International Museum Day 2017
Theme of the year: Museums and contested histories: Saying the unspeakable in museums.
Municipal Museum and Gallery Polička, Thursday May 18th, 2017, at 6PM,
Bohuslav Martinů: Field Mass (1939), Memorial to Lidice (1943)
a lecture with musical samples and a presentation of original scores from the Museum’s collections.
The lecture will be presented by Docent Monika Holá, the musicologist of the Polička Museum.
The life and work of the composer Bohuslav Martinů capture the European memory of the 20th century. Czechoslovakia was occupied by the Fascist Germany. The fight against lack of freedom was depicted by Martinů in his Field Mass (1939) which was devoted to the Czech soldiers who had left their country in order to fight against Fascism. Among them were also pilots who took part in the aerial Battle of Britain. When Czech resistance fighters (paratroopers from the UK) killed Reinhard Heydrich, a prominent Nazi, in Prague, it was considered the most important act of resistance in the occupied Europe. The cruel revenge of the Nazis for the Heydrich’s death also led to the massacre in the village of Lidice (1942). In his American exile Martinů composed Memorial to Lidice (1943).
