Bedřich Smetana

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

Life

The Smetana monument in Litomyšl

Early Years

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

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.

Czech Music of the Romantic Era

This period saw the advance of the National Revival in the Czech Lands. The greatest display of these revivalist tendencies in the spirit of Romanticism appeared primarily in Czech opera, which was a blend of European influences. In opera it imitated the Italians,a nd in symphonies and chamber music it echoed the styles of German and Austrian masters. In the second part of the 19th century, Europe was flooded by nationalism, which spurred patirotism and national consciousness and the serach for a national art. In 1862, the national theater was founded, financed with donations from rich and poor alike. The theater served as a platform for staging Czech drama and operas. Smetana's first opera, The Brandenbrugers in Bohemia, was written for it.

Nationalism in music - Michael Steen asked the question of how can the language of music express as complete a subject as nationalism? Perphas by the use of folk music or rhythms associated with folk music and the language, he answers, but then disputes it by saying that The Bartered Bride does not contain a single folksong. (692) More probably, it ist hat composers draw inspiration from their people and the beauty of their country and use that inspiration to develop a personal style. (692)

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.

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. 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.

Smetana's Tomb

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) 1874-1879:

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)

Notes

External Links

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

Jiří Ramba: Slavné české lebky, antropologicko-lékařské nálezy jako pomocníci historie (Famous Czech Skulls, anthropological-medical findings as helpers of history), Galén, 2005, Prague, ISBN 80-7262-325-7

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