Bedrˇ ich Smetana Bedrˇ ich Smetana (1824–1884) is celebrated, along with his younger compatriot Antonín Dvorˇák, as one of the two great nationalist composers of Czechoslovakia. Yet it took years for him to achieve this status, and Smetana’s life as a whole was beset with crippling personal misfortunes. The son of a brewer who was opposed the idea of a musical career, his schooling was haphazard, and at the age of 16 – having manifested musical talent from an early age – he quit his classroom studies in order to join a string quartet. Refusing to accept further support from his father at the age of 19, Smetana left for Prague, the capital of Bohemia. Like his idol, Franz Liszt, he struggled at first to establish himself and to sustain a career as a traveling piano virtuoso and teacher. He took part in the 1848 revolution against Austria as a member of the National Guard, and then established a school of music in Prague with financial assistance from Liszt. Yet although he had been born and raised in Bohemia, he felt unappreciated in his native Prague, and the death in 1855 of his eldest daughter, aged five, affected him deeply. In 1856 Smetana left Bohemia to take up a post in teaching and performance in the Göteborg, Sweden, becoming conductor of the Philharmonic Society there, and it was during his sojourn in this country that he experienced a surge in patriotic feeling for his homeland. Indeed, up to this point Smetana had been a German speaker, having been educated in that language as was customary in polite Prague society, but in Sweden he began Czech lessons and became an ardent advocate of Czech culture. (Nevertheless, to the end of his days he was considered to speak and write Czech like a foreigner.) When a new National Theatre opened in Prague, built to house the performance of Czech opera, Smetana resigned from his position in Göteborg and returned home to devote himself to the cultural revival that was sweeping Bohemia as well as other subject nations of Europe like Poland and Hungary. The journey home was not without tragedy, however, for his first wife died en route at Dresden. Smetana did remarry, and he returned briefly to Sweden before definitively settling in Prague in 1863. Smetana’s return home also saw him found another music school with distinctly nationalist tendencies, as well as a musicians’ union; before long he was known as Bohemia’s leading critic, pianist, conductor and, above all, composer. His second opera, The Bartered Bride, 2
premiered in Prague in 1866, was hailed as a turning-point in Czech history; not only was it acclaimed at home as founding a novel yet genuine Czech musical style, but it became the first Czech work to enter the international repertoire. Its appeal lay well beyond its fairly conventional story of young lovers who manage to subvert plans for an arranged marriage; it was the musical language, full of characteristic dances and folk-like (but original) melody, that captivated audiences across Europe. Smetana’s season of triumph was short-lived, however. In July 1874, while on a duckshooting expedition, he felt dizzy and hard of hearing in his right ear. By the following morning he was entirely deaf. The affliction – a savage symptom of syphilis, which he had contracted years earlier – tortured him for years with constant roaring and dissonance inside his head, and this was coupled with the fact that he could hear no real sound outside of that internal. For the remaining decade of his life he fought against encroaching ill health and depression; in 1876 he depicted his ordeal in the finale of his autobiographical string quartet subtitled From my Life. Indomitably, he continued to compose and to attend concerts, familiarising himself with the music from scores and critiquing the performances by close observation. Fêted as a national hero, yet continually attacked by critics who attributed to his deafness to features they disliked about his music, he gave piano recitals and conducted, also completing three more operas (and sketches for a fourth) as well as his great cycle of symphonic poems, Má vlast – his other principal musical testament to his native land. As his syphilitic condition inexorably advanced, Smetana became paranoid and erratic, engaged in conversations with imaginary visitors, and ultimately became so deranged that in April 1884 he had to be confined in Prague’s lunatic asylum, where he died only a month later.
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Má vlast Má vlast (My Country) was Smetana’s most important orchestral work, a cycle of six tone poems associated with the landscape and history of his native Bohemia. He conceived the idea in 1872, intending the cycle as a perfect musical description of aspects of his native land, its people, their history, their myths and their aspirations towards national independence. Each of the constituent symphonic poems can be played separately, but the cycle as a whole is organised so that they can also be played in a continuous sequence, as a monumental single work in six large movements. As in his early symphonic poems from the 1850s, Smetana had very specific dramatic and pictorial elements in mind when he composed these pieces – he even gave his publisher detailed programmes that he wished to be printed in each score. The first four symphonic poems were composed in less than a year between 1874 and 1875, and the first two members of the cycle, Vyšehrad and Vltava, were written in a matter of weeks, not long after the composer had become totally deaf. Vyšehrad was completed on 18 November 1874 and was first performed in January 1875. The title is the name of a rocky bluff standing high above the Vltava and traditionally considered the birthplace of Prague, as it was the site of the castle where in the 8th century the Bohemian royal court was established in the reign of the prophetic Queen Libuše, who Smetana also celebrated in his fourth opera. The symphonic poem in fact uses several themes from the opera. The work is a solemn meditation on the citadel’s past glories, imbued with regret for its present ruined condition. It opens with a harp solo evoking the bard Lumir, who sings of the chivalrous past, and the music then rises in splendour to conjure up the castle in its former state, full of the bustle of activity, gleaming armour, war cries and celebrations of victory. In an elegiac epilogue the strains of the harp are heard again. Vltava (The Moldau) is not only the most popular of the six tone poems, but probably the best-known of all Smetana’s works: a classic essay in musical illustration following the course of Bohemia’s great river from its source in the Šumava Mountains of southern Bohemia to its end. The initial idea, depicting the birth of the river in two mountain streams – one cold, one warm, with bubbling figures on flutes and clarinets – was one that Smetana wrote down during a picnic at the spot in 1867. Pizzicato strings highlight beams of sunlight twinkling on 4
