Probably you wouldn’t have spent money to hear a piece of music called “The Legend of the Smoke from Potato Tops.” Maybe the title makes more sense in Czech, but still. . . . I did it for two reasons. One is that it was written by Bohuslav Martinů, whose music I have long liked and admired. The other is that the recording got a rave review in BBC Music Magazine a few months ago. The album is Cantatas (four of them, all by Martinů), performed by the Prague Philharmonic Choir, directed by Lukáš Vasilek (Supraphon).
Martinů’s music can be zany, like his early ballet, Revue de cuisine (another curious title) with its charleston episode—”charleston” as in the 1920s dance craze. It can go deep, as in the four symphonies he wrote while he was in exile in America during World War II and the subsequent communist takeover of his homeland. It can be highly rhythmic. It can have a folk-like quality. It can be emphatically modern. But I always find it both accessible and rewarding.
So I took a flyer. And I’m glad I did.
“Legend” is for choir and three soloists accompanied by a small ensemble of recorder, clarinet, French horn, accordion, and piano, giving it the clarity and transparency of chamber music. The text is a poem by the Czech poet Miloslav Bureš that begins with folk traditions and draws broader meanings out of them. (Quotations here are adapted from the English translation of Hilda Hearne.)
Reading between the lines, I take the “smoke from potato tops” as referring to a practice of burning off the foliage in the village potato fields—maybe as a defense against potato blight. The “legend” part is a story about the Virgin Mary deciding to get down off her pedestal in the village church and go out to spend a warm, sunny day with the young men who are burning the fields.
The story takes a turn particularly interesting at the moment when I write this, with Holy Week not far off. Mary meets her son in the field, looking like another statue escaped from the church: “The blood on his hips had long gone rusty, / and the wounds by the thorns pained the mother’s heart.” She asks him, “Why your and my own plight / is so often graved in stone, / and at my feet cold candlesticks are placed.”
Jesus answers: “Sweet mother of mine, / I wish that not my blood but love would save mankind.” And he envisions a fulfillment of such love with all the statues emerging from the church, the saints becoming real people.
But when the pious discover that their statue is missing, they rush out to find it—and pass right by Mary without recognizing her. They suppose she is some ignorant peasant woman. After all, “like thrifty peasants do, / she took off her sandals” as she left the village. After searching for her all day, they come back to the village. “Then, in compliance with the official rules, / they blamed the verger”—only to be interrupted by the news that some lads grazing goats on the hills have found her.
The music for all this never strikes a false note. The instrumental introduction strikes a pastoral note that continues as the opening chorus sets the scene. This shifts to a hymn-like melody as a soprano soloist describes Mary descending from the altar. Reminiscent of Bach’s pairing of solo instruments with human voices, the clarinet accompanies Mary’s lament (alto solo), while the piano takes over to accompany Jesus’ response (baritone).
The accompaniment shifts into a bustling mode as the pious discover the Virgin’s absence and run off to look for her. The soprano describes Mary’s emergence into the natural world “in a robe of ripening rye” with a simple monodic chant, then joins chorus and alto in almost jaunty mode as the crowds push past her, dismissing her as “a peasant maid who can hardly say Lord’s Prayer and Ave.”
At length, the searchers give up, only to be surprised by increasing musical energy as the “bold lads” who have seen her ignore their elders and recount what’s happened to them. I can only describe the music as music of miracle–but of a completely modest and unostentatious kind. The music returns to monody and dips lower and lower as it describes the reaction of the elders, their faces “mirrored all askew” in their half-empty beer mugs “as after a funeral wake.”
The conclusion is a prayerful celebration of the Virgin who, surrounded by “lads who trot around her barefoot, / returns to the rocks and to the trembling aspens, / with human heart.” Martinů makes a very satisfactory “amen” out of those last three words. All the sophistication of a Paris-educated composer has poured into creating the elegant simplicity of this music. He wrote it in the 1950s, not long before his death.
I love this piece of music. And I suspect a whole lot of people would if they ever had a chance to hear it. So, if you like choral and vocal music or if you know and like Martinů s music or if you’d like to see more of Bures’s interesting folk/ecological theology or if you’re just adventurous, buy this CD! I say “buy the CD” because it has an excellent booklet with texts and translations. But if your Czech is fluent, maybe the performers’ excellent diction will be all you need.
And, by the way, the other three cantatas are also wonderful. Maybe I’ll write about them later on.