The latter half of the twentieth century saw a remarkable reappraisal of the achievement of the Moravian composer Leoš Janáček. For many years, his music was considered provincial, limited in its appeal and unlikely to be appreciated outside his native land. These prejudices were not fully overturned until almost fifty years after his death in 1928: his stature as an artist of international significance has now been definitively and, one hopes, irrevocably established. There are promising signs that a similar rehabilitation is underway for the music of Bohuslav Martinů. In 1990 the centenary of his birth was widely celebrated. Eight years later, the Barbican Centre in London and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama jointly hosted a week-long celebration of his life and music under the banner ‘Out of Exile’. The concerts were attended by large, enthusiastic audiences, comprising confirmed admirers as well as people new to Martinů’s music. Many of the performances were broadcast by the BBC to a still wider audience.

For many years, Martinů’s reputation struggled against a critical prejudice which these days is hard to fathom. It is illustrated by an early review of his Fantaisies Symphoniques from the American composer Henry Cowell, who heard elements of Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Falla, Satie, Milhaud, Honegger, Janáček and Shostakovich in the work, but credited Martinů with nothing of his own, feeling that ‘his music has never arrived at a high point of originality or individuality’. When Walter Weller conducted the Fourth Symphony at a Promenade concert in London in 1984, the review in The Times carried the jaded comment that ‘perhaps Martinů had become too cosmopolitan to be all together distinctive’. This perception has changed markedly since the centenary celebrations and Martinů is now rightly judged one of the most individual musical personalities of the twentieth century. Yet there is still a dearth of literature, especially in English, which investigates the components of his unique style. The most valuable appraisal appeared in the seminal work of the Belgian musicologist Harry Halbreich, first published in 1968 and revised in 2006, an indispensable study which has sadly never been made available in English.