U UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI
Date: August 12, 2009
I, Erin K. Bennett , hereby submit this original work as part of the requirements for the degree of:
Doctor of Musical Arts in Piano Performance
It is entitled: Czech Nationalism in Music: A Study of Smetana's
"Czech Dances, Book 2" for Piano
Erin K. Bennett Student Signature:
This work and its defense approved by: Jonathan Kregor, Ph.D. Committee Chair: Elisabeth Pridonoff Eugene Pridonoff
Approval of the electronic document:
I have reviewed the Thesis/Dissertation in its final electronic format and certify that it is an accurate copy of the document reviewed and approved by the committee.
Committee Chair signature: Jonathan Kregor Czech Nationalism in Music: A Study of Smetana’s Czech Dances, Book 2 for Piano A document submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF MUSICAL ARTS in the Keyboard Studies Division of the College Conservatory of Music August 2009 by Erin Kathleen Bennett B.M., Rice University, 2001 M.M., University of Florida, 2004 Committee Chair: Jonathan Kregor, Ph.D.
ABSTRACT
This document examines Bed ich Smetana’s Czech Dances, Book 2, for piano, through the lens of nineteenth century Czech nationalism. This work is relatively rare in Smetana’s output for its overt quotation and paraphrasing of Czech folk tunes. The historical background of Czech nationalism is explored, incorporating its cultural antecedents and the conflicts and divisions that resulted as the movement expanded. To examine Smetana’s role in creating a conscious national style, this document will investigate the role of music in contributing to national identity and how “Czechness” is expressed in music. After considering the circumstances surrounding the composition of the Czech Dances, the collection will be analyzed for its varied usage of folk material, employing recent scholarship on the fashioning of national music as a framework.
iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This document is the final step in a degree that would not have been possible without the assistance and support from several important people. I would like to extend a sincere thank you Dr. Jonathan Kregor for his time and energy in helping to guide me on the path to writing this paper during one of his most eventful summers. I want to thank my piano professors and mentors, Eugene and Elisabeth Pridonoff, and
Dr. Michelle Conda, for their unfailing commitment and inspiration. From the three of them I learned how to become a confident, independent, and self motivated artist and scholar—qualities I needed in spades during the researching and writing of this document. I might never have been introduced to Smetana’s piano music were it not for my former piano teacher, Boaz Sharon, and for that, I will always be grateful. Thanks also go out to Tom Kernan and Amy Zigler for coming through with extra materials when I was away from the library. Many thanks to my parents, who have always provided me with their unwavering support and love, even when I have chosen the road less traveled. Finally, an enormous thank you to my husband, Jason, for his patience and support, his editing prowess, and his ability to answer every style related question I could throw at him.
v
CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ...... iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...... v
LIST OF EXAMPLES ...... viii
Chapter
INTRODUCTION ...... 1
1. THE RISE OF CZECH NATIONALISM...... 4
Definitions and Theories of Nationalism
A Historical Background of Bohemia
The Origins of Czech Nationalism
The Development of the Obrození
Restoration, Reconstruction, Reinvention
Politicization of the Obrození
The Development of Czech Music
2. NINETEENTH CENTURY NATIONAL MUSIC ...... 36
Music and National Identity
Frédéric Chopin and Polish Music
Franz Liszt and “Hungarian Music
The Role of Folk Music in National Identity
vi Czechness in Music
Czech Music before Smetana
Smetana and National Music
3. CZECH DANCES, BOOK 2 ...... 72
The Dances
Furiant
Slepi ka
Oves
Medv d
Cibuli ka
Dupák
Hulán
Obkro ák
Sousedská
Sko ná
“Czechness” in the Czech Dances
CONCLUSION...... 98
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 100
vii ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure Page
2.1. Erben, Popular Czech Songs and Nursery Rhymes, #588 ...... 68
2.2. Smetana, “Furiant” from The Bartered Bride, mm. 1 14...... 68
2.3. Smetana, “Vltava” from Má Vlast, mm. 40 47...... 69
2.4. Traditional, “Ko ka leze dírou”...... 70
2.5. Smetana, “Vltava” from Má Vlast, mm. 333 346...... 70
3.1. Smetana, “Furiant” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 29 36 ...... 76
3.2. Smetana, “Furiant” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 1 4...... 77
3.3. Smetana, “Furiant” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 167 174 ...... 77
3.4. Smetana, “Slepi ka” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 11 18 ...... 78
3.5. Erben, Popular Czech Songs and Nursery Rhymes, #592 ...... 80
3.6. Smetana, “Oves” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 9 13...... 80
3.7. Smetana, “Med d” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 5 16...... 81
3.8. Smetana, “Med d” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 17 24...... 82
3.9. Smetana, “Med d” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 104 111...... 82
3.10. Smetana, “Dupák” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 1 8...... 84
3.11. Erben, Popular Czech Songs and Nursery Rhymes, #471 ...... 85
3.12. Smetana, “Hulán” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 12 21...... 87
3.13. Smetana, “Hulán” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 41 44...... 87 viii 3.14. Smetana, “Hulán” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 62 75...... 88
3.15. Smetana, “Obkro ák” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 55 58...... 89
3.16. Erben, Popular Czech Songs and Nursery Rhymes, #114 ...... 89
3.17. Smetana, “Sko ná” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 1 2 ...... 91
3.18. Smetana, “Furiant” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 81 88 ...... 96
3.19. Smetana, “Furiant” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 284 291 ...... 96
3.20. Smetana, “Furiant” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 316 323 ...... 97
ix
INTRODUCTION
Bed ich Smetana (1824 1884) is widely acknowledged to be the father of a Czech national style of music. His most famous works, such as his opera The Bartered Bride and his celebrated tone poem Vltava, from the collection Má vlast, glorify the Czech lands and evoke the simple nobility of its peasants. His appealing mix of lyrical melodies, heroic fanfares, folk song like phrases, and national dance rhythms influenced subsequent Czech composers, including Antonín Dvo ák, Leoš Janá ek, and Bohuslav
Martin . These national elements can be found in Smetana’s works for solo piano, as well. Yet this part of his output is relatively unknown, despite the fact that it spans seven volumes in the critical edition of his piano works, Klavírní skladby.1 Within this output the Czech Dances represent the culmination of Smetana’s writing for the piano, demonstrating his skill as a pianist composer. Moreover, the collection, with its use of
Bohemian folk melodies, is an important illustration of Smetana’s national style.
The image of Smetana single handedly spearheading the Czech national movement in music, however, is misleading and neglects his far more complicated legacy. Czech nationalism as it developed in the nineteenth century was not a unified concept, but a complex and at times conflicting collection of ideals. Nor was Smetana’s
1 Bed ich Smetana, Klavírní skladby (“Piano Compositions”), ed. Jan Novotný (Prague: Supraphon, 1986 1990).
1 music straightforwardly nationalistic. His stylistic voice incorporated non Czech influences that at times put him at odds with the national establishment. To truly appreciate Smetana’s music we need to better understand nineteenth century Czech nationalism and the Czech cultural revival that served as its catalyst.
This document explores the notion of “Czechness” in the second volume of
Smetana’s Czech Dances for piano, setting the collection in the context of the larger nineteenth century movement of European nationalism. The first chapter focuses on broad definitions and trends in nineteenth century European nationalism and their specific application to the Czech lands. The subsequent discussion includes a historical background on the rise of nationalism in Bohemia, from its origins in the Czech linguistic revival to the larger cultural and political “awakening” that took place. Czech nationalism was a complicated movement, comprising a wholesale reinvention of the culture and reinterpretation of Bohemian history, and several differing ideologies consequently competed for Czech patriots’ allegiances. This chapter will help the reader fully grasp the complex roots of Czech nationalism in order to better understand how this affected the cultural scene in late nineteenth century Prague.
The second chapter focuses on the role music plays in the construction of national identity. To better appreciate how Smetana used his compositions to express
Czech nationalism, this chapter examines two other examples of national musical styles from the Habsburg realm that served as important models for the Czech composer: the
2
Polish inspired polonaises and mazurkas of Frédéric Chopin (1810 1849) and the gypsy inflected Hungarian Rhapsodies of Franz Liszt (1811 1886). As folk music and dance played a significant role in the construction of nineteenth century national identity, this chapter also explores how folk material—songs, dances, and legends—came to be appropriated for national purposes. The second half of this chapter is devoted to the manner in which the Czechs expressed their burgeoning national feeling in music, including both Smetana and his predecessors. The discussion of Smetana’s compositional style takes into account his conscious creation of a Czech national music, as well as his integration of progressive trends from the New German School.
