the English poet and critic Arthur Symons (1865–1945), whose book The Symbolist Movement in Literature brought French Symbolism on to the Anglo-Saxon literary scene. His poems were frequently set to music especially by British composers; Javanese Dancer was published in 1905 in the collection Silhouettes. Although it is full of musical connotations and it references the sounds of exotic string and percussion instruments (“twitched strings, the clang of metal, beaten drums”), Martinů arranged the piece for viola, harp, and piano only. It was not the sonority of the poem that inspired the author so much as the ritualising austerity of the portrayed dancer who, despite the different means of expression, reminds one of the protagonists of the Sacrifice, the second part of lgor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring from the same year. Unlike Stravinsky's radically modern work, however, the Three Melodramas still belong unequivocally to the departing world of the 19th century.
Aleš Březina, CD Bohuslav Martinů: Prague, Paris, New-York, Salamandre, 2014.