Bohuslav Martinů

Bohuslav Martinů started as a violinist in the Czech Philharmonic, studied briefly under Josef Suk, then left Czechoslovakia for Paris in 1923 and deliberately turned away from the Romantic training he'd received. Through the 1920s he tried on modern French styles and jazz idioms in works like Half-time and Kitchen Revue. By the early 1930s he'd landed on neoclassicism, but built textures denser than the Stravinsky school, composing fast: chamber works, orchestral pieces, operas including Juliette and The Greek Passion. He kept threading Czech folk melodies through it all, earning comparisons to Prokofiev and Bartók for how he folded them into modern forms. When Germany invaded France in 1941 he fled to the United States, and that's when the symphonies started - six of them, performed by every major American orchestra. He moved back to Europe in 1953, returned to New York, then went back to Europe in May 1956 and died in Switzerland three years later.