Finally, the third chapter explores how this historical and cultural background informs the second volume of Smetana’s Czech Dances. The chapter opens with an investigation of Smetana’s motivation for composing the set and reflects on his decisions with regard to the use of folk material. This section examines each dance in greater detail, analyzing the score with an eye for the fusion of Czech musical elements and more progressive trends, using Michael Beckerman’s essay “In Search of Czechness in Music”2 as a methodological framework. It is this fusion that is at the heart of
Smetana’s national style.3
2 Michael Beckerman, “In Search of Czechness in Music,” 19th Century Music 10.1 (Summer, 1986): 61 73.
3 Beckerman, “In Search of Czechness in Music,” 66 67.
3 CHAPTER 1
THE RISE OF CZECH NATIONALISM
Had there been no medieval Bohemian state, there might very possibly have been no modern Czech nation either. But this modern nation is not so much rooted in that medieval experience as retrospectively reconstructed out of it.1 Native born Bohemians began defining themselves as “Czech” in the nineteenth century. The seeds of Czech nationalism began to sprout when scholars first set about the task of reviving Czech as a literary language. In the Middle Ages Czech literature had flourished, but centuries under Habsburg rule left Czech as a written language neglected and unused. What began as a restoration of the Czech language, however, gradually gathered momentum as an overall cultural revival, and eventually led to political leanings as well. To the Czechs, this period is known as the obrození, which can be translated as “revival,” “awakening,” or “rebirth.” The original goal of the obrození was not political autonomy or nationhood, but an attempt to recapture what was perceived as the Czechs’ former glory.
Czech Nationalism is a complicated movement, with origins in the
Enlightenment and a broader history of Europe, in particular the Habsburg Empire. It is linked with the development of other localized nationalisms and influenced by the
French Revolution and its aftermath. To set Czech nationalism in context, an
1 Derek Sayer, The Coasts of Bohemia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 52. 4 investigation of some general definitions and ideas as to how nationalism developed
across Europe in the nineteenth century will be helpful for the present study. A further
examination of major events in Czech history will point to the roots of the obrození and
demonstrate the process of how the Czech language and culture were not only revived,
but reinvented, by retrospectively reconstructing the Czech past.
Definitions and Theories of Nationalism
Nationalism has been described as an “imagined community,”2 or “a sentiment
binding a group of people together through common institutions and culture.”3 Most
recently it has been defined in more detail as “an ideological movement to attain and
maintain autonomy, unity, and identity on behalf of a population, some of whose
members believe it to constitute an actual or potential ‘nation.’”4 In other words,
nationalism does not presume the political existence of the state; in fact, nationalism
typically takes place prior to the existence of “the nation.” It is not the nation that
generates nationalism, but its people. Nationalists mobilize the community, bring
people together, and solidify the “national” identity through education, language, the
arts, and the cultivation of national symbols. 2 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983).
3 John F. N. Bradley, Czech Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1984), 1.
4 Anthony D. Smith, Ethno symbolism and Nationalism: A Cultural Approach (New York: Routledge, 2009), 61.
5 The process of creating a national identity grows out of a sense of connectedness between people, often a perception of being ancestrally related.5 Self definition can be further cultivated by establishing a collective name and defining boundaries—not only geographical, but linguistic and cultural boundaries, as well. The codification of a myth or myths of a community’s origins, combined with additional symbolic cultivation, provides a sense of shared values, myths, memories, and traditions to unite a group of people. As feelings of national unity emerge, a sense of territorialism can develop within the community, an attachment to a historic territory that comes to embody a geographic type of nationalism as well. In this process the homeland is sanctified as the location of previous battles and heroic deeds, historic sites, or unique natural features become sacred symbols of “the nation.” In the end these factors—history, archaeology, philology, sociology, geography, the arts—all contribute not only to the unification of a community, but to the authentication of the nation.6
According to nationalism scholar Anthony D. Smith, all nationalisms share several common themes or motifs: autonomy, unity, identity, authenticity, the
5 Smith, Ethno symbolism, 45 46.
6 This view of nationalism is discussed at length in many books by Anthony D. Smith. See Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Study of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism (London and New York: Routledge, 1998); The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); Myths and Memories of the Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Ethno symbolism and Nationalism: A Cultural Approach (London and New York: Routledge, 2009). For a more modernist perspective, see Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983.
6 Homeland, dignity, continuity, and destiny.7 These themes are present to greater or lesser degrees in the development of every nation, and are certainly found in the rise of
Czech nationalism. Also central to the rise of Czech and other Eastern European nationalisms is the role of Romanticism and the ideas of Johann Gottfried von Herder
(1744 1803), who argued that each people had a unique identity and original voice owing to their language and culture.8 Herder argued that the “nation” was a “natural” occurrence, with origins rooted in the notion of family, race, and ethnic ties.9 Related families banded together to form tribes who, in turn, joined with other tribes with whom they shared common ties of kinship, language, and culture, to form nations.
According to Herder, “A nation is a plant as natural as a family; it only has more branches.”10 Herder objected to “the state,” however, which he perceived as an artificial creation that tied together disparate nations: “Nothing is therefore as alien to the
7 Smith, Ethno symbolism, 62 63.
8 See Lonnie Johnson, Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 130, and Derek Sayer, The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 71.
9 Tomáš G. Masaryk, The Meaning of Czech History, ed. René Wellek, trans. Peter Kussi (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974), 29.
10 Johann Gottfried von Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Mesnchheit, Book 9, iv; quoted in Masaryk, The Meaning of Czech History, 29. For further reading of this and Herder’s other major treatise related to this study, Essay on the Origin of Language, see also Johann Gottfried von Herder, J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, ed. and trans. F. M. Barnard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). 7 purpose of government as the unnatural expansion of states, and the wild mingling of human races and peoples under a single scepter.”11
According to nationalism scholar John Hutchinson, a distinction should be made between cultural and political nationalisms. The goal of political nationalism is the creation of an independent state, while the purpose of cultural nationalism is to develop the language, culture, and institutions to create a self sustaining nation. Hutchinson does not see each form of nationalism as mutually exclusive, however, but as complimentary movements that may be used in alternation according to the stages of a nation’s development. Cultural nationalism begins to influence political events after completing a three step process of preparation, crystallization, and articulation of sociopolitical goals.12 During the initial preparatory state, intellectuals, scholars, poets, and artists begin to give definition to the idea of a culturally distinct nation. In the crystallization stage, institutions are established, including universities, academies, museums, journals, and language revival groups, to solidify the concept of a distinct national culture. Once the population becomes nationally aware and accepts their existence as a unique entity, cultural nationalism enters its final stage as leaders begin to clearly articulate their political goals, propelling the movement into a new stage of political nationalism. 11 Masaryk, The Meaning of Czech History, 29.
12 Catherine B. Shannon, review of The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State, by John Hutchinson, The American Historical Review 95 (April 1990): 504.
8 Music and the arts play a significant role in the first and especially the second stages of cultural nationalism. Works of visual art, theatrical performances, and musical compositions can provide a tangible representation of national ideas; furthermore the arts are essential for both the dissemination of ideas to the masses and for recruitment to the national cause. Stylized folk dances such as Chopin’s polonaises and mazurkas, orchestral tone poems, like those by Sibelius, and operas on national themes such as those by Verdi solidify national ideas not only for the nation represented, but present a fully formed national identity to the outside world as well. These types of genres and works are present in Smetana’s output, and are illustrated by operas such as The
Bartered Bride and Libuše, tone poems such as the movements of Ma vlást, and collections of stylized ballroom and folk dances, including both volumes of Czech Dances for piano.
A Historical Background of Bohemia
An examination of Czech history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seems remote from a study of Smetana and nineteenth century development of Czech nationalism, but is nevertheless highly relevant. Events including the start of Habsburg hereditary rule over the lands of the Bohemian Crown and the defeat at the Battle of
White Mountain became etched into the Czech psyche to such a significant extent that the symbolism of the battle and the political repercussions of its aftermath are essential to understand the roots of Czech nationalism.
9 Bohemia came under Hapsburg control in 1526, when Archduke Ferdinand of
Austria (1503 1564) was elected King of Bohemia after the death of the childless King
Louis II (1506 1526). Bohemia remained much the same, however, enjoying the liberal atmosphere and noble patronage, and stubbornly resisting any attempts at Habsburg centralization. Religious tensions between Catholics and Protestants had persisted since the days of the reformer Jan Hus (c. 1372 1415), but by the early seventeenth century had entered a period of tenuous stability. This balance was jeopardized when the devoutly Catholic Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II (1578 1637) tried to impose religious uniformity throughout the kingdom. In protest, the predominantly Protestant
Bohemian nobles threw two of Ferdinand II’s administrative representatives and their secretary out one of the windows of the Prague Castle, in what became known as the
“Second Defenestration of Prague.”13
The Bohemian estates instead elected the Protestant Frederick V of the Palatinate as King of Bohemia, thereby dragging both Protestants and Catholics across Europe into the conflict and putting in motion events that would lead to the Thirty Years’ War.
Twenty thousand Bohemian nobles faced off against twenty five thousand Catholic mercenaries, led by the Spanish Flemish nobleman Tserclae von Tilly, at the Battle of
White Mountain (Bilá hora, in Czech):
13 The first defenestration of Prague, in 1419, was carried out by Hussites from the Town Hall.
10 The Battle of White Mountain had none of those epic qualities one would expect from [a] confrontation with such profound consequences. More of a skirmish than a clash of cosmic forces, it lasted less than an hour. Tilly’s professional soldiers of fortune scattered their poorly organized opponents, and Ferdinand II proceeded with the work of dismantling Bohemian independence.14 Such a short battle seems entirely unrelated to an examination of nineteenth century
Czech nationalism, and yet this single event represented “the most cataclysmic event in modern Czech history.”15 The repercussions of the battle resonated throughout the remainder of the seventeenth century, as well as through the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century the Battle of White Mountain became a rallying national symbol and an emblem of earlier national struggles, despite the fact that the battle was, at its core, a religious struggle, and not a national one.
