Bedřich Smetana

File:Smetana.JPG

Portrait of Bedřich Smetana

Bedřich Smetana March 2, 1824 - 12 May 12, 1884) is considered one of the greatest Czech composers of the 19th century and the country's first nationalist composer. Smetana stands for "cream" in English. He is best known for his symphonic poem Vltava (The Moldau), the second in a cycle of six which he entitled Má vlast (My Country).part of the Austrian Empire

little formal training but thrived in a musical family, playing in a string quartet at five and on the piano inpublic at six and composing by eight. It was all instinctual and musical theory was still a closed book to him at 17.

Life

The Smetana monument in Litomyšl

By the grace of God and with His help I shall one day be a Liszt in technique and a Mozart in composition. (stanley 172)

Early Years

Smetana was known tohis family as Fritz, 11th child and first surviving son of a German-speaking family. Speaking Czech was regarded as low class. In 1831, the family moved furhter south where Mahler would be brought up 30 years later. When he arrived in Prague, there was a vigorous musical life int he city which had seen the first performances of Don Giovanni and La Clemenza di TIto. The Prague Conservatoire had been founded in 1811. Music was centred on church and theater. In 1826, the Society for the PErfection of Church Music in Bohemia was formed. Four years later, the Organ School was set up, whose alumni would include Dvorak and Janacek. The focus of Prague's theatrical and operatic life was the small THeatre of the nobility, the Estates THeater, where Don Giovanni was first performed and where Weber was director between 1813 and 1816. There were high-quality concerts: Liszt, Berlioz, Paganini, Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann performed in PRague int hemiddle of the century. THere was a piano school run by Joseph Proksch, whose teaching methods were among the most modern in Europe. Katerina showed symptoms of tuberculosis. THree of thier four daughters died ininfancy, only Sofie survived. It is not clear whehter he had to leave Prague because the authorities suspected that he was too nationalistic. So many ladies wished to take lessons from him that he found it difficult to cope with the demand.

After he remarried, he started learning to speak Czech.

the Prague musicla world was divided between those who supported him, and perceived him as a modernist and a Wagnerian, and those who did not. His opponents were those who wanted a Czech opera developed on the lines of Italian opera with the sung voice predominating. Two critics were his adversaries: Jan Nepomuk Mayr nad Pivoda, who even tried to oust Smetana from the Provisional Theater.

Jabkenice - could not afford to pay his rent , did notlike the loneliness of the country but started a highly productive period of his life, depsite deafness. ('deafness would be a relatively tolerable condition if only all was quiet in my head. (steen 702) MOst of his masterpieces, operas, string quartets, piano and vocal compositions come from this time.

Bedrich Smetana was born as the seventh child of a fairly wealthy man from the third marriage of Master Brewer Frantisek Smetana to Barbora Linkova. The family was constantly on the move, and young Bedrich went to high school in Jindrichuv Hradec, Jihlava, Havlickuv Brod, Prague and Plzen, where he graduated. Although he is the Czech Republic's national composer and wrote several operas in Czech, as a child he was not taught the language. From a very early age he showed a great talent for music, which was encouraged within the family, and he played the piano at his first concert at the age of eight. Throughout his childhood, he also performed in a quartet at home, playing first violin, and his father second, although his father opposed to his son's formal musical training.

A deciding factor in his artistic development was studying under Josef Proksch in Prague, from 1843. Then he moved to Prague to study piano and theory with J. B. Kittl, director of the Prague Conservatory. After completing his studies, he worked four years as a music teahcer for the family of hte famous Count Thun. Then he founded his own private piano school in Prague, with the help of Franz Liszt, and began composing, and a year later married his teenage love Katerina Kolarova, a fine pianist.

Family Tragedies

The 1840s and 1850s were turbulent years in the life of his nation, of Europe, and his personal life, with European nationalist movements of 1848, political oppression, and the death of his second child, his beloved four-year-old daughter Bedřiska, coupled with his inability to establish himself on his home turf. When his third child died nine months later, he committed himself to composition, producing the Piano Trio in G minor. This piece is full of sadness and despair, making use of phrases that are cut short, possibly in resemblance to his daughter's own life.

Sweden

In an attempt to escape a place where everything reminded him of the loss of his daughter, Smetana decided to leave Bohemia, and in 1856 he moved to Goteborg, Sweden. Here he taught, conducted Sweden's Philharmonic Society, and gave chamber music recitals for five years. He achieved recognistion for his conducting, piano playing, and compositions. However, the northern climate accelerated Katerina's illness and she died in 1859. A year later he married again to the 20-year-old Bettina Ferdinandiova.

