Martinů’s relocation to Paris was made possible by the award of a travel scholarship from the Ministry of Education in Prague. He left for Paris shortly after the death of his father, a bereavement which may have weakened his ties to Czechoslovakia and encouraged him to explore the wider world. He had first encountered Paris in 1919, having been invited to augment the National Theatre orchestra on tour. His scholarship provided for a stay of three months; in the event, Paris became his home for almost eighteen years, until the events of the Second World War forced him to flee to America. One wonders exactly how he made ends meet at first. In Prague, he had been sustained by regular work with the Czech Philharmonic. He did no such work in Paris – indeed, he seems to have given up on life as a professional violinist entirely. Apart from its role in his compositions, the violin disappears from his life after Prague.

He was soon swept away by the variety, vivacity and daring of Parisian cultural life. The apparent influences on Who is the Most Powerful in the World? were strengthened and deepened throughout the remainder of the 1920s. He began to use jazz elements more and more frequently in his music, especially in the operas and ballets written in the latter half of the decade. Although he had defended himself against the charge of Stravinskianism in his 1922 ballet, he quickly became devoted to Stravinsky’s works, with The Wedding and The Soldier’s Tale as particular favourites. He wrote a number of polemical articles at the time, defending Stravinsky and his music. Nonetheless, it was to the French composer Albert Roussel that he turned for advice and informal tuition. He had played some of Roussel’s music with the Czech Philharmonic, and admired both the First Symphony and the ballet Le Festin de l’araignée (‘The Spider’s Banquet’). From Roussel he sought to acquire ‘order, clarity, balance, refinement of taste, accuracy and sensibility of expression, the qualities in French art I have always admired’. The admiration was mutual – in later years, Roussel declared: ‘Ma gloire, ca sera Martinů’ (‘My glory will be Martinů’).