In the aftermath of the Battle of White Mountain, Ferdinand II had many of the noble leaders tried and executed, and expelled the Protestant nobles and burghers from
Bohemia, confiscating their land. Over three quarters of privately held land changed hands in the 1620s, awarded or cheaply sold to the mercenary soldiers who had won the battle and to the Catholic Bohemian nobles who had remained loyal to the emperor.16 Approximately 150,000 people left the Bohemian lands to escape political or religious persecution, including not only 185 noble families, but other “carriers of Czech
14 Johnson, Central Europe, 89.
15 Sayer, Coasts of Bohemia, 45.
16 Sayer, Coasts of Bohemia, 45.
11 culture like urban bourgeoisie, ministers, and professors.”17 Ferdinand II’s mercenaries were foreigners—not only German, but Flemish, Spanish, Italian, and Irish; ennobling them profoundly changed the makeup of Bohemia’s aristocracy. The formerly large class of nobles, “predominantly Czech, Protestant, and recalcitrant, was replaced by a smaller one, which was ‘German,’ Catholic, and loyal to the Hapsburgs.”18
In addition to the drastic change in population, Ferdinand II made permanent changes to the politics and governance of Bohemia, including making the Bohemian crown a hereditary possession rather than an elected office, and turning the Bohemian lands into a dynastic province. A Jesuit administration assumed control of Prague
University and oversaw all schools in Bohemia. They further created a ruthless and lasting form of censorship that remained in place until the Josephine reforms of the
1780s. Published indexes of banned books, such as the Index Bohemicorum librorum prohibitorum, dictated that all Czech books published in Bohemia between 1414 and 1635 contained heresies that needed to be rooted out. According to Derek Sayer, “Much that had thus far defined Czech history, and made Czechs who they were, could not be spoken of. The very language itself had acquired the taint of heresy.”19 In such a climate, even books by those high in the Catholic hierarchy were suspect. Pope Pius II’s Historia
17 Johnson, Central Europe, 89.
18 Johnson, Central Europe, 90.
19 Sayer, Coasts of Bohemia, 49.
12 Bohemica (1458) was listed in the Index, and the Jesuit priest Bohuslav Balbín z Vorli né’s
(1621 1688) most famous work, A Defense of the Slavonic Language, in Particular Czech (c.
1670), was not permitted to be published until 1775, almost one hundred years after his death. (Tellingly, Balbín’s Defense was initially published in Latin—a Czech version was not released until 1869.) Bohemia, in the aftermath of White Mountain and through the later part of the eighteenth century, became a stunted, provincial, and increasingly
“Germanized” region within the Hapsburg Empire; the Czechs lost their crown, their nobility, much of their population, their language, and ultimately their culture.
Change finally came to Bohemia during the reigns of Empress Maria Theresa
(1717 1780) and her son Joseph II (1741 1790). During her rule from 1740 1780, Maria
Theresa sought to consolidate the empire and improve its efficiency, enacting a number of administrative, legal, and educational reforms. In 1774 she introduced a system of universal education (in German) throughout the empire; in the Bohemian lands this created elementary schools for each parish, secondary schools in larger towns, and centers for training new teachers in both Prague and Brno. Joseph II’s reforms were similarly targeted for efficiency, modernization, and further to shift power away from the church and towards the state. While he eased censorship rules, abolishing the Index of prohibited books, he also made German the sole official language for all administrative offices and higher education. Joseph II closed a number of monasteries
(particularly those not serving educational or medical needs), abolished serfdom, and
13 most significantly, passed the Patent of Tolerance in 1781, which guaranteed religious freedom for the kingdom’s Protestants for the first time since White Mountain.
In practice the Josephine reforms were designed to consolidate the power of the state, improve efficiency, and to put an end to older, feudal practices. The choice of
German as an administrative language was to both lessen the significance of Latin (and by extension, the Church) and to create a unified language with which to govern an empire that encompassed several different language groups. But the choice of the
German language angered many from the Czech lands, and curtailed some of the potential upward mobility offered by the new civil service. A single imperial administrative and education language greatly lessened the likelihood that the Czech language would ever be revived as a written language.20
Yet Czech was by no means a dead language. Although the upper classes no longer spoke Czech except to communicate with their hired help, it continued to be spoken both in the countryside and in the towns, although it was, by the late eighteenth century, considered a rough, uncouth language. Ironically, the Catholic Church also helped to maintain the language. While church officials were German speaking, most of the parish priests came from Czech peasant households. The renowned Slavic philologist and historian Abbé Josef Dobrovský (1753 1829) was on the forefront of the revival of written Czech. His works, including The History of Czech Language and
20 Sayer, Coasts of Bohemia, 67.
14 Literature (1792), Detailed Grammar of the Czech Language (1809) and a two volume Czech
German Dictionary (1802, 1821), helped to extend the vocabulary and codify the grammar of the Czech language.
The nobility also began to endorse the idea of a language revival. Writing in 1773
(in German), Count František Josef Kinský (1739 1829) stressed the importance of pupils learning their mother tongue prior to Latin: “I confess that as a good descendent of the
Slavs I have inherited the prejudice that if the mother tongue of a Frenchman is French and of a German, German, then the mother tongue of a Czech [Böhmen] must be
Czech.”21 Czech, Kinský argued, was a useful language to learn, as landowners may find it useful to communicate with their peasants, and officers with troops who might only speak Czech.
The Bohemian nobility, influenced by the spirit of the Enlightenment, also began to establish academies, scientific societies, and cultural institutions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Throughout much of the eighteenth century the Catholic
Church held the monopoly on intellectual activities and research. The Josephine reforms which disbanded the Jesuits and lessened the overall power of the Catholic
Church left gaps in the intellectual life of the empire that the nobility increasingly rose to fill. The new organizations they founded in the final decades of the eighteenth
21 As quoted in Hugh LeCaine Agnew, “Czechs, Germans, Bohemians? Images of Self and Other in Bohemia to 1848,” in Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe, ed. Nancy M. Wingfield (New York: Berghahn, 2003), 56.
15 century included the Royal Society of Bohemia (1784), the Patriotic Economic Society of
the Czech Kingdom (1788), and the Society of Patriotic Friends of Art (1790). The latter
organization helped to establish Bohemia’s first art gallery in 1796 and Prague’s
Academy of Fine Arts in 1799. In 1783, Count František Antonín Nostic Rieneck (1725
1794) opened Bohemia’s first public theater, dubbed “The Count’s National Theater”
(Gräfliches Nationaltheater; Hrab cí Národní divadlo), inscribing across the portico the Latin
motto Patriae et musis (“To the Fatherland and the Muses”).22
The establishment of Bohemian cultural and intellectual institutions continued
into the nineteenth century. Founded by the Bohemian Estates in 1806, the Prague
Polytechnic was the first technical institute of higher education in the Austrian Empire.
The Prague Conservatory, one of the oldest music conservatories in Europe, opened in
1811. In 1818, Supreme Burgrave Count František z Kolovrat (1778 1861) proclaimed the
establishment of a National Museum in Prague.23
Although these activities appear to be (and in many ways function as) the seeds
of the obrození, Derek Sayer argues that the activities of Bohemia’s nobility, and even of
Abbé Dobrovský, were merely representative of the wider European spirit of the
Enlightenment:
22 Sayer, Coasts of Bohemia, 55. The theater was later purchased by the Bohemian Estates and from that day forward became known as the Estates Theater.
23 Housed for many years in the palaces of several noblemen, the National Museum did not get its permanent home on Wenceslas Square until 1891.
16 These institutions were not early manifestations of a Czech national rebirth. Many of them were hijacked for that project later, and their foundation retrospectively appropriated for nationalist genealogies, but that is a different matter. They were the product of a particular historical moment and a particular constellation of interests.24 Scholars instead attribute the motivations of the Bohemian aristocracy to a so called
“Land Patriotism,” differentiated from nationalism by a devotion to the Bohemian
“homeland” ( eská vlast), rather than the “Czech nation” ( eský národ).25 The nobility did much to assist in the revival of Czech language and culture, but still chose to speak, read, and write almost entirely in German and French. The “national” theater established by Count Nostic staged performances almost exclusively in German throughout most of the nineteenth century.
The Origins of Czech Nationalism
If the aristocrats’ efforts to restore Prague’s intellectual life was not nationalism, what, then, was the origin of nationalist sentiment in the Czech lands? Many early nineteenth century nationalists like Josef Jungmann might have described it as a resistance to the perceived increasing “Germanization” of the empire resulting from the
24 Sayer, Coasts of Bohemia, 62.
25 Sayer, Coasts of Bohemia, 57. See also Josef V. Polišenský, Aristocrats and the Crowd in the Revolutionary Year 1848: A Contribution to the History of Revolution and Counter Revolution in Austria, trans. Frederick Snider (Albany: State University of New York Press, c. 1980), 75, and Andre Liebich, “Introduction: Altneuländer or the Vicissitudes of Citizenship in the New EU States,” in Citizenship Policies in the New Europe, ed. Rainer Bauböck, Bernhard Perchinig, and Wiebke Sievers (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 22.