Back Home

Smetana's Tomb

After the easing of the political situation in the Czech lands, he hurried home,He did not settle in Prague permanently at first, and spent his time travelling back and forth to Gothenburg, before making Prague his home in 1863. In 1863, back in Prague, he opened a new school of music dedicated to promoting specifically Czech music. During this time, he composed his historical opera The Brandenburgers in Bohemia, whose first performance in 1864 was an instant success. This was followed in 1866 by perhaps his most famous opera, the comedy The Bartered Bride. The Bartered Bride was an instant and enduring success. It was in the same year that Smetana became a conductor at the Provisional Theatre, the first theatre in Prague to hold performances in Czech, , where he focused primarily on opera. The opera emerged from his awareness of his responsibility to his nation, and his firm belief in its future. He held this position until he went deaf in 1874 as a result of a long illness. Despite his catastrophe he managed to realize his long-held creative project: to celebrate his homeland and nation with a cycle of symphonic poems.

From 1875 he lived in small village of Jabkenice. As if plain deafness were not enough, Smetana also suffered from tinnitus, which caused him to hear a continuous, maddening high note which he described as the "shrill whistle of a first inversion chord of A-flat in the highest register of the piccolo. "Towards the end of the 1870s, Smetana's health continued to fail, and in 1883 he apparently suffered a mental breakdown, and was placed in a mental asylum in Prague, where he died shortly after his sixtieth birthday, on May 12th 1884. It is widely believed that in actual fact he died of syphilis.

In April 1884 came the day when Smetana was still composing and he wrote on a page of his score: "Final page." Then his creative powers left him for good. After that, it wasn't possible for Smetana to get the treatment he needed at home. On the suggestion of his physician, on April 22 he was transferred to the Prague Institute for the Mentally Ill in Katerinky. What was actually transported there was really only an empty shell, which was set free by death on a sunny May 12, at 4:30 in the afternoon.

The celebrated funeral began in Old Town Square, leading from the Church of Our Lady of Tyn, on May 15. It turned into a national occaision of mourning, with large crowds lining the path of the procession to say their farewells to the dead master. At the National Theater, fanfares greeted Smetana for the last time, then the procession headed for Vysehrad, where Smetana's body was laid to rest. On that day, Prodana nevesta (The Bartered Bride), the merriest of Smetana's works, was performed at the National Theater in tribute to the great composer...

Ina letter to the Czech nation, Franz Liszt wrote: "In haste I write to you, that Smetana's death has touched me deeply. He was truly a genius..."

Musical Nationalism of the 19th Century

The period from approximately 1825 to 1900 is called Romanticism. In Europe, this was the era of political turbulences and the revolt of nations against the Austro-German influence. The Congress of Vienna held in 1814-1815 redrew European boundaries in a way that set off protests and rebellions. Politically, this reaction was labeled Nationalism, and its extent was such that it defined the period of Romanticism, both in emotion and thought, and consequently music as well.

“Nationalism” constitutes a “belief which, in the course of the nineteenth century... became the governing idea without always being held by those in government... the belief that it was to his nation - and not to a creed, a dynasty, or a class - that a citizen owed the first duty in a clash of loyalties.” (http://hunsmire.tripod.com/music/nationalism.html)

Politically, nationalism comprises two stages: in the first half of the 19th century, nationalists regarded themselves as citizens of the world; later the reaction became more aggressive. This second stage is discernible in music in works composed after 1860 — music in each nation thus reflected the nature of the local conflict.

Music during the period of nationalism was marked by innovation and exoticism. The composers strove for unique, distinguishable music rather than imitation of what was out there. That is why they incorporated folk songs and dances, which were monodic, and this in turn forced them to come up with new harmonies. Exoticism stood for the borrowing of another country's idioms. Russian nationalists even abandoned western European idoms in favor of the cultural elements available in the vast TsarTsarist Empire.

Still, to characterize nationalism in music is no easy task, because some works considered as its masterpieces did not contain a single folksong, as Steen observed in Smetana's The Bartered Bride. Since Nationalism is country specific by definition, its musical language is infused not only by national folk music and rhythms but, ultimately, it borrows inspiration from the nation's culture, language, habits, scenery, and the beauty of local color. (692)

In Russia, nationalism in music was exemplified by The Five (Balakirev, Cui, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Borodin); in Central Europe by Smetana, Dvorak, and Janacek; in Hungary by Bartok; in Norway by Grieg, and in Finland by Sibelius.

