The Epic of Gilgamesh (Martinu)

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Bohuslav Martinu carried the idea of setting Gilgamesh for fourteen years before he actually wrote a note of it. When he finally sat down near Nice, France, at the close of 1954, the oratorio came quickly, composed over the turn of that year into 1955. He built his own English language libretto rather than commissioning one, working directly from archaeologist Reginald Campbell Thompson's 1928 hexameter translation of the ancient Mesopotamian text and choosing, in the Bohuslav Martinu Institute's own words, freely what would suit his music best rather than setting the epic in full.

That selectivity shapes the whole work. Martinu's three parts follow Gilgamesh's tyranny and the goddess Aruru's creation of Enkidu as his equal, then Enkidu's illness and death, then a closing incantation in which Gilgamesh tries to summon Enkidu's ghost back from the underworld to learn what death actually holds. Left out entirely is the epic's sixth tablet, in which the goddess Ishtar propositions Gilgamesh and he refuses her; no source consulted for this entry places that episode inside any of the sections Martinu actually set. What he kept is the epic's starkest material: friendship, death, and a king who cannot buy or fight his way past either.

The work premiered January 24, 1958, in Basel, Switzerland, performed by the Basel Chamber Orchestra and Choir under Paul Sacher, three years after Martinu finished it and long after he first considered the subject.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Epic of Gilgamesh ends, in Martinu's setting, the way the ancient poem itself keeps circling back to: a living king demanding to know what death actually is, and a dead man's ghost giving him an answer he does not want. The oratorio's third part, titled The Incantation, stages Gilgamesh summoning Enkidu's spirit up from the underworld after his failed quest for immortality, and closes on what the work's publisher, Universal Edition, describes as a somber monologue about human mortality delivered as that ghost answers his desperate questions about the afterlife.

Getting there took real technical apparatus. Martinu scored the work for double woodwinds, brass, four percussion players, harp, piano and strings, with soprano, tenor, baritone and bass soloists and a full mixed chorus, a duration of roughly fifty minutes built to carry the weight of the text rather than to decorate it. A first ever scholarly critical edition of the score, edited by Ales Brezina and honored with the Best Edition award in 2016, uncovered something performance tradition had missed: Martinu's own detailed instructions for a semi theatrical staging and a considerably larger role for the Narrator than the piece is usually given.

The composer himself, quoted by his publisher, framed the ancient material as anything but remote: despite everything modern life has changed, he said, the questions and feelings which preoccupy people are still the same as those an audience meets in Gilgamesh's refusal to accept that his friend, and eventually he himself, must simply stop existing.