Composer Geraldine Mucha has a life story with many interesting features, not the least of which is that she continued composing into great old age. While studying at the Royal Academy of Music in London, she met war correspondent Jirí Mucha, and the two fell in love and married. Even in the String Quartet No. 1 of 1944, before the pair moved to Prague, her music shows a concise Bartókian grasp of Eastern European folk idioms. The couple continued to live in Czechoslovakia, working to protect the artworks of Jirí's father ...
Read More
Composer Geraldine Mucha has a life story with many interesting features, not the least of which is that she continued composing into great old age. While studying at the Royal Academy of Music in London, she met war correspondent Jirí Mucha, and the two fell in love and married. Even in the String Quartet No. 1 of 1944, before the pair moved to Prague, her music shows a concise Bartókian grasp of Eastern European folk idioms. The couple continued to live in Czechoslovakia, working to protect the artworks of Jirí's father Alphonse Mucha against the increasing depredations of the Communist regime. Scriptwriters, sharpen your pencils! Perhaps as a coping mechanism, Mucha retained features of the music of her native Scotland in works such as the Variations on an Old Scottish Song for piano; in these works, she cultivated not a pastoral style but a delightful kind of Scottish Impressionism. As repression deepened after the Soviet invasion of Czechslovakia in 1968, Mucha returned to Scotland, but after the...
Read Less
