Frank Martin

Among the finest of all Swiss composers, Frank Martin was born in Geneva in 1890, the 10th and last child of a Calvinist pastor. While the metrical psalms of the Reformed Church populated his earliest memories, the course of his musical development was set shortly before his 13th birthday when he first heard J.S. Bach’s St Matthew Passion. Martin first established a foothold in Swiss musical life with the Piano Quintet (1919) and Quatre Sonnets à Cassandre (1920). During the 1920s, he absorbed invaluable lessons in the rhythmic organisation of music from the eminent Swiss composer and educator Émile Jaques-Dalcroze. Motivated by a profound need to express his inner spiritual life in music, Martin began his Mass for Double Choir in 1922; completing this four years later, he consigned its score to a drawer, where it remained until 1962. In the interim, he gradually refined his compositional language to embrace Bach’s counterpoint, the sophisticated melodic invention of composers such as Chopin and Franck, and influences drawn from French and German music, directing the results into the beguiling chromatic lines of his secular oratorio Le vin herbé (1938-41). He made his international breakthrough with works such as the Petite Symphonie Concertante (1944-45), the oratorios In terra pax (1944) and Golgotha (1945-48), a dramatic meditation on Christ’s crucifixion. Martin's later output includes concertos for violin and cello, the haunting Requiem for choir and orchestra and Polyptyque (1973), the latter completed in the year before his death.