17 Josephine reforms. Faced with German oppression, the Czech intelligentsia sought to
revive their language as a means of elevating their “nation.” The roots of Czech
nationalism, however, are far more complicated. Czech nationalism scholar John F. N.
Bradley summarizes probable causes ranging from a wider European trend towards
enlightened reason, to a domestic origin that owed much the Bohemian noble and
peasant classes. Marxist scholars have argued that Czech nationalism stemmed from the
end of feudal society and the nineteenth century economic revival and rise of capitalism.
To all of these arguments, Bradley adds a contingent based on demographics.26
One of the likely unintended consequences of the agricultural, fiscal, educational,
and administrative reforms initiated during the reigns of Maria Theresa and Joseph II
was a substantial increase in population, which in the mid eighteenth century for the
first time reached and surpassed its pre 1620 levels.27 This population growth took
place almost entirely in the Czech dominated countryside; the Germanized cities and
towns populations saw little increase. Improvements in education led to a much more
literate population, which in turn demanded new material to read. The body of Czech
literature grew tremendously during this time, and distribution improved with
enhanced transportation and communication systems. The abolition of serfdom,
combined with Joseph II’s economic reforms also provided new economic opportunities 26 John F. N. Bradley, Czech Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Boulder, CO: Eastern European Monographs, 1984), 2 5.
27 Bradley, Czech Nationalism, 5.
18 in the larger urban areas, and gave the peasants the opportunity to move into those towns to take advantage of them. As a result, the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed a profound shift in the social classes of the Czech lands. Before the reforms, the Czech population consisted predominantly of illiterate peasants with a small class of Bohemian nobility; towards the nineteenth century the population became more educated, more upwardly mobile, and a new, Czech bourgeoisie was formed.
To run his reformed imperial administration, Joseph II needed more people to join the ranks of the civil service. Historically these positions went to the nobility; but while the top positions were still filled by members of the aristocracy, competitive exams, not social class, became the new basis for recruitment. Given the number of
Slavs in the Hapsburg Empire, some positions required bilingual officials. Where
Germans were reluctant to learn Slavonic languages, positions were filled by Slavs. Yet for all of the gains made by the Bohemians, there were still obstacles to their upward mobility to the higher ranks in comparison to their German brethren. This discrimination naturally led to tensions along national lines.
The Development of the Obrození
A more aggressive form of nationalism began to develop under the influence of the intellectuals in early nineteenth century Prague. The linguist and poet Josef
Jungmann (1773 1847) was a leading figure in the Czech National Revival whose
19 contributions to the expansion and codification of written Czech were enormous. He
published the first modern history of the Czech language in 1825, entitled History of
Czech Literature or Systematic Survey of Czech Writings, with a Short History of the Nation,
Education, and Language, and created the largest Czech dictionary of his time.28
Jungmann also demonstrated the potential for Czech as an expressive language
by translating works of Schiller, Chateaubriand, Goethe, and most famously, Milton’s
entire Paradise Lost. As a scholar and translator who “approached the language as a
patriot first and a scholar second,”29 however, some of his decisions were also
controversial. In his translations Jungmann did not rely solely on the vocabulary of
spoken Czech, but borrowed words and grammar from medieval Czech literature.
When that did not suffice, in a move that angered some fellow scholars, he borrowed
from other Slavonic languages or invented new words and expressions to suit his
needs.30
Tellingly, among his translations Jungmann also drew upon selections from the
works of Johann Gottfried von Herder, whose writings were influential to the early
Czech nationalists. Herder argued that culture—poems, stories, folklore, songs, and
most importantly, language—formed the connective tissue that united a group of
28 Jungmann’s 120,000 entry Czech German Dictionary (1834 39) took him over thirty years to compile and was published in five volumes.
29 Sayer, Coasts of Bohemia, 71.
30 Sayer, Coasts of Bohemia, 109.
20 people into a cultural linguistic nation, with the common volk (people) as “the most important curators of a national culture.”31 Within his writings, Herder singled out the
Slavs as “charitable, almost extravagantly hospitable, devoted to their rustic independence, yet loyal and law abiding and contemptuous of pillaging and looting,” and painted the Germans as “aggressive, warlike, and autocratic.”32 This line of thought was highly influential on the burgeoning Czech national movement, and legitimized their self portrayal of the epic struggle of the Slavic people, fighting against the German aggressors to regain their former freedoms.
In a parallel to the German Grimm brothers, several prominent Bohemian scholars collected national folk songs, folk tales, proverbs, and nursery rhymes. Author and translator František Ladislav elakovský (1799 1852) came out with one of the first anthologies in Bohemia, Slovanské národní písn (Slav National Songs), released in three volumes from 1822 to 1827, and followed it with Mudrosloví národa slovanského (Popular
Proverbs of the Slav Nation) in 1852. Karel Jaromír Erben (1811 1870) was secretary to the National Museum from 1846, the first official archivist for the city of Prague from
1851, and from 1849, the official translator of laws into Czech. His lifelong interest in ethnography led him to collect and publish his two volume Písn národní v echách
31 Johnson, Central Europe, 131. See also Herder’s Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (1807).
32 Johnson, Central Europe, 132. For the complete text of Herder’s chapter on the Slavs see Johann Gottfried von Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man, trans. T. Churchill (London: J. Johnson, 1803).
21 (National Songs in Bohemia) in 1842 and 1845, and the thematically organized
Prostonárodní eské písn a íkadla (Popular Czech Songs and Nursery Rhymes) from
1862 64, from which Smetana would later borrow folk tunes to use in his second volume of Czech Dances. A poet in his own right, many of Erben’s folk themed ballads from the 1853 collection Kytice z pov ti národních (A Garland of National Myths) were subsequently used by Dvo ák as the poetic basis for the composer s symphonic poems
The Golden Spinning Wheel, The Wild Dove, The Noon Witch, and The Water Goblin, as well as serving as texts for a few of his songs.
Another major revivalist in the obrození was František Palacký (1798 1876).
Regarded as the father of the modern Czech nation, Palacký was one of the most significant figures in the political and cultural life of Bohemia, in general, and Prague, in particular. In 1831 he was appointed official Land historian by the Bohemian Estates.
He was instrumental in founding the Journal of the National Museum (1827) and the
Matice eská (1831), an organization to support the publication of Czech scholarly and scientific literature, and later in the 1860s, he helped to launch the newspapers Národní listy (National Paper), Národ (Nation), and Pokrok (Progress). When a committee was instituted to raise funds to build a National Theater, he was its first chairman. In politics,
Palacký presided over the first pan Slav Congress in Prague in 1848.
But Palacký was most famous for his five volume History of the Czech Nation in
Bohemia and Moravia (1836 67), first published in German. For this monumental work
22 Palacký relied on a number of primary sources, culled from his research in over seventy
European archives. In his preface to the 1848 Czech language edition, Palacký wrote:
From my early youth I had no higher wish for my earthly life than to serve my beloved nation by giving a faithful account of its past, in which it would recognize itself as in a mirror and regain consciousness of what it needs.33 The latter part of his inscription reveals both the intentions and ultimate success of his grand project: that the Czech people would “regain consciousness” or “awaken” to recapture their former glory. Palacký’s history frames the medieval Czech lands as an early nation state, a vast empire with Prague as its capital. His history is inflected with national sentiment, occasionally going so far as to reinvent, reinterpret, or reappropriate events and symbols of the Czech past. In Palacký’s eyes, the Hussite Wars marked a time when, “a century before Luther, the Czechs stood up ‘against all.’”34 Prague was no longer considered to be a provincial town in the Habsburg Empire, but remembered as the illustrious capital of the fourteenth century Holy Roman Empire.
Although Palacký’s work ends with the Habsburgs rise to power in 1526, his
History laid the groundwork for later authors to similarly reinterpret events under
Habsburg rule, such as the revolt of the Czech Estates in 1618 20 and the subsequent years of absolutism. Instead of a Protestant Catholic conflict, the revolt, which included the Battle of White Mountain, was perceived as a national uprising. Those martyred or
33 Sayer, Coasts of Bohemia, 128.
34 Sayer, Coasts of Bohemia, 134. Emphasis original.
23 exiled in the battle and its aftermath were retrospectively regarded as “Czech” patriots.
In this way, Palacký and his successors constructed continuity between the autonomous, medieval Czech state and the nineteenth century obrození, with the intervening years of
Habsburg rule as a brief interruption of “darkness.”35
Restoration, Reconstruction, Reinvention
Based in part on this type of wholesale reinterpretation, Czech scholar Vladimír
Macura describes the Bohemian obrození as a movement defined by artificiality. Early language revivalists, including Dobrovský and Jungmann, reinvented the Czech written language, sometimes relying on other Slavic languages or neologisms to expand the vocabulary and expressive power of the language. According to Macura, one goal was
“to demonstrate the variety of the mother tongue and to argue for its advantages over the German language,” with the result that “the artificial and exclusive ‘high Czech’ became scarcely comprehensible, even for active participants in the patriotic movement, and radically strayed from colloquial speech.”36 A number of Czech language scholarly and literary works were published in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries before there was enough of a Czech reading public to digest them. The language revival
35 Sayer, Coasts of Bohemia, 137.
36 Vladimír Macura, “Problems and Paradoxes of the National Revival,” in Bohemia in History, ed. Mikuláš Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 189 90.
