Emboldened by his experience with Tintagiles [Smrt Tintagilova, H 15] Martinů soon began work on a second, even more ambitious, orchestral piece called The Angel of Death (Anděl smrti, H 17). Based on an 1898 novel by the Polish writer Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer, it runs to 109 pages and was again written at high speed. The manuscript is dated 6–13 July 1910 and appears to have been written in Polička. At the head of the score, Martinů writes the following synopsis: “The beginning of the composition up to page 19 represents the meeting of two friends, Rdzawicz and Tęnźel. Then Rdzawicz reads a letter from his betrothed, in which she breaks off their engagement. There follows a catastrophe and the desire for revenge grows inside Rdzawicz. In his mind, thoughts take shape concerning his greatest work, his wretched life and his revenge. At the end of the composition Rdzawicz takes his chisel for the first time with a firm hand and carves himself a modest sarcophagus, a coffin for the happiness of his entire life.”
Perhaps this choice of material was not the wisest for Martinů at a time when he was apparently suffering the pangs of unrequited love. He appears to have identified too closely with the hero of the novel, sacrificing the objectivity and discipline which dignified the best parts of Tintagiles. [...] The Angel of Death, although it has never been performed, has gained the reputation of being Martinů ’s most wildly extravagant and impractical score. Unfortunately, the exaggeration to which the work is prone has occasionally rubbed off on its detractors, as can be seen from this description by Brian Large: „The musical expression is exaggerated and overloaded, the instrumentation clumsy and sometimes unplayable. […] Martinů’s manuscript is well salted with instructions, though from time to time these suffer from an excess of enthusiasm. (Within the space of a few bars, the orchestra is asked to play pppp, crescendo furioso, feroce con fuoco, ffff and then appassionato religioso.)” [...]
The most demanding parts are those for the strings, but as a highly competent violinist himself, Martinů is unlikely to have written beyond their capacity. The main difficulty of the piece, as with Tintagiles, would lie with the co-ordination of very exacting passages for the strings and woodwind, and the strenuous effort required to play so much loud and dense music. The manuscript shows that Martinů eventually realised that the demands of his score were excessive. The last page carries a comment added in pencil, which Šafránek coyly described as ‘a drastic piece of selfcriticism’: “It appears at the end that the horn players have shat themselves”.
Perhaps, in the end, the composition of The Angel of Death was a useful experience for Martinů. He had written the sort of work that he would soon come to despise. This chastening experience helped him steer clear of self-indulgence in the future, leaving the main body of his work singularly free of the bombastic and the overblown.
Michael Crump, Martinů and the Symphony, Symphonic Studies No. 3, Toccata Press, London, 2010, s. 21–24 [shortened by Jana Burdová, 2024].