Frank Martin was born in Geneva, Calvin's city, in 1890, the son of an influential minister and the youngest of ten children. He is without a doubt, with Arthur Honegger, the most important Swiss composer of the 20th century. At the age of twelve, hearing Bach's St Matthew Passion determines his vocation. His only teacher is the composer Joseph Lauber, who introduces him to the post-romantic repertoire. Initially he is a supporter of neo-classicism according to Ravel's idiom. But in the 1930s, under the influence of dodecaphony, Martin develops a very personal and more daring style, very chromatic, but whose main lines are always linked to the idea of an extended tonality.
Although he is largely self-taught, Martin - a great rhythmicist - has long been a teacher at the institute of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, creator of eurythmics, a movement in which music is learned and experienced through movement. He even asks Martin to succeed him as head of his school, an honor he declines out of concern for his independence as an artist. Later, Martin was appointed as a teacher at the Geneva Conservatory, where he also founded the Technicum Moderne de Musique, where he would meet Maria Boeke, who would later become his wife.
His pioneering role within the Swiss composer circuit is evident from his activities in all musical genres and from the international interest his work has enjoyed since the 1940s. In 1946 he leaves Switzerland and settles in the Netherlands, the homeland of Maria, with whom he will have two children (he already had a son and three daughters with his previous wives). Initially he settled in Amsterdam, later he moved to Naarden, where he devoted himself to composing in peace and where he lived until his death in 1974. The only appointment he accepts during his years in the Netherlands is as a composition teacher at the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne in the years 1950-1957. One of his pupils there is Karlheinz Stockhausen, who soon separates from him because of their incompatible ideas about dodecaphony.
Martin's writing style is characterized by an intense lyricism, whose melodic lines, often very pronounced and intense, are supported by constantly changing chords in the bass. Neither tonal nor atonal in the strict sense, his music shows a very original solution to the question that preoccupies all the important composers of the 20th century.
His Calvinist roots and the great popularity of his sacred works mean that Frank Martin is often regarded as a Protestant composer par excellence. But that's just one aspect of his music. Martin, while never denying his religious roots, has always steered clear of any religious or musical dogmatism: he liked to say that he had faith in the broadest sense of the word, but no specific religion.
Frank Martin has often set German texts to music and also finds a lot of inspiration in texts from the Middle Ages. In this case, too, less for religious reasons than for the liveliness and sincerity of this literature, which is far from the classical canons and which offers him new inspiration. His sense of humour, his open attitude to jazz music and even, at the end of his life, to pop music also make Martin a composer who escapes all the great 'schools' of twentieth-century music. He manages to escape the obligations of the avant-garde and thus blaze his own path.
