Martinu the Symphonist

Tovey once suggested that Brahms was so jaundiced a self-critic as to have destroyed a sheaf of works scarcely distinguishable in quality from those we know. Whether or not Brahms was justified in remaining for so long uncommitted to a declared solution of the symphonic problem, his caution helped to magnify that peculiar sanctity with which the nineteenth century sought to invest the symphony. The relaxation in which he was then able to work out another vein of thought is an obvious characteristic of the symphony he completed only one year later; a decent interval of six years preceded his third essay. Though the large output of Bohuslav Martinu marks him out as one of the most prolific, and at times least self-critical, composers of our century, he too seems to have been reluctant to approach symphonic structure. Apart from a rather mystifying piece originally entitled La Symphonie (a descriptive rather than structural title, later changed to Rhapsody), he did not venture near the medium before he was fifty-one, but then wrote four in as many years, a fifth after two years, and a final symphony after another six years. We may feel that his initial spurt of composition in the one medium has tended to make those works too similar, and has served to confuse and discourage a public anxious to recognise symphonies as sporadic but particularly significant milestones in a composer's career.