Martin, Frank

Frank Martin – La Danse de la peurpour deux pianos et petit orchestre (1936) from the ballet score Die blaue Blume (1935-36)

(b. Eaux-Vives, Geneva, 15 September 1890 – d. Naarden, Netherlands, 21. November 1974)

Adagio (p. 1) – Allegro con fuoco (p. 18) – Lento (p. 19) – Allegro (p. 29) – Poco più mosso (p. 42) – Adagio (p. 75)

Preface
In the early 1930s Frank Martin set out on a quest to surmount tradition and find a style all his own. Probably at the suggestion of his great champion Ernest Ansermet (1883-1969), he came into contact with Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, which at that time was still new. The first work he produced under the influence of this method was Quatre pièces brèves for guitar (1933), which he later arranged for solo piano and in 1934 for full orchestra, giving it the title Guitare. In this form it was premièred in Geneva under Ansermet’s baton on 21 November 1934. Immediately thereafter Martin wrote his First Piano Concerto (1933-34), premièred in Geneva by Ansermet and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande on 22 January 1936, the soloist being Walter Gieseking (1895-1956). In 1935 he composed his at first highly controversial Rhapsodie for string quintet (two violins, two violas, and cello), premièred in Geneva on 30 March 1936, as well as the short score for a ballet of twenty-nine numbers and more than one-hundred minutes’ duration. This latter work, Die blaue Blume (The Blue Flower), though never orchestrated, has survived in Martin’s hand. It is based on a scenario by the Slovenian choreographer Pino Mlakar (1907-2006) that was selected to be a subject for a composition competition sponsored by the Zurich Opera. Martin recalled that although he was awarded a prize, the project never reached performance because Mlakar considered the music “too difficult.” As a result, he chose not to elaborate the work in full score. Martin’s third wife, Maria Martin, later added that Mlakar found the music “too modern” – a view corroborated by remark in Martin’s letter of 19 November 1939 to the conductor Edmond Appia (1894-1961), in which he sums up his handling of the twelve-tone technique in a ballet score by declaring it an experiment “not entirely without fairly severe harmonic acerbities in the beginning.” The same applies to his string quintet of that year and to his sole Symphonie pour grand orchestre (1936-37). Martin’s only ballet score from those years was Die blaue Blume, a “midsummer night’s ballet on a scenario by P. Mlakar, with music by Frank Martin.” Besides an orchestra, it calls for a solo contralto, men’s chorus, and women’s chorus, all of which are treated almost entirely in vocalise. The first date entered in the short score is 15 October 1935; the date of completion is given as 9 January 1936.

It creates a wholly misleading impression to say that Martin adopted Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method. From the very outset he applied it with great freedom, always with an ear for the tonal relations among the intervals. Later, in his “Entretiens avec Jean-Claude Piguet,” he initially spoke of the advantages of this method: “I used the serial technique very often. It played a great role in my musical evolution, for it forced me to seek paths I would never have found on my own. I still use it often from a sense of duty. As I once put it in an article, ‘I love hurdles, for they teach us to jump higher.’”

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