24 thus preceded the cultural revival, obscuring the lack of a coherent Czech cultural movement until the obrození could sufficiently catch up.
Nineteenth century Czechs did much to reinvent or reconstruct their culture.
Translations by Jungmann and others were used not only to expand the language, but to create the appearance of a Czech culture. Some translators did not feel the need to cite the original author’s name, simply passing the translation off as their own work.
Names were changed for both characters and places, substituting Czech names or historical figures for original names, and setting stories in domestic locales in place of international destinations. For example, the original German text in a poem by F. L.
Stolberg: “ihr liebe deutsche Frauen” was replaced with “mladé dívky eské” (young
Czech girls).37
Constructing the culture of the present in nineteenth century Bohemia also required reexamining, reevaluating, and in some cases, rewriting the past. Jan Hus and
Hussites like Jan Žižka were elevated to the status of national heroes, even though they had only recently been regarded as heretics. Early philologists like Dobrovský were put on a pedestal as shining examples of patriotism and their legacies were systematically reinterpreted as aggressively nationalist. The Battle of White Mountain was portrayed as a decisive turning point in “Czech” history. In its aftermath the Czechs became
“sacrificial victims” of the vilified Habsburgs, and the battlefield itself was likened to
37 Macura, “Problems and Paradoxes,” 196n21.
25 Golgotha.38 The goal of the nationalists throughout the first half of the nineteenth century was not to create a “nation,” but to recapture former Czech glory.
Although the Bohemian obrození was primarily a secular, anti Habsburg (and hence, often anti Catholic) movement, religious vocabulary and imagery was frequently used in reference to nationalism, and national symbols became sacred. According to
Vladimír Macura, the Czech language and Bohemian history and culture were viewed as holy:
The everyday cultural and propagandistic activity of patriots was clothed in the ritual symbolism of sacrifice and made sacred together with the whole of Czech cultural production. Czech literature, language, theatre—all these were accepted as holy, sacral, and untouchable values.39 Furthermore, important features of local topography were also sanctified: the city of
Prague (especially Prague Castle and Vyšehrad hill), the Vltava river, the Krkonoše mountains, Blaník and Radhošt , and the Tatry mountains of Slovakia.40 In the hands of the revivalists—authors, playwrights, poets, composers, and other members of the intelligentsia—these geographic elements became powerful symbols of the cultural landscape.
38 Josef Petrá and Lydia Petrá ová, “The White Mountain as a Symbol in Modern Czech History,” in Bohemia in History, ed. Mikuláš Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 154.
39 Macura, “Problems and Paradoxes,” 193.
40 Macura, “Problems and Paradoxes,” 193.
26 Where revivalists could not reach back into history and find enough examples and artifacts to promote native high culture, elaborate hoaxes or forgeries were created to fill in the gaps and to promote the greatness of past literary achievements.41 František
elakovský, famous for his ethnographic collections as well as his translations and original poetry, created a literary hoax based upon an invented poetess, Žofie Jandová.
The farce was so pervasive that some of “Jandová’s” poetry was published abroad in a
British anthology, John Bowring’s Cheskian Anthology being A History of the Poetical
Literature of Bohemia, with Translated Specimens (1832).42 Old Czech manuscripts were frequently “discovered” in the early decades of the nineteenth century, including the
Rukopis královédvorský (Manuscript of Dv r Králové), “found” in 1817, and the Rukopis zelenohorský (Manuscript of Zelená Hora), anonymously sent to Count Kolovrat in 1818.
The highly influential manuscripts, allegedly dating from the thirteenth and tenth centuries, respectively, contained poetry about the mythical origins of the first Czech dynasty. Josef Dobrovský included the Manuscript of Dv r Králové in the updated editions of his History of Czech Language and Literature. František Palacký relied on both manuscripts as historical sources for his History of the Czech Nation. Countless artists, including authors, poets, sculptors, painters, and composers, drew inspiration from the
41 Ewelina Warner, “Mystification as a Cultural and Humoresque Phenomenon in Modern Czech Literature Against the Background of European Cultures (With Special Reference to Jára da Cimrman),” (M.Phil. thesis, University of Glasgow, 2007), 20.
42 Macura, “Problems and Paradoxes,” 192.
27 two collections, even after rumors surfaced questioning their authenticity;43 the libretto to Smetana’s opera Libuše is partially based on the Manuscript of Zelená Hora.
Politicization of the Obrození
With the newly flourishing Czech language and the accompanying developments in Czech culture, the obrození began to take on more political overtones.
In April 1848 Palacký rejected an offer to represent the Bohemian Lands at the
Vorparliament in Frankfurt (also known as the Frankfurt Assembly), citing among his reasons his inability to attend an event intended to create a unified German nation:
“The object of your assembly is to establish a federation of the German nation . . . I am not a German . . . I am a Bohemian of Slavic blood.”44
In June Palacký presided over a Pan Slav Congress in Prague, bringing together representatives from Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and other Slavs throughout the Habsburg
Empire, but the event was cut short when a popular uprising broke out in the streets.
Prince Alfred von Windischgrätz, commander of the imperial forces, dissolved the
Congress, declared martial law, and began shelling Prague. A period of harsh absolutism followed under the guidance of Emperor Franz Josef’s interior minister,
Alexander Bach. The empire’s constitution was abolished, Bach reduced freedom of the 43 Sayer, Coasts of Bohemia, 146.
44 Robert Bideleux and Ian Jeffries, A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change (London: Routledge, 1998), 307 308.
28 press, criminalized all unauthorized political activities, and eliminated all public trials.
As a result Czech nationalism reverted to being a strictly cultural movement until
Bach’s removal in 1859 and the revival of constitutionalism in 1860.
With political avenues closed to them, many leaders of the obrození redirected their energies towards cultural ones, the most important of which was the creation of a theater. The idea of establishing an independent Czech theater had been discussed for some time, and in 1845, Palacký’s son in law František Rieger (1818 1903) secured the license to build one. Following the failed revolution of 1848, nationalists increasingly envisaged a “national” theater, not only a place that could stage Czech drama and opera, but an educational and nationalizing institution capable of spreading the ideals of the obrození to a wider audience. Benjamin Curtis ascribes the theater’s importance to
“its status as perhaps the principal mode of mass communication in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when much of the population was still illiterate.”45 The efforts to build a Czech National Theater (Narodní divadlo), an educational and patriotic institution, became the most important national activity of the 1850s.
With the easing of restrictions in the early 1860s, Czech nationalists renewed their political efforts more vigorously, forming the Czech National Party in 1860. But what began as a unified National Party began to dissolve in the shortly thereafter when
45 Benjamin Curtis, Music Makes the Nation: Nationalist Composers and Nation Building in Nineteenth Century Europe (Amherst NY: Cambria Press, 2008), 45.
29 a group of more radical young intellectuals splintered off over a disagreement with the leaders’ decisions. The remaining members in the National Party became known as the
“Old” Czech Party (staro eši), while the newly formed group became the “Young”
Czech Party (mlado eši).
The Old Czechs, led by Palacký and Rieger, built an alliance between large landowners, entrepreneurs, and the Bohemian nobility. Dominant in politics until the end of the nineteenth century, they followed a strategy of passive national resistance and gradual change in the face of the Hapsburg absolutist regime, evidenced by their boycotting of the imperial council (Reichsrat) meetings. They did not seek political independence in their quest for nationalism, but an autonomous Bohemia as part of a larger Austrian state.
The Young Czechs, on the other hand, were typically students and other intellectuals, joined by members of the industrial and commercial classes.46 They were more radical in their political and economic ideologies and disagreed with the Old
Czechs’ strategy of passive resistance. The New Czechs not only wanted a role in the
Hapsburg government—they ultimately wanted an independent Czech state.
Many Young Czechs believed that modern aesthetics should be an important part of creating a new cultural identity. Although the Czechs had a centuries old
46 Stanley Buchholz Kimball, Czech Nationalism: A Study of the National Theatre Movement, 1845 83 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964), 119.
30 reputation as skilled performers of music, they lacked an original Czech national style
of musical composition. The Young Czechs looked beyond their borders to other
regions and cultures for inspiration, including Germany, Russia, and Poland, provoking
a struggle between “nationalist” and “cosmopolitan” aesthetics within the obrození.47 It
is with group that Smetana would be closely allied. Those opposed to radical change,
like the Old Czechs, viewed cosmopolitan, progressive trends in the arts as an obstacle
to forging a Czech national culture. They preferred to cultivate their own national
musical aesthetic along more conservative lines using Czech legends and folk tunes as
the basis for their new Czech music.
Another cultural bone of contention between the Old and Young Czech parties
was the national theater movement. Members of the Old Czech party controlled the
National Theater Committee until 1865. In the early 1860s the committee still held out
hope that the Austrian government would fund the National Theater, so little
fundraising took place. The Old and Young Czechs also debated over the option to
build a Provisional Theater in order to provide performance space until they could
afford to build a more permanent National Theater. The Young Czechs objected to the
waste of funds to build a temporary, inadequate structure when they might have used
the money to build the National Theater sooner. Despite Young Czech objections,
47 Brian S. Locke, Opera and Ideology in Prague (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006), 5.
31 however, the Provisional Theater was built in 1862 on part of the land designated for the National Theater.
