Traveling with Mary: Explorations of Bohuslav Martinů’s Opera Cycle Hry o Marii

Abstract

At the time of its 1935 premiere, The Plays of Mary (Hry o Marii), Bohuslav Martinů’s musically catholic Czech-language cycle of four one-act opera-ballets, spoke to the concerns of its interwar moment. And somewhat remarkably, the cycle did this in the spirit of medieval Christendom’s popular theater.

Over the years, different opera companies have made efforts to revive The Plays of Mary. However, such attempts to make The Plays of Mary’s relevance manifest have taken place within the Czech lands primarily. Because of this, and in conjunction with how many music analysts, critics and historians writing in English tend to focus on Martinů’s works for orchestra and chamber ensembles at the expense of his numerous stage and vocal works, most potential deciders of the opera’s fate outside the Czech lands are unaware that that the cycle exists. And in the off chance that they have gained awareness, very few of them have received means, motive, or opportunity to hear, watch, read or play through the work. This situation is especially embarrassing for The Plays of Mary, which is concerned with acts of persuasion, and therefore, as a matter of course, very much invested in whether anybody listens or not.

Throughout the dissertation I try to remedy this situation by providing readers with different access points into The Plays of Mary, and most of these points of entry are unique to this dissertation alone. For example, I often discuss Martinů’s Plays of Mary publicity essays, and sometimes this includes doing Czech-to-English translations of passages that have never received such treatment so publicly before. Sometimes I build arguments around passages from the Plays of Mary autograph full score, and I provide images of these passages.

“Traveling with Mary: Explorations of Bohuslav Martinů’s Opera Cycle Hry o Marii” aims to get readers excited about the work’s spiritual, rhetorical, and emotional relevance for the angry, impatient, and defensive times that are the second quarter of the new millennium. Doing this requires that I juggle two tasks. The first, doing the more humble, foundational work of reporting facts and providing data, proof, and verification. The second, demonstrating to experts, scholars, and musicians working in different fields of inquiry the work’s power and capaciousness, albeit via an eclectic means more literary, rhetorical, and hermeneutical than strictly data-driven and philological.

And in opposition to what Martinů himself advises in select passages from the work’s publicity materials, throughout the dissertation I often stop at details along the way, hence the dissertation’s title. “Traveling with Mary: Explorations of Bohuslav Martinů’s Opera Cycle Hry o Marii” is a series of reports on my travels with Mary over the last decade. Each chapter resembles a postcard, and each postcard is addressed to a different field of expertise that I am trying to persuade to visit. In one chapter, I attend to the cycle in terms of transformation (Rhetoric, Wagner Studies, Nietzsche Studies). In the second I insert The Plays of Mary into discussions about interwar cultures of the case, especially as they are wrapped up in legal precedents, operatic or otherwise (Weimar thought, especially Brecht). In the third, I reach out to music scholars who focus on the interwar philosophy of Gebrauchsmusik (Weimar thought once again).