My Country (jan 1, 1872 – jan 1, 1879)

Description:

Set of six symphonic poems by Smetana, widely regarded as his masterpiece. Three of them--including the first two (The Castle on High, The Vlatva River, and From Bohemian Fields and Groves (No. 4)--are descriptive of places or of nature. The third, is drawn from pre-Christian Slavic mythology. The last and longest two deal with episodes in the fifteenth-century religious wars led by teh pre-Reformation Protestant Jan Hus. The six symphonic poems are interconnected by the use of recurring musico-poetic emblems. Tabor and BLanik are both shot throguh with a fifteenth-century Hussite hymn (Ye Who are God's Warriors), which all Czechs know by heart.
Smetana also used recurring motives along the lines of a Berliozian idee fixe or an operatic reminiscence motif. One motive is first heard as a harp solo at the very beginning of Vysehrad, where its evocative timbre gives the impression of a bardic storyteller relating an invented past; it returns not only in the first piece of teh cycle but also later, at the end of VLtava, the symphonic poem that has most strongly established itself as a repertory item independent of the others. The reasons for the separate popularity of Vltava (or THe Moldau, to use its more familiar German name) are not difficult to understand. It makes virtuosic use of some very traditional, wideloy accepted representational devices. Its program, or sequence of events, is represented in the music in an unusually straightforward, descriptive fashion. It begins with the murmurings of the distant rural tributaries of teh great Vlatava River, which flows past hunters, a peasant wedding party with dancing, and a moonlit night, before reaching the urban splendor of Prague. The style of the music, while never actually qoting a Czech folk song, is of a popular character that appeals to foregign audiences by virtue of tis exotic coloring and brilliant orchestration.

The pictorial effects are as skillful as they are traditional: water music, hunting horns, moonlit nights, and country dances (the wedding is cast as a polka, a popular Slvic dance). The end brings the Vltava theme into sudden juxtaposition with the Vysehrad Mtovie. The latter theme is proclaimed in a majestic rhythmic augmentation wtih respect to he rushing river music that continues beneath it, carrying ecvchoes oft he forest fanfares. The effect of climactic magnicicence is inescapable, even to an audience unaware of the repetition of thsi theme.

Another reason why Vlatava is so popular is because of the recurrent braod theme representing the mains tream of the river, which became the most famous melody Smetana ever wrote. As the emblem of the Czech national river--a beloved emblem of nationhood in its own right--the theme was presumed by Czechs and non-Czechs alike, to be a oflk song. And it is a folk song, but not a Czech one. It is a swedish tune that Smetana heard in Gotebor as part fo teh incidental music to a folk pageant. Psosibly Smetana did not remember the origins of the tune when he appropriated it to represent his nation. The swediish origin of the melody that has represented Czech nationalism to the world for more than a hundred years is an excellent reminder that art is artful rather than natural. National identity is a construction in which composer and listener, preducer and consumer, must collaborate.

The end of Vltava pales beside the orgy of Czechness at the end of Blanik--the culmination of the whole cycle--when the Vysehrad motive is reprised in counterpoint with the Hussite hymn. The thematic juxtaposition creates grand nationalistic pomp, symbolic of a national glory that was only a dream in 1882, when the cycle was first perforemd as a totality. Its dramatic counterpart is the final act of Smetana's opera Libuse, premiered the year before and based on the central foundign myth of Bohemia. The title character, the legendary first queen of the land, has a prophetic vision in which all the heroic events of Czech national history (to her, the national future) pass in review. It culminates in a vision of Prague castle, magically illuminated, while the clairvoyant queen sings exultantly, "My beloved Czech nation will not perish." The populace enthusiastically responds while the orchestra pounds out the distinctive rhythm of the Hussite hymn.

Smetana's comic operas, which celebrated the peasantry in idealized harmony with the upper classes, were infused with folksy charm. His second and best-known opera, a Figaro-ish comedy of peasants and landowners called The Bartered Bride

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