Martinů's career as a writer began with a burst of essays he wrote for the Czech cultural press shortly after his arrival in Paris in 1923. Although his writings from Paris deal with a variety of themes, what frequently emerges here is his protest against the norms of Czech music criticism, which he found excessively romantic and harmful to the efforts of the younger Czech composers.

Throughout his Parisian Criticism, Martinů does not name the critics who perpetuated these norms. This, too, is characteristic of his essay from his American Diaries, “Something about that ‘French’ Influence” (1945), where he illuminates the biases of Prague's musical life as he perceived them as a young man. In this later essay, Martinů describes how the Czech critics had considered French music “superficial” in relation to the “deeper” and “better” conception of music at home. But the closest he brings us to the specific critics involved is by referring to them as the “dominating ideologues,” whose thinking was based on “German metaphysical philosophy.”

Martinů's first biographer, Miloš Šafránek, does not make this matter any clearer. This we see in Šafránek's second biography, where, also without naming any individuals, he explains Martinů's motivations for leaving Prague: “Martinů was aware that there was something false in the philosophical conception of music as a vehicle for extramusical ideas, subscribed to by music theorists and professors of aesthetics under German influence.”

In the case of his Parisian Criticism, we can propose various reasons for Martinů's oblique references to the critics. Playing a role here might have been his ostensibly non-confrontational nature, or the fact that overt challenges to well-positioned figures in Prague might have hurt his chances for gaining a position there in the future. But as we will see, some of the targets of Martinů's critiques were well known to the Czech cultural world, suggesting that his motive was to marginalize them and help lead the Czech musical discourse into more cosmopolitan directions.