How could one describe the fascination of Martinu's Julietta to someone who has never heard it? One could begin, perhaps, with that scene in the Second Act where an old couple visit a bar in a wood. They are charmed when the proprietor recognizes them, even to describing the dress that she was wearing when they first came there many years ago, and the flattering remarks that another customer made about it. He is lying and they know it. They, like him and everyone else in this nameless country, can remember nothing that happened more than a few minutes ago, but they are as grateful for false, comforting memories as a blind man would be for the gift of sight, and the music of the scene, warmly nostalgic and mainly for solo piano, treats those memories as genuine and touching.
The subject, centred around a young man's search for a girl that he may once have met in this dream-country, struck a chord in Martinu. Some of his most moving works are evocations of folk rituals and peasant customs which it is rather unlikely that he genuinely 'remembered'; they are idealized visions, rather, of an unrecapturable past. George Neveux's play (Martinu said that he one day ''discovered that he had set its First Act without knowing quite how'') tapped a rich vein of nostalgia, of the borderland between memory and fantasy and of dreams that are somehow more real than reality. It drew from Martinu the most haunting and poetic of all his operas (there is something of a selfportrait in the central character, the troubled dreamer Michel), with a sense, akin to that in the paintings of Rene Magritte, that these dreamlike and improbable places and events are real.
Martinu's admirers have long been wearing out copies of the LP version of this outstanding recording; its transfer to CD is an event of major importance. The very large cast is without a weak link, with Ivo Zidek as a flawless exponent of the youthful, perplexed, ardent Michel. Krombholc had the mysterious poetry of this lovely score in his bones. The subtitle of the opera, by the way, is ''A dream-book''. Is there any language but Czech in which such a surely recondite concept can be expressed by a matter-of-fact word of a mere four letters: snar?'