Martin, Frank

Frank Martin – Ouverture en Hommage à Mozart

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

Preface
Regarded as one of the foremost twentieth-century composers who hailed from Switzerland, Frank Martin enjoyed an estimable career as a composer, educator, and performer. The youngest of ten children, Martin was born in the Eaux-Vives quarter of Geneva into a Huguenot family whose patriarch, Charles Martin, served as a Calvinist pastor. As a burgeoning composer, Frank composed his first complete songs at the age of nine, and he also proved to be an avid improviser. At the age of either ten or twelve, he attended a performance of Johann Sebastian Bach‘s St. Matthew Passion, which left an indelible impression upon him throughout his life.

Having had no systematic training in music as a child, Martin‘s formal studies in music began at Geneva University, where he studied piano, composition, and harmony with Joseph Lauber (1864-1953) in addition to mathematics and physics. Lauber, a leading composer in Geneva at that time, thus became Martin‘s first music teacher. Beginning in 1926, Martin studied rhythm and music theory with Swiss educator and composer Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865-1950). (Jaques-Dalcroze, best known for his method of eurthymics and founder of a music institute in Geneva in 1914, had studied in Paris with Gabriel Fauré and Léo Delibes, who may have indirectly influenced Martin‘s interest in French music.)

Between 1918 and 1926, Martin lived in various European cities, including Zurich, Rome, and Paris. For the last twenty years of his life, however, he resided in Naarden, North Holland, where he enjoyed considerable success as a composer. He died there and was interred in Geneva at the Cimetière des Rois.

Although he is best known today as a composer, Martin worked as an educator, performer, and administrator in the early decades of his career. At the Institut Jacques‑Dalcroze he taught improvisation and theory of rhythm, and at the Geneva Conservatory of Music he coached chamber-music ensembles. In 1926, he founded the Société de Musique de Chambre de Genève in which he played piano and harpsichord. He served as the artistic director of the Technicum Moderne de Musique from 1933 to 1940 and as president of the Swiss Association of Musicians between 1942 and 1946. From 1950-1957, he taught composition at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Cologne.
Martin wrote a number of estimable works for orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo instruments, voice, and the stage. Among his most notable compositions are the Petite Symphonie Concertante (1944/45), which launched his international career, and Le Mystère de la Nativité (The Mystery of the Nativity, 1957/1959), which is considered to be one of the finest religious compositions of the twentieth century.
Radio Geneva commissioned Martin to compose Ouverture en hommage à Mozart in 1956 to commemorate the bicentennial of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart‘s birth. He dedicated this work to Monsieur René Dovaz, director of the radio studio.
In several respects Martin‘s Ouverture captures the spirit of Mozart‘s music as well as style characteristics of composers who influenced the master and those he, in turn, inspired. Specifically, elements of Martin‘s approach to orchestration, form, thematic content, and texture pay homage to Mozart, his predecessors, and his successors. Furthermore, just as Mozart effectively articulated his individual voice in an otherwise communal language that could be appreciated by both Kenner and Liebhaber, so too did Martin advance his unique approach to composition while subsuming those very elements that helped to define Mozart‘s singular voice.

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