The Development of Czech Music
A characteristically Czech music developed later than the Czech language. Not surprisingly, its first efforts focused on operatic and choral works, genres in which the
Czech language featured prominently. Theatrical works, including operas, were difficult to mount in Prague because the Estates Theater put on almost exclusively
German language works. For several years in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, Czech productions were permitted on Sunday afternoons and holidays (when Czech speaking servants had leisure time), gradually allowing for the performances of European plays and operas translated into Czech.48 Influenced by the writings of Herder, the subsequent development of a native form of opera and a Czech style of music initially found its basis in Bohemian and Moravian folk songs and poetry.
(The development of Czech music in this context will be explored in more detail in the following chapter.)
Smetana’s role in the obrození came rather late. Having spent the previous five years in Gothenburg, Sweden, lucratively employed teaching, conducting, and performing, he returned to Prague in 1861 hoping to secure a new position in his
48 Sayer, Coasts of Bohemia, 56.
32 homeland. Austrian absolutist rule had recently relaxed and new opportunities were opening in Prague as the obrození regained momentum. Smetana had hoped for either the music directorship of the new Provisional Theater, or else directorship of the Prague
Conservatoire, but found himself passed over for both. Prior to his departure for
Sweden, he was known in the Czech lands largely as a teacher and composer of piano works. Although his skill and experience as both a conductor and composer of orchestral music grew while in Sweden, Smetana’s reputation back in his homeland did not. He returned with a number of unpublished works to his credit, but with little recognition of the breadth of his recent experiences.
Once in Prague Smetana re established his reputation as a piano teacher and virtuoso performer, but looked for opportunities to raise his standing in the musical community by expanding into composition, conducting, and other fields. Soon after his arrival, he became the chorus master of Hlahol, the largest Czech choral society in
Prague. This position allowed him to promote his own choral compositions and to refine his settings of Czech texts. Smetana, who was never fully at ease in the Czech language and who only in the early 1860s began writing his diary entries in Czech instead of German, worked diligently to set texts by using the intonation and natural rhythmic stress of the language to create a melody. He described the process to a close friend: “I read the poem many times then I declaim it—simply pacing to and fro in my
33 room until the words change into rhythm and melody.”49 In this manner Smetana taught himself how to set text the difficult Czech language, a skill he would later put to great use in the composition of his operas.
In 1863 a group of artists, including Smetana, banded together to form the
Um lecká beseda (Society of Arts), devoted to the cause of national music, literature, and the visual arts. Smetana was elected President of the Music Section, with Karel Erben heading Literature and the painter Josef Manés (1820 1871) chairing the Visual Arts.
Through the Um lecká beseda, Smetana attempted to improve the musical life of Prague, campaigning to create concert subscription series and other regular performances. In general he found standard of music making in the city to be poor and any sort of national music utterly neglected. He found public outlets to vent his frustration and offer solutions by writing for several journals, culminating in a regular contribution to
Narodní Listy in 1864. Smetana was quite forceful in his opinions, as seen in an excerpt from an 1862 contribution to the magazine Slavoj:
The programs I suggest are to include masterpieces by heroes of every nation, but particular attention will be given to the works of Slavonic composers. And rightly so. Have works by Russian, Polish, or Southern Slav composers ever been heard in Prague? I hardly think so. Indeed, it is a rarity to meet one of our own people’s names in our programs. . . .As a Czech I arrange Czech concerts. Or is the Czech public not fit for this? I think our reputation as a musical nation is sufficiently old and well known to justify this.50 49 Brian Large, Smetana (New York: Praeger, 1970), 122.
50 As quoted in Large, Smetana, 129.
34 While Smetana’s critical writings allowed him to build a reputation in Prague, they also made him some enemies in the Prague artistic establishment. His aesthetic views, the vehemence of his opinions, and his admiration for the New German School caused many within the Old Czech community to distrust him, and even a few friendly former acquaintances to turn against him.
Another of Smetana’s goals in returning to Bohemia was to compose a Czech opera to enter into a competition organized by Count Jan Harrach (1828 1899), a Czech patriot and the Chairman of the Building Committee for the National Theater. Harrach offered a prize of 600 gulden to the two best operas composed on national Czech themes. Smetana’s first opera, The Brandenburgers in Bohemia (Branibo i v echách), an opera about peasant resistance against German occupation of Bohemia in the thirteenth century, won the competition. His follow up, The Bartered Bride (Prodaná nev sta) was a major success that cemented his place as the preeminent composer of “Czech” opera.
For the remainder of his professional career, Smetana played a major role in the
Cultural Revival, becoming the Music Director of the Provisional Theater in 1865, and presiding over the fanfare to lay the foundation stone of the National Theater in 1868.
35 CHAPTER 2 NINETEENTH CENTURY NATIONAL MUSIC
In the nineteenth century, music played a significant role in the construction of national identity for many European nations. No study of Smetana and his works would be complete without examining definitions of national music, especially characterizations of “Czechness” in music. Furthermore, comparing Smetana’s particular brand of musical nationalism to other, contemporary nationalist composers provides a better context of what exactly constitutes a native style, a concept notoriously difficult to define. The following chapter explores Czech manifestations of musical nationalism as well as other trends in nineteenth century European nationalism to better understand Smetana and the “Czech” tropes found in his music.
What makes a piece of music national in character? In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries people believed that music could convey an innate national spirit of a community. Supported by the writings of Herder, nationalists believed that every people, each “nation,” had a unique national character, and therefore a unique national style of music. Today, however, this explanation is insufficient to explain what makes a piece “Czech,” “Hungarian,” or “French.”
Early nationalists argued that the inclusion of folk music or folk material makes a work inherently national, but this, too, is insufficient as an explanation. Many
36 nineteenth century nationalist compositions are composed in a folk like style or may
actually quote a folk tune, but by itself, the integration of folk material into art music
does not necessarily make a work national in character. In such cases, Haydn,
Beethoven, Schubert, and many other eighteenth and early nineteenth century
composers would also be considered nationalists.
Others choose a purely stylistic approach in searching for nationalism in music.
Czech music scholar Michael Beckerman attempts to list characteristic musical elements
found in the music of nineteenth century Czech composers:
1. First beat accents (related to speech and folk song).
2. Syncopated rhythms (often relating to characteristic dances).
3. Lyrical passages, often as a trio in a dancelike scherzo.
4. Harmonic movement outlining triads a major third apart.
5. Two part writing involving parallel thirds and sixths.
6. Oscillation between parallel major and minor modes.
7. Use of modes with lowered sevenths and raised fourths.
8. Avoidance of counterpoint.
9. Use of melodic cells which repeat a fifth above.1
1 Michael Beckerman, “In Search of Czechness in Music,” 19th Century Music 10 (Summer, 1986), 64.
37 Yet these same characteristics can be found in many works by non Czech composers, including Liszt, Schubert, and even Copland. Beckerman goes on to explain: “There is, in fact, no single musical detail that can be shown to occur in Czech music and nowhere else.”2 In other words, an examination of national characteristics in music must take into account more than just stylistic analysis. Beckerman instead suggests incorporating a much broader view which encompasses not only musical analysis, but the composer’s stated intentions, his choices of title, program, settings, and symbols, and perhaps most importantly, how these elements conspire to forge a work’s unique identity. Benjamin
Curtis suggests a similar approach: “We must not look for the defining features [of a national style of music] in the music, but rather in the ideas about the music,”3 and further suggests examining a composer’s diaries and letters.
To this end, this chapter will explore representations of nationalism in music from other “nations” that served as important models for Smetana as he embarked upon his own quest to create a characteristically Czech musical style. Moreover, the history and role folk music plays in the construction of national identity will be investigated. The chapter will conclude with an examination of the expressions of
“Czechness” in music before Smetana, and culminate in an analysis of Smetana’s Czech national style. 2 Ibid.
3 Benjamin Curtis, Music Makes the Nation: Nationalist Composers and Nation Building in Nineteenth Century Europe (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2008), 30. Emphasis is mine.
38
1. Music and National Identity
Throughout the nineteenth century composers across Europe used music as a means to communicate their conception of national identity. Smetana looked to composers like Chopin and Liszt, in particular, as models for how to consciously create a national style of music. Folk influences, including both songs and dances, also became important components for expressing nationalism in music at this time, although composers chose many different routes to imitate or assimilate folk sources.
Frédéric Chopin and Polish Music
Frédéric Chopin (1810 1849) is generally considered to be “one of the first composers of significance to have promoted a form of cultural nationalism in music.”4
Barbara Milewski is a bit more precise in her definition, citing Chopin as the “first composer to export successfully to the West a national music that was linked in the
Romantic imagination with an indigenous practice.”5 Her caution stems from a series of
Chopin scholars since the mid nineteenth century who have insisted that Chopin’s form
4 Jim Samson, “Chopin Reception: Theory, History, Analysis,” in Chopin Studies 2, ed. John Rink and Jim Samson (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 8.
