I first got to know The epic of Gilgamesh from a BBC performance given at the Maida Vale Studios early in 1959 under Sir Malcolm Sargent, with Alvar Lidell as narrator. The work made a very strong impression and over the years my conviction that this is the greatest of Martinu's works has grown stronger. Perhaps I should modify that to say ''the greatest of his works that I know'' for Martinu is so prolific and so full of surprises. It is now just over a decade since the first commercial recording of it appeared (Supraphon, 6/80—nla) and that, alas, has gone the way of all vinyl. Gilgamesh itself is a long Assyrian-Babylonian poem recorded on cuneiform tablets in or before the seventh century BC and predates Homer by at least 1,500 years. In 1948 the wife of the Swiss conductor, Paul Sacher, presented Martinu with a booklet dealing with its discovery together with an English translation by R. Campbell Thompson from materials in the British Museum. Martinu was fascinated not only by the poem, the oldest literature known to mankind, but its universality—''the emotions and issues which move people have not changed... they are embodied just as much in the oldest literature known to us as in the literature of our own time... issues of friendship, love and death. It is dramatic, it pursues me in my dreams'' he wrote. It certainly inspired in him music of extraordinary vision and intensity as well as enormous atmosphere.
Martinu finished his oratorio in Nice in 1955, a month or so before the three Frescoes of Piero della Francesca. It tells how Gilgamesh, King of Uruk, hears about the warrior Enkidu, a primitive, at home among the works of nature with only animals as friends. He sends him a courtesan to whom he loses his innocence; the King then befriends him but they quarrel and fight before their friendship is really cemented. The second and third parts of the oratorio centre on the themes of death and immortality; the second tells of Enkidu's death and Gilgamesh's grief, his plea to the gods to restore Enkidu and his search for immortality, and the third records his failure to learn its secrets. I must say I can never hear the chilling episode of the last words of Enkidu's ghost (''Yes, I saw'') with its subtly changing vocal colours without a feeling of awe. I suppose with its evocation of a mysterious and remote past, its use of spoken narrative and its distinctive sound world, it is inevitable that it should be compared with Honegger's Le roi David. But much though I admire the latter, Gilgamesh strikes me as far stronger and its invention far more sustained and powerful.
The performance is in Czech as, of course, is the narration, which I very much hope will not limit the dissemination of this disc, for the music deals with universal themes and is Martinu at his most profound and inspired. It is gripping and although my blood did not freeze quite as much as it has done in other performances on hearing its closing pages, the effect is still very powerful. There are no weaknesses in the cast (and the Gilgamesh of Ivan Kusnjer is very impressive indeed), and the chorus and orchestra respond very well to Zdenek Kosler's direction. The recording maintains a generally natural balance between the soloists, narrator, chorus and orchestra, and the somewhat resonant acoustic is used to good advantage. Those who do not know this extraordinary work, whether they are Martinu enthusiasts or not, should investigate it without delay.'