Bedrich Smetana

Bedrich Smetana was born on 2 March 1824 in Litomysl, a small town in eastern Bohemia, then part of the Austrian Empire. His father, Frantisek Smetana, worked as a brewer for Count Waldstein and had done well enough to give his large family a comfortable home in the count's chateau brewery. Bedrich was the first surviving son after several daughters, and his arrival was celebrated with particular joy ^[1].

Music entered his life almost immediately. His father, an enthusiastic amateur violinist, taught the boy the rudiments of music, and Bedrich made his first public appearance as a pianist at the age of six, performing at a concert in Litomysl. The family moved several times during his childhood as his father changed brewing posts, so the boy's schooling passed through Jindrichuv Hradec, Jihlava, and other Bohemian towns ^[2].

As a teenager in Prague and later in Plzen, Smetana neglected his formal studies in favor of concerts, dances, and composing. He wrote piano pieces, especially polkas, for the social gatherings he loved. A diary entry from 1843, often cited by his biographers, records his youthful ambition to become, in technique a Liszt and in composition a Mozart. That same year he finished school in Plzen and moved to Prague with almost no money, determined to make music his profession ^[1].

Prague in the 1840s was not an easy city for a penniless young musician. Smetana survived by taking a post as music teacher to the children of Count Leopold Thun, which gave him a steady income while he studied theory and composition privately with Josef Proksch, one of the city's leading pedagogues ^[2].

In 1848, the year revolution swept through Europe, Smetana opened his own piano school in Prague, aided by a loan he had requested from Franz Liszt. Liszt could not send money but accepted the dedication of Smetana's Six Characteristic Pieces for piano and later helped get them published, beginning a friendship that lasted for decades. Smetana also took part, briefly, in the Prague uprising of June 1848, composing marches for the student legion and a Song of Freedom ^[1].

The repressive political climate that followed, together with personal grief, pushed him abroad. Three of his four daughters died within a short span in the mid 1850s, including Bedriska, a musically gifted child whose death in 1855 inspired his Piano Trio in G minor. In 1856 he accepted a position in Goteborg, Sweden, where he spent five years conducting, teaching, and writing symphonic poems influenced by Liszt. His first wife, Katerina, weakened by tuberculosis, died in 1859 during a journey home; he remarried the following year ^[3].

When political conditions in Austria eased after 1860 and plans advanced for a Czech language theatre in Prague, Smetana returned home for good in 1861, convinced that his future lay in building a national music for the Czech people ^[2].

The list of Bedrich Smetana achievements begins with opera. The Provisional Theatre, the first Prague stage devoted to works in Czech, opened in 1862, and Smetana set out to supply it with a national repertoire. His first opera, The Brandenburgers in Bohemia, won a competition for the best Czech historical opera and reached the stage in 1866 ^[1].

The same year brought the premiere of The Bartered Bride (Prodana nevesta), a comedy of village life that initially met a lukewarm reception but grew, through Smetana's revisions, into the most popular Czech opera ever written and the work by which he is known worldwide. In 1866 he was also appointed principal conductor of the Provisional Theatre, a post that placed him at the center of Prague's musical life for eight years ^[4].

He went on to complete eight operas in all. Dalibor (1868) treated a heroic legend and drew accusations of Wagnerism from conservative critics, while Libuse, finished in 1872, was conceived as a festival work for great national occasions; Smetana withheld it until the opening of the National Theatre in Prague in 1881 ^[2].

His crowning orchestral work is Ma vlast (My Homeland), a cycle of six symphonic poems composed between 1874 and 1879 that depicts Czech landscapes, legends, and history. Its second poem, Vltava (known abroad as The Moldau), traces the river's course from mountain springs through the Bohemian countryside to Prague, and has become one of the most frequently performed orchestral pieces of the nineteenth century ^[4]. The complete cycle traditionally opens the Prague Spring International Music Festival on 12 May, the anniversary of his death ^[5].

Smetana married the pianist Katerina Kolarova, a friend from his student years in Plzen, in 1849. The couple had four daughters, of whom only Zofie survived childhood. Katerina's death from tuberculosis in 1859 closed the most painful decade of his life; the Piano Trio in G minor and later the string quartet From My Life carry echoes of these losses ^[3].

In 1860 he married Bettina Ferdinandiova, the sister in law of his brother Karel. The second marriage produced two more daughters but was, by most accounts, less happy than the first, strained further in later years by illness and financial worry ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Bedrich Smetana beyond the public composer finds a man of strong convictions and thin skin. He fought long battles with Prague critics, above all Frantisek Pivoda, who accused him of subordinating Czech music to Wagner's methods. The disputes wore on his health and his standing at the theatre, though a faction of younger musicians, among them the critic Otakar Hostinsky, defended him vigorously ^[2].

In the summer of 1874 Smetana began to notice ringing and whistling in his ears. By late October of that year he was completely deaf. The cause is generally connected by modern scholars to syphilitic infection, and no treatment of the time could help. He resigned his conductorship of the Provisional Theatre and moved in 1876 to the village of Jabkenice, where his daughter Zofie lived with her forester husband ^[3].

Deafness did not silence him. Within weeks of losing his hearing he completed Vysehrad and Vltava, the first two poems of Ma vlast, and the remaining four followed over the next five years. In 1876 he wrote his String Quartet No. 1 in E minor, subtitled From My Life, an autobiographical work whose finale contains a sustained high harmonic in the first violin representing the fateful whistling that announced his deafness ^[4].

He also completed the operas The Kiss (1876), The Secret (1878), and The Devil's Wall (1882) while deaf, and began a second string quartet. The premiere of Libuse at the opening of the National Theatre on 11 June 1881, and a festival performance of the complete Ma vlast in November 1882, brought him public honor even as his health collapsed. By early 1884 his mental state, ravaged by the late stages of his illness, had deteriorated so far that his family placed him in the Prague lunatic asylum, where he died on 12 May 1884, aged 60. He was buried at Vysehrad cemetery in Prague, the resting place of Czech national figures ^[1].

Among the essential Bedrich Smetana facts is his position in Czech memory: at home he is honored as the father of Czech music, the composer who proved that opera and symphonic music could speak Czech. Antonin Dvorak and Leos Janacek, the two Czech composers with wider international fame, both built on ground Smetana had cleared, and Dvorak worked for a time as a violist in the theatre orchestra under Smetana's baton ^[2].

His music remains woven into Czech public life. Vltava serves almost as an unofficial national anthem, the Prague Spring festival opens each year with Ma vlast, and the Bedrich Smetana Museum, housed in a neo Renaissance building on the Vltava embankment in Prague, preserves his manuscripts, letters, and diaries ^[5]. The main concert hall of Prague's Municipal House bears his name, as does an annual opera festival in his birthplace, Litomysl.

Abroad, The Bartered Bride and Vltava carry his reputation, while performers and scholars continue to argue for the operas Dalibor and The Kiss and for the two string quartets. Any Bedrich Smetana biography must reckon with the drama of his final decade: a composer, entirely deaf, writing the works on which his fame chiefly rests. Musicologists such as Brian Large and John Clapham, who wrote the standard English language studies of his life, treat that late outpouring as one of the remarkable episodes in nineteenth century music ^[3].