5 Barbara Milewski, “Chopin’s Mazurkas and the Myth of the Folk,” 19th Century Music 23 (Autumn 1999): 118.
39 of musical nationalism owes its national flavor to folk music quotation, absorption, and imitation.6
Although exposed to Polish folk music from a young age and certainly informed by it, Chopin’s compositions rarely, if ever, rely on folk quotations. Instead, Chopin uses the rhythms and harmonic patterns of national dances, in particular, those found in Poland’s “urban dance culture.”7 Many of his works seem to imitate folk like instrumentation, with a singing melody line representative of the violin or fujarka, a high pitched shepherd’s pipe, or the drone bass of the duda or gagda, Polish bagpipes, but the melodies are of Chopin’s own invention.8 His mature polonaises and mazurkas are polished, stylized dances—they are idealized versions of the original, imbued with his own poetic feeling and unique compositional voice. Franz Liszt says of Chopin’s mazurkas: “Preserving [the dances’] rhythm, he ennobled their melody, enlarging their proportions; and . . . he wrought into their tissues harmonic lights and shadows, as new in themselves as were the subjects to which he adapted them.”9
6 Milewski, “Chopin’s Mazurkas,” 114 21. Milewski cites sources including works by nineteenth century Polish critics Marceli Antoni Szulc and Maurycy Karasowski, mid twentieth century scholars Arthur Hedley and Zdzis aw Jachimecki, as well as major figures like Gerald Abraham and Maurice J. E. Brown as contributing to this myth.
7 Halina Goldberg, Music in Chopin’s Warsaw (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 62.
8 Kornel Micha owski and Jim Samson, “Chopin, Fryderyk Franciszek,” in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/51099 (accessed July 8, 2009).
9 Franz Liszt, Life of Chopin, trans. Martha Walker Cook (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005), 34.
40 Almost half of Chopin’s output consists of dance music, and many of the remaining works incorporate the rhythms, harmonies, or melodic elements of Polish national dance rhythms.10 Liszt cites the nocturnes, scherzos, preludes, and concertos as genres in which national sensibilities permeate. Several nocturnes in particular contain dance like qualities, including the mazurka styled lilt in the middle section of the
Nocturne in C sharp minor, Op. Posth., and the polonaise rhythms in the central section in his Nocturne in C sharp minor, Op. 27, No. 1.
In terms of reception, during his life Chopin was perceived as composing works representative of his homeland. Liszt describes the slow movement of the Sonata in B flat minor, Op. 35 as “the funeral train of an entire nation weeping its own ruin and death.”11 He goes on to give a romanticized summary of Chopin’s legacy:
More than once in the history of art and literature, a poet has arisen, embodying in himself the poetic sense of a whole nation, an entire epoch, representing the types which his contemporaries pursue and strive to realize, in an absolute manner in his works: such a poet was Chopin for his country and for the epoch in which he was born. The poetic sentiments the most widely spread, yet the most intimate and inherent of his nation, were embodied and united in his imagination, and represented by his brilliant genius.12 Jim Samson reinforces this idea, albeit with less florid language than Liszt, that
Chopin’s dance music symbolized the Polish national struggle and even reflected
10 Eric McKee, “Dance and the Music of Chopin: The Waltz,” in The Age of Chopin: Interdisciplinary Inquiries, ed. Halina Goldberg (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 106.
11 Liszt, Life of Chopin, 7.
12 Liszt, Life of Chopin, 90.
41 events in Polish history. Samson describes Chopin as a “nostalgic exile,” who used his mature dance compositions such as the Polonaise in C sharp minor, Op. 26 No. 1 as
“agents of a proud, even aggressive, evocation of Poland’s past splendour.”13
As Chopin was among the first to pursue musical nationalism in nineteenth century Europe, his style was widely imitated by many subsequent composers. The combination of native dances and folk like inflections, combined with some of the most up to date harmonies and musical styles made Chopin an excellent model for the
“fusion of nationalism and modernism,” especially those of Slavic origins like Mily
Balakirev and Smetana.14 For Balakirev, in particular, Chopin was “neither a salon composer nor a romantic composer, but a radical, progressive figure.”15
For Smetana, Chopin was the model after whom he consciously chose to fashion his own dances for piano. Smetana wrote to his publisher after the composition of the four polkas that form the first volume of Czech Dances (1877): “My title: ‘Polkas’ is important, for my efforts are directed towards idealizing the polka in particular, as
Chopin did with the mazurka.”16 The two figures shared much in common: both were
“nostalgic exiles” (although Smetana’s time in Sweden was comparatively brief), both
13 Jim Samson, The Music of Chopin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 103 104.
14 Kornel Micha owski and Jim Samson, “Chopin, Fryderyk Franciszek,” in Grove Music Online (accessed July 8, 2009).
15 Jim Samson, “Chopin Reception,” 8 9.
16 František Bartoš, ed., Bed ich Smetana: Letters and Reminiscences, trans. Daphne Rusbridge (Prague: Artia, 1955), 203 4.
42 composed numerous stylized17 dances for their primary instrument, the piano, and in their other works, one can find the influence of native dances in rhythms and melodic formulas. Both Chopin and Smetana also believed that writing national music involved more than simply integrating folk music or setting the vernacular language. Smetana, like Chopin, realized that music did not need texts or folksong quotations to express national sentiment.18
Franz Liszt and “Hungarian” Music
While Franz Liszt (1811 1886) did not write as many works as Chopin that can be called overtly nationalistic, he nevertheless was another significant model for Smetana in the possibilities of composing progressive, national compositions on a virtuosic scale.
Because of his itinerant lifestyle, Dana Gooley describes Liszt as a composer who was “uprooted both linguistically and nationally.”19 Born in Hungary to a German speaking family, Liszt grew up learning almost no Hungarian. By his teens he was living in Paris, speaking more French than German. Later in his life he divided his time
17 The words “stylized” and “idealized” are often used to refer to the non functional dances of both Chopin and Smetana. Beginning with Chopin, stylized dances for the piano became more virtuosic, expressive, and chromatic, incorporating an extended pianistic vocabulary that featured “larger ranges, figurations related to vocal fioriturae, more frequent use of extreme registers, and a greater involvement of the left hand.” See Halina Goldberg, Music in Chopin’s Warsaw, 78.
18 See Milewski, “Chopin’s Mazurkas,” 123n30.
19 Dana Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 118.
43 between Weimar, Budapest, and Rome. At various times throughout his career he was
“claimed” by several different countries, prompting Heinrich Heine in 1844 to write of him: “He is here, the modern Homer, whom Germany, Hungary, and France, the three greatest countries, claim as a child of their land.”20 Liszt seemingly cultivated a reputation of being both a nationalist and a cosmopolitan, simultaneously a child of every place he visited, yet having no fixed home. Gooley, in recounting a story of Liszt’s promotion of regional pride while visiting Marseille on tour, describes the virtuoso’s approach to connecting with his audiences during performances:
He tapped into their sense of loyalty to a community, paid tribute to that community, elevated their spirit of pride, and thereby made the concert into an extraordinary, memorable event.21 By means of his concert attire, the details of his performance (instrument choice, the language of the program, etc.), and his gestures, Liszt conveyed the idea of belonging to whichever local community he was currently visiting.
This strategy was most evident in his visits to Hungary. Although he spent much of his life living outside of his homeland, Liszt remained devoted to it. He was quick to come to Hungary’s aid, providing fundraising concerts for numerous charitable causes throughout the nineteenth century. In concert, Liszt not only performed his own
Hungarian inspired works, but also operatic paraphrases and transcriptions of works
20 As quoted in Dana Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt, 117.
21 Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt, 117.
44 by his fellow countrymen. As part of his 1846 concert tour of Hungary, Liszt debuted a transcription of the “Swan Song” and “March” from Ferenc Erkel’s opera László Hunyadi, and later that fall transcribed the overture, as well.22
At times, however, this chameleon like adaptability to his surroundings worked against him. During the aforementioned tour of Hungary, in a village comprised mostly of Germans, the audience grew frustrated not only by “the many
Hungarians in the audience, but also of the admission cards printed in Hungarian
(which Liszt used throughout his Hungarian tour) and the greatest number of
Hungarian pieces on his program.” When Liszt played the Rákóczi March as an encore, instead of Erlkönig, the Germans hissed him off the stage.23 At various times the
Germans found him too “French,” the French were startled by his Hungarian devotion, and the Hungarians themselves were divided in their reasons for admiring their native son. While they were united in their enthusiasm for Liszt, the Hungarians were conflicted as to what kind of symbol he represented for their aspiring nation:
22 Dezs Legány, “Liszt in Hungary, 1820 1846,” in Liszt and His World: Proceedings of the International Liszt Conference held at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 20 23 May, 1993, ed. Michael Saffle (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1993), 12, 15. Ferenc Erkel (1810 1893) is regarded as the founder of Hungarian opera, beginning with his Mária Bátori (1840). His nine operas, based predominantly on events and characters in Hungarian history contain “rather conventional structure of recitatives, arias, choruses, and divertissements. . . embellished at important points with the distinctive sounds of the Verbunkos and Csárdás.” See Leon Plantinga, Romantic Music: A History of Musical Style in Nineteenth Century Europe (New York, W. W. Norton, 1984), 345.
