Martinu's Third

On today’s date in 1945, the Third Symphony of the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu had its premiere performance at Symphony Hall in Boston.

The new symphony’s dedication read: “To Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony,” and the new score was presented on the occasion of Koussevitzky’s 20th anniversary as conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Martinu had finished the first two movements of his symphony that summer, as the Second World War was rushing to a close. Martinu later claimed he had Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the “Eroica,” very much on his mind in those days.

He said he was convinced that there was somehow an ethical force at work in the creation of a symphonic work, and, as in Beethoven’s “Eroica,” it was possible to express in music a sense of moral forces at work. As an exile from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia and France, Martinu had come to the United States in 1941, and his mood is understandable in the anxious yet hopeful spring and summer of 1945.

After l