Faith and Folklore

Presented by the Bard Music Festival

The 2025 Bard Music Festival examines the life and times of Bohuslav Martinů, the 20th century’s foremost Czech composer, whose music is nonetheless largely unfamiliar to U.S. audiences today.

The Festival’s second all-Martinů event opens with one of the composer’s greatest choral works. A Czech-language cantata written to honor the Czech volunteers who fought in the French army, Martinů’s Field Mass had him blacklisted by the Nazis. Set to texts by Jiří Mucha, passages from Bohemian folk poetry, and lines from psalms and the liturgy, this powerful anti-war protest anticipates such later works as Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem and Leonard Bernstein’s MASS. Folk poetry is also the basis for Martinů’s Brigand Songs, which use Moravian tales of feudal tyranny to address the Soviet invasion of Hungary. The program concludes with the world premiere of the original French version of Martinů’s one-act opera Mariken de Nimègue (“Mary of Nijmegen”). Based on a medieval Dutch miracle play, and better-known in the later Czech version for which he won the Czechoslovak State Prize for Composition, Martinů’s original is set to French text by Henri Ghéon and features different orchestration as well as extensive original musical material that has never previously been published or performed.

Image: Karel Plicka, film still from The Land of Song, 1933. Courtesy of Moravian Gallery in Brno, Czechia.