Nationalism in the Czech Lands

In the Czech Lands, this was a period of the National Revival, which called for liberal constitutional reforms and equal educational rights for Czech and German speakers. This was a reaction to the centralization policies of Emperor Franz Joseph I, when Bohemia became a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire administered from Vienna. Czech culture was threatened by German culture and German nationalism, which sought to unite all German-speaking peoples, including those living in Bohemia. There was a saying that a German will as soon do a good deed to a Slav 'as a snake will warm itself upon ice'. (steen 699)

The Czech language was therefore at the forefront of Czech nationalism and the survival of national identity. Science, literature and arts, especially in the first part of the century, strove to prove the national origin of the Czech Lands and document the moments of glory so as to prove that Czechs were not superior to their Habsburg masters. Smetana's operas celebrated and uplifted the language, which came to reflect modern needs. In the second half of the century, nationalism became increasingly vocal, relaxed laws were passed, Prague civic authorities started using the Czech language, and education in the Czech language started in 1862. A temporary national theater—the Provisional Theater—seating around 800, opened in 1862 to promote the national identity. Smetana's first opera, The Brandenburgers in Bohemia, was written for it. Czech Choral Society and the Artists' Club were founded at that time, with Smetana acting as a conductor at the former and the first head of the music section of the latter. This gradually reversed the ration of the German-speaking residents to the Czech-speaking ones: in late 1840s, more than half the people of inner Prague were German-speaking; by the 1880s, this number has shrunk to less than 14%.

In music, Czech nationalism was the most evident in opera, which had absorbed European influences. Czech operas bore the signature of Italian opera, while symphonies and chamber music had borrowed from their German and Austrian counterparts. To impart a distinctively Czech character, composers drew inspiration from folksongs; however, those did not differ from Western European folksongs as much as the Russian ones did, since Bohemia had had an unrestrained contact with mainstream European music.

Smetana, Dvorak, and Janacek were the foremost Romantic composers. Their nationalism and, thus, Czech nationalism in music, is manifested in the choice of national subjects for program music and operas, and in their musical language, which in Smetana’s case was descended from Liszt’s and in Dvorak’s case from Brahms. The melody was fresh and spontaneous, and the form and harmony rather nonconformist, laced with folk melodies and popular dances here and there. Janacek was the purest Czech nationalist composer, having renounced the styles of Western Europe.

Compositions

His first compositions included pieces for the piano, such as waltzes, bagatelles, and impromptus. But in 1863 he finished the singspiel Branibory v Cechach (Brandenburgers in Bohemia,with a libretto by Karel Sabina), which was a great success - and brought its author some much-needed finances. Described as a Bohemian rebellion against Teutonic invaders, the music is strongly Wagnerian but the Bohemian folk songs and dances are perceptible in it. Wiht the next three opearas—The Bartered Bride (conducted it himself.), Dalibor and LIbuse—he set the tone of Bohemia's musical theater.

The Bartered Bride

This is a comic opera in three acts. Yet, Smetana viewed his greatest and most popular opera with condescension, because he wrote it to silence the critics who dismissed his first opera as too Wagnerian and too pretentious. So the next opera was to be frivoulous and light, in stark contrast with his more serious and heroic pieces, which he felt were being neglected. W. J. Henderson said about it when it was first performed in America, "The chief charms of the opera are its incessant flow of melody, of fresh and piquant character, its bright and vivacious pictures of Bohemian life, its captivating dances, its excellent chracter sketches, its ismple yet unctuous comedy,a nd its admirable instrumentation. As a specimen of genuinely artistic comic operat it takes a commanding position." It offers insight into human character, its weaknesses and motivations. It was light and frivolous, aimed to entertain, yet it was a penetrating study of human psychology and emotion, w hich Smetana was not able to achieve in his serious operas. (ref Ewen 777)

The story is set in a small Bohemian village a century earlier, where a festival is taking place. All villagers are in a joyful, celebratory mood except John and Mary, whose love met with opposition from Mary's parents. THey want her to marry Vasek, a stuttering idiiot, who is a son of a welathy landowner. This match was arranged by the broker, Kecal (Chatterbox in English).

My Fatherland

Bohemian folk music was dominant also in his concert works, particularly the six-part My Fatherland, whose Vltava (The Moldau) is universally admited, and in his two autobiagraphical quartets From My Life.

THe first 4 poems, said Jan Lowenbach, are of "fiercely musical reflections, impressions of Bohemian nature and reminiscences of Bohemian history filtered through a sensitive musical imagination." (Ewen 779) Vy7sehrad is is a tonal picture of old Bohemia. The MOldau is the portrait of hte river Vltava which rises in the forests of south Bohemian and flows past PRague into the Elbe. Smetana's program: two springs pour forth their streams in the shade of the Bohemian forest, the one warm and gushing, the other cold and tranquil. THeir wave,s gayly flowing over their stony beds, join and glitter in the sun. The woodland brook, chattering along, becomes the river MOldau which, as its waters hurry through the valleys of Bohemia, becomes a mighty stream. ... the wide river bed in which it rolls on, in majestic calm, toward PRague, where, welcomed by time-honored Vysehrad, it disapears from the poet's gaze far on the horizon." (ewen 77y9)

Sarka - Ctirad murdered by his weetheart, an Amazon. SMetana also provided a detailed description of his music. Tabor - Hussites. Blanik - extension of Tabor (Hussite wars). From the Fields and Groves of Bohemia - on a fine summer day we stand in Bohemia's blessed fields, whose lovely scent of flowers and cool breezes fill us with inspiration. (steen 780).

