Bedrich Smetana (jun 1, 1824 – sep 1, 1884)

Description:

The leading nationalist composerpn from the Czech lands. He was known for his saymphonic poems and for eight operas in the Czech language, including Libuse and The Bartered Bride, the first opera in Czech to be widely succesful internationally. His Ma vlast (My Country) is a cycle of six symphonic poems based on Czech history, legends, and landscape, the most famous of which is Vltava (The Moldau), the river that runs through the country. Although Smetana's focus on program music established him as a progressive New German composer, he is known today mainly as developing a distinctive style of Czech music.

The influence of hte NEw German School did not stope at the German border. One of its most enthusiastic disples was Smetana, now generally considered the first important nationalist composer of the Czech lands. How could a Czech nationalist also be a New German? In a letter Smetana wrote to a friend shortly after his thirty-sixth birthday, he explained how his education was thoroughly German even though he was born a Czech:

"...up to the present day I have no had the good fortune to be able to perfect myself in our mother tongue. Educated from my youth in German, both at school and in society, I took no care..to learn anything but what I was forced to learn, and later divine music monopolized all my energy and my time so that to my shame...I cannot express myself adequately or write correctly in Czech.

Smetana was brought up to call himself Friederich rather than BEdrich and to aspire to a cosmopolitan career like any urban, educated, middle-class child of a loyal Bohemian subject of the Austrian emperor. His place of birth (Bohemia, the part of the Czech lands that lies north of Moravia), his native language (German), and his early cultural orientation were the same as those of teh critic Eduard Hanslick, adlthough Smetana's ethnicity was different (as his surname, which means "cream", suggests).

In one important sense, Smetana did not come from beyond the borders of the German lands at all, because those borders, as drawn politicaly, extended far beyond the German-speaking core. The "divine music" that Smetana said claimed his time and energy was the music of the great German tradition, not that of the Czech countryside. He never learned to speak Czech flawlessly, nor did he get to know much authentic Czech folk music. Instead, he produced his own "authentic" Czech music.


A piano prodigy, Smetana had a life-changing experience in March 1840, when at the age of sixteen he heard Liszt perform in Prague... he wanted to become "A Liszt in technique and a Mozart in composition".

The year 1848 was as politically eventful in Bohemia as elsewhere in Europe, and Smetana's early compositions reflected its turbulence. He wrote his share of patriotic marches and anthems, as well as two more substantial pieces: the Jubel-Overture (Festive overture).

Despite efforts by the emperor to stamp it out, the use of the Czech language among the educated classes grew. The capital, Prague, was transformed over the second half of the nineteenth century from a German- to a Czech-speaking ckity. The musical establishment in Prague did not initially embrace Smetana's music, notably his Piano Trio in G minor, which Liszt praised highly while visiting the city in 1856. "Prague did not wish to acknowledge me, so I left it," Smetana told his parents at the end of the year as he emigrated to Goteborg, Sweden's main seaport and second-largest city.

Smetana was an instant scuccess there. During his first year he opened another music school, was named the director of the city's leading choral society, and inaugurated a prestigious series of chamber music concerts. He had further contact with Liszt, whom he visted at Weimar in the summer of 1857. Smetana became so committed a disciple that Liszt invited him to attend the great 1859 convocation of musicians in Leipzig and to join the associawtion of german composers. Smetana became one of the most advanced New German composers. He wrote to Liszt that he now better understood "the necessity of the progress of art, as taught by you in so great, so true a manner, and made it my credo. Please regard me as one of the most zealous disciples of our artistic school of thought. "

Smetana composed a series of symphonic poems, among the earliest to follow Liszt's example. First came Richard III, and Wallesnteins Lager


Smetana was lured back to PRague in 1862 by a career opportunity: the announcement of a competition for a Czech opera to open a new national theater. Five years alter, he became its principal conductor and eventually its artistic director. Ever since Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischutz and especially since Mikhail Glinka's triumph with A Life for the Tsar, it was assumed that the founding of a truly national musical life could best be expressed on the operatic stage, which required an opera with big numbers and recitatives, not a folksy Singspiel. In Poland Stanislaw Moniuszko did this with Halka, and Ferenc Erkel did so in Hungary with several historical operas.

Smetana played this role in the Czech lands, establishing Czech opera as part of the international repertoire. His maien effort was called The Brandenburgers in Bohemia, 1863. Although he paid close attention to teh peculiar accentual pattern of the Czech language in it, there is not the lsightest hint of folk music. He was adamant that a true nationawl opera should not rely on folk songs, even in the case of comic operas, where they were traditionally used. THere is an echo of New German ideology in his rejection of (Volkstumlichkeit (folklikeness), and echoes of Robert Schumann's warning that national character is decoration rather than substance. He also learned from Glinka's achievement that national musics had to be internationally respectable and competitive if they were to become a true source of national pride and prestige. Nonetheless, Czech musicians and music lovers, from Smetana's day to ours have insisted that his style is intensely and inherently national in character, instantly recognizable as such by any native listener. What is the source of this ceskost, or "Czechness"? Is Smetana's music Czech because he intentionally made it so, because listerners heard it as such, or for some more complex mixture involving both creation and reception? These are questions at the heart of how national character is perceived in music.

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