The Incredible Martinů Affair

A true story about how the remains of composer Bohuslav Martinů returned from distant Switzerland to his native town of Polička on 17 August 1979
The remains of Bohuslav Martinů were interred in his native land next to his wife Charlotta twenty years after his death. To that time they had been located in Switzerland, where the famous composer had died on 28 August 1959, and where he was buried on the land of his friend the composer Paul Sacher. During the Cold War the idea of bringing the remains of the famous exile back to his homeland seemed unthinkable. It therefore seems incredible that several Czech musicians and musicologists came up with the idea in the mid-1970s in the middle of the normalisation era. What is even more extraordinary, however, is that their idea succeeded in spite of the cumbersome and ignorant communist machinery. Musicologist Jan Kapusta (1932–2007), who personally took part in this affair, spent many years researching the history of this entire story. The outcome of his archive research and interviews with living witnesses is this book, a monumental testimony to the narrow-minded nature of circumstances in Czechoslovakia at that time. It offers equally valuable evidence of how communist cultural policy and propaganda operated at those days, and how it could be shaped, twisted and bent under various pretexts to the advantage of such an important matter. Integral to the book are the unique and to a large extent never before published illustrations.