the surface of the water as it flows over the rocks, and the streams unite into a swift young river whose course is graphically conveyed by the lilting rise and fall of the main theme. (This famous melody is often thought to be a Czech folk song; it was in fact Smetana’s own invention, but it was subsequently set to folk poetry and published in folk-song collections before his death.) As the river swells and flows through the countryside, we hear hunting horns, a wedding dance, the cavortings of nocturnal nymphs, and the foaming St John’s Rapids before the river’s theme sounds out majestically as it broadens and passes through below Vyšehrad (whose theme is recalled from the previous tone poem) and through Prague, before disappearing from sight on its way to meet the River Elbe and thence to the Baltic Sea. After pageantry and nature, grand guignol. The third tone poem, Šárka, completed on 25 February 1875, bears the name of a valley near Prague, and this in turn owes its name to a kind of Bohemian Amazon maiden who, just after the time of Queen Libuše, swore vengeance not only on her unfaithful lover but on all men. The story goes as follows: a group of soldiers, led by a knight named Ctirad, come to capture Šárka and her group of rebellious women. Šárka, however, ties herself to a tree, pretending to be in distress, and successfully beguiles Ctirad into falling in love with her. Wined and dined by the women, Ctirad and his men are subsequently put to sleep with the help of potion. Šárka and her band of women then massacre the entire party. Šárka is the shortest of the six symphonic poems, but it has five clearly defined sections and begins with a fierce, even hysterical violin melody depicting the violent and passionate Šárka. The remaining sections are a march portraying the arrival of Ctirad and his men; Ctirad freeing Šárka from the tree and, in a passionate episode, falling in love with her; the drinking party (signalled by a heavy-footed dance) during which the men fall into a stupor (snoring bassoons); and finally the bloody climax, which Smetana with good reason marks frenetico. While the programme may sound self-indulgent, the music itself is concise, economical and swift-moving. Z cˇeských luhu˚ a háju˚ (From Bohemia’s Meadows and Fields), composed between June and October of 1875, is a pastoral interlude, an invocation to the beauty of the landscape amid the scents and breezes of a summer day. The opening music, depicting the wind blowing through the forest canopy, has an epic quality, and the imitations of birdsong have 5
considerable charm. The spirit of the country people is represented by snatches of songs and dances (notably a noble, hymn-like melody and a lively polka) that drift across the landscape. Inspired by the infectious mood, Smetana throws in a lively, capricious fugue with many false starts in different keys that represents the intoxicating creative power of nature, and keeps that breaking through the texture. The dance music is worked up to a thrilling conclusion for the work. Smetana had originally intended to write just four pieces, with Z cˇeských luhu˚ a háju˚ forming the final panel of the design, but after a four-year interval he decided to complete Má vlast with an additional pair of related works celebrating the 14th-century Hussites, followers of the religious reformer Jan Hus, burned at the stake in 1415 and regarded as a national Czech martyr. Hus’s followers, forerunners of the Protestant religion, attempted to break away from the established church of Rome and found a purified version of Christianity in Bohemia, but in the end they were condemned and extirpated as heretics; Tábor, the fifth tone poem, completed in December 1878, portrays the Hussite warriors, a zealous group of religious dissidents who in 1420 founded the town of Tábor (after the traditional name of the mountain on which Christ was expected to return at the Second Coming) as a stronghold and defended it to the death. As the most radical of the Hussites, ones who adopted the teachings of the English mystic John Wycliffe, this group came to be known as the Táborites, their town run as an egalitarian peasant commune. In Smetana’s tone poem their faith is represented by the warlike hymn tune ‘Ye who are God’s Warriors’ (also used by Dvorˇák in his Husitská Overture), a robust, imposing and steadfast melody that infuses the Táborites’ fervent prayers, their grim preparations for battle and the tense uncertainty of their fate. The noble theme remains the focus of the music, which is highly inventive though mainly dramatic and hard-driven; in the closing pages it becomes an elegy for their ultimate defeat. The final tone poem, Blaník, completed on 9 March 1879, is named after the mountain in central Bohemia (Velký Blaník) where the Hussites took refuge after their defeat and where, according to legend, they sleep with St Wenceslas as their leader, until the day when they might again be summoned to rally and defend their people in time of need. (Janácˇek also composed a tone poem on this theme.) The piece begins with the same defiant hymn tune that ends Tábor (in fact, it is possible to play the two symphonic poems without break), 6
but then, just as the land itself had become pasture in Smetana’s day, the tension is relaxed to allow for a pastoral idyll making use of a shepherd’s pipe tune. Eventually, to assuage the people’s suffering, the Hussite knights emerge with a new joyous hymn to restore peace. In a grandiose apotheosis, the Hussite hymn blazes up with new confidence and vigour, capped by the opening harp motif of Vyšehrad, as if only now has the bard passed Czech history fully in review, closing the extended narrative of Smetana’s epic cycle. Blaník then concludes with a brief, triumphant march, pointing towards the glorious future foretold by Queen Libuše. Tábor and Blaník were premiered together in Prague on 4 January 1880 as part of a gala concert celebrating Smetana’s golden jubilee as a musician; and the complete Má vlast was performed for the first time on 5 November 1882. 훿 Malcolm MacDonald
Recording: 2007, Concert Hall, Ostrava, Czech Republic Producer & engineer: Jaroslav Stranavsky 2007 & 훿 2015 Brilliant Classics
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