Bohuslav Martinů

Abstract In the fall of 1948, Martinů, then in his eighth year of uneasy American exile, began a three-year stint on the faculty at Princeton. I was a senior and excited at the prospect of meeting a composer whose music I liked so much and who, moreover, was at the height of his then considerable fame. Tall, thin, gray-haired, blue-eyed, he had a narrow face of distinctly Slavic cast, a face that explored from time to time the risk of a smile which, when it blossomed, delightfully combined warmth and skepticism. His speech, pianissimo and con sordino, was strongly accented (I still sometimes catch myself thinking of “slow, “ a frequent complaint of his about performances, as rhyming with “now “) and, as we discovered, it was odd in various ways: fifths and fourths, for example, were “quints “ and “quarts. “ We knew that he was partially deaf as the result of a bad fall, since stories about him in newspapers and magazines were plentiful. Listening (with the t pronounced) or speaking, he was infinitely more comfortable in French, but really he was shy in any language.