Bohuslav Martinů

Bohuslav Martinů is a celebrated composer whose offstage relationship with the young composer and conductor Vítězslava Kaprálová enters the novel through Hana’s lively, sometimes speculative reports. Seen at a distance, through gossip rather than direct encounter, Martinů links artistic ambition, erotic attachment, and the precarious public world of interwar Europe.

Identity and Introduction

Hana first brings Martinů into conversation while chatting with Viktor before dinner guests arrive. Recounting a recent visit to a café in Montparnasse, she says that Kaprálová is often with him and that people claim they are sleeping together. Hana admits she has not asked Kaprálová directly; her inference rests on the young woman’s constant talk about the composer. Martinů is therefore introduced not through a scene of his own, but through the social circulation of rumor and the suggestive gap between what is observed and what is known.

The Reported Affair

In a later round of gossip, Hana presents the relationship as a shifting sequence. Kaprálová is said to have been in Paris with Martinů, leaving his wife alone at their country house. Something then happens—Hana does not know what—and Kaprálová goes on an extended holiday with a new boyfriend, an engineering student named Kopec from Prague. After returning, she reportedly falls back into Martinů’s arms. The account keeps uncertainty visible: Hana offers an entertaining narrative, but the cause of the separation remains unknown, and the details reach the household secondhand.

Public Music and Private Attachment

The affair’s next reported turn takes Kaprálová and Martinů to London for a music congress. Hana says that Kaprálová, carrying Martinů along, opens the congress with her Military Sinfonietta, the work she had conducted in Prague the previous winter. The event places her artistic achievement alongside the intimate relationship, without reducing one to the other: she is presented as a young musician making a public impression in her own right, even as Hana frames the episode through her connection with Martinů.

Hana claims that Martinů is completely infatuated and that his new compositions contain coded references to Kaprálová. The claim remains rumor rather than confirmed authorial fact, but it gives the affair an artistic dimension: private desire is imagined as finding its way into music, where it may be disguised and recognized at once.

Narrative Role

Martinů never takes the floor in these passages. The reader encounters him through Hana’s voice, whose humorous embellishments turn the affair into a social performance for listeners gathered in the Glass Room. The room’s cool, composed interior becomes a place where romances, reputations, and political anxieties are discussed; outside, the storm gathers. Against that approaching crisis, the gossip’s shifting itinerary—from Paris to a holiday abroad and then London—registers both the mobility of artistic life and the fragility of the world in which it unfolds.