From My LIfe - program for all 4 movmeents supplied by hte composer: 1. love of art in his youth, romantic supremacy, yearning for something which he could not define, and warning of future misfortune. 2. joyful days of his youth when he composed dance music enough to bury the world and was known as a passionaty lover of dancing. 3. the bliss of his first love to the girl who became his faithful wife. 4. discovered that he coud treat the national elements in music and the joy in following this path until deafness set in. a high E in the first violin, over tremolos in the other three strings, tells of his deafness.

Bohemia had for centuries been an Austrian crown land, and unlike RUssia, had always bene in contact with the mainstream of European music; her folksongs do nto differ from thoese of Western nations as much as do the Russian. nationalism of smetana and dovrak is apparent int he choice of national subjects for program music and operas, and int eh infusion of their basic musical language (smetana;s from liszt), with a melodic freshness and spontaneity, harmonic and formal nonchalance. Pitts Sanborn said of The Bartered Bride that it is not folk music "in a crapming sense. While distinctively of its native soil... [this music] possesses the universal qualities necessary to give it a world-wide currency. We of other countries delight in Czech rhythms, its national dances, the characteristic contour of its melodies, but we also find in this music more than local color and exotci charm; the flowing humanity is there that transcends limits and boundaries." (ref Ewen 775)

Jan Lowenbach added that "Smetana was privileged not only to hear ad imitate the spirit of the rich melodies and varied rhythms of his nation, but also to invent, to feel,a nd to express it in a new way and to adapt it to the spirit of modern times." (Ewen 775)

The peak of his production from this period is his Klavirni trio g moll (1855) (Piano trio in g minor), which reflected his grief over the loss of Bedriska.

Smetana was a great admirer of Franz Liszt, and they were in frequent contact through correspondence and personal meetings. He was gripped by Liszt's idea of the symphonic poem. This gave rise to such works as his Richard III., Valdstynuv tabor (Waldstein's Camp) and Hakon Jarl. although things did not immediately go well for him.

His string quartet in E minor, Z mého života (From My Life, composed in 1876), the first of only two quartets, is an autobiographical work. The final movement is punctuated by a piercing high E in the first violin which, Smetana explained, represents the devastating effects of his tinnitus. He may also be hinting at this personal misfortune with the piccolo scoring in Má vlast. In 1883 Smetana, suffering further progressive neurological effects of his illness, finally became insane, and was taken to a mental hospital in Prague, where he died the following year. He is interred in the Vyšehrad cemetery in Prague. in general his works were well received during his lifetime, with a few exceptions, such as his tragic opera Dalibor, written in 1867, which was heavily criticised.

Works

Operas

• Braniboři v Čechách (Brandenburgers in Bohemia) – 1863
• Prodaná nevěsta (The Bartered Bride) – 1866
• Dalibor – 1867
• Libuše – 1872
• Dvě vdovy (The Two Widows) – 1873
• Hubička (The Kiss) – 1876
• Tajemství (The Secret)
• Čertova stěna (The Devil's Wall)
• Viola (not completed) – 1884

Other

Cycle of symphonic poems Ma vlast (My Fatherland) 1874&ndash1879:

Vysehrad

Vltava:

Sarka

Z ceskych luhu a haju (From Czech Fields and Groves)

Tabor

Blanik

• String quartet From my Life – 1876
• Quartet Bohemian Dances
• Tone poem Wallensteins Lager – 1859

External Links

• The Composers of Bohemia
• Free Public Domain Sheet Music by Smetana at IMSLP
• http://www.radio.cz/en/html/hudba_romantismus.html
• http://www.radio.cz/en/article/37465

http://archiv.radio.cz/hrbitov/smetaneng.html

References & Further Reading

gammond

• Ewen, David (Edited by). The Complete Book of Classical Music. London: Hale, 1966. ISBN 0-709-03865-8.
• Ramba, Jiří. Slavné české lebky, antropologicko-lékařské nálezy jako pomocníci historie (Famous Czech Skulls, anthropological-medical findings as helpers of history), Prague: Galén, 2005. ISBN 80-7262-325-7.
• Steen, Michael. The Lives and Times of the Great Composers. Cambridge: Icon Books, 2003. ISBN 1-840-46485-2.
• Nationalism and its Effect on Music in the Romantic Era (1985)

by John Mileshttp://hunsmire.tripod.com/music/nationalism.html

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