Frescoes, Three Symphonic Movements

One of the last students of the famous master Antonín Dvořák, Fran Lhotka (1883–1962), graduated in composition and horn at (from) the Prague Conservatory in 1905. By 1909, he moved to Zagreb as a musician (horn player and accompanist for the opera esmeble of the Croatian National Theatre), where he remained for the rest of his life, leaving behind a brilliant legacy of his compositions. His ballet The Devil in the Village made a significant media coverage in European musical circles, premiering triumphantly in 1935 at the Zürich State Theatre, and later being performed with exceptional success in a number of European cities. His ballets Bow (Lûk) and Ballad of a Medieval Love (Balada o jednoj srednjovjekovnoj ljubavi) also achieved notable success outside of Croatia. Today, Fran Lhotka's ballets and orchestral works are considered some of the most popular music-theatrical and symphonic achievements of the new national direction in Croatian music. Their publication in the Croatian Music Information Centre series of sheet music editions is an outstanding contribution to the study and performance of this important segment of Croatian culture and music history. Taking into consideration the composer’s words, we might characterise Frescoes as a symphonic poem with, if we may use the words of Constantin Floros, an unspoken programme. From the character of the musical substance and from the formal structure, it is clear that the programme, which Lhotka in one of his interviews put forward only in a very rudimentary form, in its elaborated version, known only to the author, and never made public in full, is a kind of scenario, a dramaturgical framework for the creation of the piece. This would be supported by a formal analysis of the composition. That is, the work is constructed with the technique of montage, as in cinematographic editing. The individual musical scenes are divided from each other by sharp cuts and are sequenced in such structured formal blocks, following the imaginary plot. Changes of scene are sudden and unexpected which gives the dramatic dimension of the work both excitement and unpredictability. Notwithstanding the extramusical suggestions contained in the programme stated, Lhotka’s music is in itself extremely eloquent and abounds in plastic images that have great suggestive power. The composer conjures all this up with a number of compositional and technical procedures from the arsenal of his technically superior composerly craft and his great acoustic imagination. Precisely because of this powerful aesthetic component, Lhotka’s work has the right to be called Frescoes. Of great importance here is the composer’s superlative art of orchestration, mentioned so often, his exquisite sense for the combination of sound colours and refined feeling for the tonal palate of the orchestra, ranging from impasto sonic whole-orchestra swipes, to entirely transparent drawings, of gentle watercolour surfaces and the subtle fine lines of the individual solo instruments used. We might well compare Frescoes, in the light of the narrative nature of the motivic-thematic layer, which has the distinct role of bearer of the semantic structure of the extramusical action, with the symphonic poems of late Romanticism and musical realism – primarily with the similar works of Lhotka’s teacher, Antonín Dvořák, if with an essentially updated harmonic idiom and with the application of the technical innovations and advances of the orchestration of the first half of the 20th century. The orchestration of the work in particular is impressive, Fran Lhotka coming across as an imaginative and inventive artist – a genuine master of the craft of music.