The Marriage is based on the same Gogol tale used by Mussorgsky for his abortive attempt at a realist opera, setting words to a kind of continuous recitative. Even if the work must be accounted no more than an interesting historical experiment, the nimble comic plot suited the idea: three suitors compete for the hand of Agafya, with one fussing about the bride’s wealth, the second irritated that she cannot speak French and the third a bundle of marital nerves made worse by the others’ doubts. Martinu, when approached by NBC for a television opera in 1953, saw that something so quick-moving and conversational was ideal for his purposes. It also matched an element in his idiom. The swift, allusive manner that had made a success of Comedy on the Bridge was well suited to the small screen. And so this comedy whips along, with cheerful speech-inflected melodies in the Mussorgsky manner, passages of actual speech, quick-witted quotes (a snatch of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March) and any demonstration of emotion confined to brief, touching lyrical phrases, usually overtaken by the forward impetus of the plot.
Perhaps this all works well on television. It does not seem so suitable for steadier gramophone listening, even with the aid of a full text in Czech, English, German and French. Martinu’s manner can seem flat, for all his immense skill and a very neat sense of theatrical timing. Certainly the cast does brilliantly for him, singing in a Czech translation from the original English version of Gogol made by Martinu himself, and, in a lively recording made for Brno Radio in 1958, Vaclav Nosek keeps matters speeding along.'