No other composer in the twentieth century quit, or was dismissed from, so many schools as Martinu, born in a church belfry in eastern Bohemia. He was taught violin by a local tailor before enrolling at age 15 in the Prague Conservatory. Put on probation time and again for rebellion against academic discipline, he was finally expelled for "incorrigible negligence" in 1910. By then he'd been shunted from the violin department to the organ school, and studied composition piecemeal with Josef Suk, whom he sought out again after several years of playing second violin in the Czech Philharmonic.

A small scholarship enabled emigration to Paris in 1923, where he lived until the Nazi occupation of 1940. Blacklisting drove him from Provence to Lisbon, then to the U.S. in 1941. Martinu's Paris years were spent in poverty. However, he not only found a wife but studied with Albert Roussel, the strongest influence on his mature style, notably in this Double Concerto. The stateside advocacy of Serge Koussevitzky rekindled his creativity but could not ease homesickness. A planned return to Czechoslovakia in 1947, to teach at the Prague Conservatory (irony of ironies), was thwarted by the Communist takeover. An alternative decision to teach at Tanglewood was ended by a near-fatal fall that damaged his hearing and nervous system, slowing the creative flow that had produced several concertos and five symphonies in as many years. He returned to Europe in 1953, settling finally in Switzerland, where the Double Concerto had been composed in 1938 for Paul Sacher (the Swiss Sir Thomas Beecham), who premiered it on February 9, 1940, with the Basel Chamber Orchestra. In Music since 1900, Nicolas Slonimsky wrote a definitive précis : "Completed on 29 September 1938, the day on which his country was dismembered at the appeasement conference in Munich...[the Concerto is written] in a neo-Baroque style...basically tonal and bitonal, triadic in harmony (though key signature is never applied), in three movements, Poco allegro, Largo, Allegro, the first two ending on major triads, the last on an agonizingly polytonal chord."

The composer himself wrote that "all my thoughts were constantly on my endangered country.... The work [was] written under terrible circumstances, but the emotions it voices are not those of despair but rather of revolt, courage, and unshakable faith in the future."

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