Not for nothing is Bedřich Smetana known as the father of Czech music, yet he didn’t speak Czech fluently until his early 30s. He was born in 1824 in the Bohemian town of Leitomischl (Litomyšl), which was under Habsburg rule, with German the official language. His father, František, a brewer, played violin in a string quartet. A budding pianist, the 15-year old Smetana went to study in Prague, where he was mocked for his “country manners”, so he bunked off lessons and attended concerts instead. It was here that he saw Franz Liszt play a recital, inspiring the young Smetana to dedicate his life to music.
Smetana had ambitions as a pianist: “With God’s grace and help, one day I will be a Liszt in technique and a Mozart in composition.” He composed patriotic works during the 1848 uprising, even manning the barricades on the Charles Bridge, but when he failed to establish a career, he accepted a teaching post in Gothenburg, where he began composing symphonic poems, very much in the style of his hero, Liszt.
Tempted back to Prague in 1861 at the prospect of a new theatre for Czech opera, Smetana started to master the language, determined to establish a national opera style mirroring what Mikhail Glinka had achieved in Russia. The Brandenburgers in Bohemia was his first opera, concerning 13th-century Czechs attempting to liberate Prague from German oppressors… so an historical, but topical subject. This was followed by a comedy, The Bartered Bride, which flopped in its original Singspiel form but went on to great success when revised.
The operas Dalibor and Libuše contain the same nationalistic stirrings that inspired Smetana to compose Má vlast, a collection of six symphonic poems that was not initially conceived as a cycle. It was written at the time Smetana was rapidly going deaf, which impacted severely on his mental health. He died in an asylum in 1884. Má vlast is performed every year on 12th May, the anniversary of Smetana’s death, to open the Prague Spring Festival. Smetana never lived to see the establishment of an independent Czech state, but when the Czechoslovak Republic was declared on 28th October 1918, it was proclaimed, appropriately enough, in Prague’s Smetana Hall.
1Vltava
Vltava, the second episode of Má vlast, is one of the most topographical pieces of music ever composed. The Vltava is the longest river in the Czech Republic and we travel with it from its two springs – represented by two flutes, twisting and entwining – bubbling away until it broadens into a flowing theme. We follow the river through woods and meadows, passing a rustic wedding celebration, water nymphs dancing in the moonlight, ruined castles, then swirling through the St John’s Rapids and flowing into Prague.
2Šárka
Šárka is named after the female warrior of Czech legend, The Maidens’ War. In this bloodthirsty symphonic poem (the third episode of Má vlast), she is tied to a tree as bait to entrap the knight Ctirad, who “rescues” and falls in love with her. She serves him and his comrades drugged mead and, once they are asleep, sounds her hunting horn as a signal to her warrior maidens to attack, and they murder the men in their sleep. Smetana’s music contains a beautiful clarinet solo as the men are intoxicated, snoring bassoons as they sleep, while the furious finale is thrilling.
3The Bartered Bride
Smetana’s best-loved opera is a comedy in which love of Mařenka and Jeník prevails over ambitious parents and a scheming marriage-broker. The 1866 premiere was not a success, indifferently received by the critics and poorly attended. Smetana revised the work, cutting all the dialogue and adding the best-known dance numbers and a drinking song. Later, he was dismissive of the work’s popularity, saying it was written “to spite those who accused me of being Wagnerian and incapable of doing anything in a lighter vein.”
4String Quartet no. 1 in E minor, “From My Life”
What does deafness sound like? Or feel like? The final few minutes of Smetana’s autobiographical First String Quartet, subtitled “From My Life”, provide something of an answer, with the violin’s high E representing the persistent ringing in his ears. “It is that fateful whistling of the highest tones in my ear, which in 1874 was announcing my deafness. I allowed myself this little game because it was so catastrophic for me.” There are happier episodes; the second movement is a quasi-polka, Smetana reminding himself of his youthful appearances in fashionable society, “where I was known as a passionate dancer”.
5Vyšehrad
Vyšehrad (The High Castle) depicts the Prague castle which was the seat of the earliest Czech kings. The symphonic poem begins with the bardic strains of solo harp, ready to spin its mythic tale. Má vlast is inextricably linked with Czech conductor Rafael Kubelík, who recorded the cycle several times. He left Czechoslovakia in 1948 after the Communist coup d’état, vowing not to return until his country was liberated. In 1990, after the Velvet Revolution, the elderly Kubelík – emerging from retirement – returned to his homeland to conduct Má vlast with the Czech Philharmonic at the Prague Spring Festival, which he had founded in 1946. It was an emotional homecoming. Kubelík repeated the performance a few weeks later in Wenceslas Square on election day:
6Piano Trio in G minor
Smetana’s early Piano Trio had a tragic background. It was written in memory of Bedřiška (nicknamed Fritzi), the eldest of four daughters, who died in 1855. “Nothing can replace Fritzi,” wrote Smetana in his diary, “the angel whom death has stolen from us”. Two of the other daughters also died in infancy and Bedřich’s wife, Kateřina Kolářová, died in 1859. The trio, praised by Liszt, is an emotional work, overlaid with an elegiac spirit. Smetana once claimed that the second theme of the opening movement was based on a tune that Bedřiška loved.
7Dalibor
Smetana’s third opera is akin to a Czech Fidelio. In 15th-century Prague, the knight Dalibor is imprisoned for avenging his friend’s death, a minstrel. Milada, his victim’s sister, is moved by his plight and, disguised as a boy, enters the jail to secure his release, falling in love with him. Unlike Fidelio, there is no happy ending. Dalibor is sentenced to death; Milada and her retinue storm the castle, but she is mortally wounded and Dalibor kills himself.
8Wallenstein’s Camp
Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein’s Camp was the first of three plays about the exploits of General Albrecht von Wallenstein during the Thirty Years’ War. Smetana’s symphonic poem (1859) was intended as an overture to the play. The music depicts up a busy crowd scene in the camp with dancing. A monk protests (three trombones and a tuba), complaining about their wicked activities – “Is that an army of Christians? Are we Turks? Are we Anabaptists?” – but is mocked by the crowd. The camp sleeps but the soldiers are roused by a trumpet call and march off. Keen operagoers will recognise this as the same scene Verdi inserted into his opera La forza del destino.
9Dreams
As a composer with pianistic ambitions, Smetana naturally wrote a lot of piano music, including two sets of Czech Dances. Dreams was a cycle of six pieces composed in 1875. The first, Lost Happiness, almost anticipates the autobiographical nature of his First String Quartet. There are wistful images of rural Bohemia, with By the Castle conjuring up images heroic troops. The final piece, Bohemian Peasants’ Festivities, takes us back to Smetana’s beloved Czech dance rhythms.
10String Quartet no. 2 in D minor
Like his First String Quartet, the Second is autobiographical. Composed in 1882, it is both the product and the description of Smetana's life in full deafness and declining mental health. It takes up where the First left off: “after the catastrophe, it represents the turbulence of music in a person who had lost his hearing.” There’s a sense of agitation and anger in a score that is fragmentary, where dance music such as a syncopated polka is frequently interrupted, Melodies evaporate in sudden mood swings, a spiral of plangent resignation and frustration.
This article was sponsored by the Year of Czech Music.