23 Legány, “Liszt in Hungary, 1820 1846,” 15.
45 The entire population was carried away by one common feeling, for while the royalists worshipped the artiste who had earned for their country a name among the virtuosi of Europe, the reformers saw in the man a patriot who loved that country better than his own fame.24 Liszt’s own sense of Hungarian nationalism was broad enough to extend beyond
the Magyars and incorporate the local gypsies. He devoted an entire book to them—Des
Bohémiens et de leur Musique en Hongrie (The Gypsies and Their Music in Hungary,
1859)—mistakenly believing they were the original source of native folk music.25 In his
writings, Liszt demonstrates a fascination with the Gypsies, and clearly identified with
them, noting their similar nomadic lifestyles and seemingly innate virtuosic musical
abilities.
Planning what he called his “National Epic,” Liszt set to work trying to notate
characteristic Gypsy themes and dances to set them for solo piano, which he believed to
be “the instrument best capable of rendering the form and spirit of the Bohemian art in
its entity.”26 The works that emerged in 1840 were called Magyar Dallok (Hungarian
National Melodies), later revised and published as the Hungarian Rhapsodies (1851 1853).
24 Julia Pardo, City of the Magyar (London, 1840), 3 vols., II: 353 54, as quoted in Dana Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt, 133. Gooley does a particularly fine job of summarizing the conflicting interpretations of Liszt’s various national and cosmopolitan associations, especially as it concerns the different perceptions towards the award of the Hungarian saber in 1840. See Gooley, chapter 3, 117 155.
25 The English translation of the book, in two volumes by Edwin Evans, is titled The Gipsy in Music (London: William Reeves, [1926]).
26 Franz Liszt, The Gipsy in Music, trans. Edwin Evans (London: William Reeves, [1926]), 333, 337. Note that Liszt refers to gypsies (and not Czechs) when he uses the term “bohémiens” in the original French. The English edition causes some confusion by translating the term to “Bohemians” rather than “gypsies.”
46 In these compositions Liszt successfully captured the sounds, the scales—with their characteristic augmented fourth—the improvisatory character, and the impassioned virtuosity of the Romani sound. The Hungarian Rhapsodies contain the structural elements of the typical Gypsy improvisation: the slow, highly ornamented lassan section as well as the wild and frenzied friska, and at times evoke the orchestration of a typical Gypsy band, in particular the cimbalom and solo violin. They also incorporate the major characteristics of verbunkos music, including formal patterns modeled after Magyar nóta (Popular Hungarian Song), frequent repetition (of complete phrases or phrase cells, or repeated notes in the form of pedal points), harmonic stasis or “pendular directionality,” unprepared modulations between distantly related keys, parallelisms, and keyboard based polychordal and bimodal effects.27
Many of these verbunkos elements would have sounded not only exotic, but modern to nineteenth century ears. Characteristic Lisztian double octaves in imitation of the cimbalom, combined with modal inflections created percussive, chromatic effects that predated similar music by Ravel or Stravinsky. In this way Liszt combined nationalism and the modern harmonies of the New German School and could validate
27 For a more detailed description of verbunkos style and its application to Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, see Shay Loya, “Beyond ‘Gypsy’ Stereotypes: Harmony and Structure in the Verbunkos Idiom,” Journal of Musicological Research 27 (2008): 254 280.
47 his harmonic experiments. According to Loya, “For Liszt, both verbunkos and
‘progressive’ German music were allies against postclassical stagnation.”28
Liszt’s unique style of national music had a profound effect on Smetana, who discovered from his mentor how to successfully unite progressive harmonies and forms, elements of pianistic virtuosity, and national sentiment. Unlike Smetana and Chopin, however, fewer of Liszt’s other works reveal the same folk like or gypsy influences.
According to Sidney Finkelstein, “Folk music, to Liszt, is not a medium through which he can express his own varied feelings of life. The Rhapsodies are like a hugely enjoyed vacation among the folk, and there is accordingly a lack of deep personal involvement in them, and a monotony of mood.”29 Other scholars, however, assert that Hungarian elements can be found increasingly in Liszt’s later works. Leon Plantinga mentions the
Missa solemnis (1856) and the oratorio, Die Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth (1857 62) as works that incorporate the “Hungarian manner.”30 Klára Hamburger also cites several other scared works of Liszt that incorporate Hungarian idioms, describing Liszt’s
28 Loya, “Beyond ‘Gypsy’ Stereotypes,” 273.
29 Sidney Finkelstein, Composer and Nation: The Folk Heritage in Music (New York: International Publishers, 1989), 111.
30 Plantinga, Romantic Music, 347.
48 tendency to employ “Hungarian” or verbunkos elements to express grief, pain, and mourning.31
The Role of Folk Music in National Identity
In the second half of the eighteenth century, writers began distinguishing between two different types of music: the national and the cultivated.32 “National” music was simple, natural, and typically anonymous. “Cultivated” music was written by a professional composer. In general, the “national” species of music was preferred for its simple naivety and pastoral quality. This national/cultivated dichotomy would eventually come to be known as “folk music” and “art music.”
Johann Gottfried von Herder was the first to coin the term “Volkslied” in his essay Von deutscher Art und Kunst (Of German Style and Art, 1773), although the concept of folksong and folk music existed in other languages prior to Herder’s invention of the German term. Herder published his own collection of folk songs, Alte
Volkslieder in 1774, including examples from Germany and the British Isles. Like Ludwig
Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano’s later Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805 8),
31 Klára Hamburger, “Program and Hungarian Idiom in the Sacred Music of Liszt,” in New Light on Liszt and His Music: Franz Liszt Study Series #6, ed. Michael Saffle and James Deaville (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1997), 240.
32 Matthew Gelbart, The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music”: Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner (New York: Cambridge University Press), 2007. Such writers in the English language included John Gregory (1724 1773), James Beattie (1735 1803), Alexander Campbell, (1764 1824), and John Leyden (1775 1811) .
49 Herder’s collection consisted only of folk song texts, no music. To Herder, the Volk were
the “eternal” and “authentic” bearers of national culture, untainted by foreign
influences and modernization. In his view, German national culture was in decline,
therefore Germans needed to look to their Volk—to their songs, fairytales, and
legends—in order to preserve their “national inheritance.”33 Herder’s definition of Volk,
however, was very specific: they were an idealized, rural Other, isolated from the
modern world. The present day lower classes Herder regarded as rabble (Pöbel), “who
never sing and compose but only scream and mutilate.”34
Herder expanded his Volkslied collection (1778 79) to include representative
examples from across Europe, also adding an important introduction outlining his
views towards Volklieder, which had evolved a bit from his earlier publication. Instead
of the former polarity between “folk” music (simple, natural) and “art” music (learned,
artificial), Herder now believed the two types of music could (and should) work
together: Volkslied would form the “material” for poetic “art” (Materialien zur
Dichtkunst).35 In Gelbart’s words, the folk material provided the “raw mined metals
waiting to be forged into something greater.”36 Moreover, Herder suggested that in
33 Curtis, Music Makes the Nation, 99 102.
34 As quoted in Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 47.
35 Gelbart, The Invention of “Folk Music,” 198. Herder’s full quotation in the original German can be found in n26.
36 Gelbart, The Invention of “Folk Music,” 198. 50 relying on their “folk inheritance,” Germans could create their own national culture.37
In essence, the former opposition of “national” and “cultivated” was replaced by the opposition of “folk” and “science,” but art could bring the two together, creating a learned and polished masterpiece from upon simple, national building blocks.38
Herder’s writings on the subject started a wave of folklore collection across
Europe, with the goal of preserving each nation’s heritage. In the Czech lands the collection effort was conducted notably by Jan Ritter z Rittersberku, František
elakovský, and Karel Erben. Echoing Herder’s concept of peasant “material” serving high art, elakovský inscribed in the second volume of his folk songs that “popular poetry” should serve “today’s poet” in the way that “ancient chronicles” serve historians.39
To much of Europe, this integration of folk music into the art music canon served as an exotic Other. For longstanding centers of “cultivated” music like France and Italy, composers could rely upon their history of national traditions, employing folk music when they chose to as an “escapist fantasy painted in broad, conflated strokes – a patina
37 Curtis, Music Makes the Nation, 100.
38 Gelbart, The Invention of “Folk Music,” 203.
39 As quoted in Curtis, Music Makes the Nation, 106.
51 of the primitive, ‘Ancient,’ and/or ‘Oriental’—even when filtered through a particular local color.”40 By contrast, national composers from “peripheral” countries
were more than happy to internalize the image as themselves as Others. While those countries had historically imported their ideas of cultivated music from France, Italy, or German composers, pieces, performers, and values, now each could assert a unique national identity through its folk music. In these nations, then, folk music as specifically (locally) ‘national’ capital was, since its conception, a ticket to international recognition on a stage dominated by others.41 Gelbart singles out Germany as an exceptional case since it functioned as both a historic capital of “cultivated” music, and the center of a Herder inspired effort to promote
Volkslied, Consequently, German art music could employ folk music either to represent the exotic or to function as a simple and natural “corrective” to seeming too learned or abstract.42
There were, however, repercussions to Herder’s view that Volkslieder should provide “material” for art music. The notion that Volkslieder could not stand alone, but needed to be combined with more cultivated practices to represent national music seemed to contradict the reverential attitude towards the rural Volk, in general. Folk songs, tales, and legends were viewed as a nation’s cultural inheritance, but were still perceived to be “low” culture, not “high” enough to form their own legitimate art.43 The
40 Gelbart, The Invention of “Folk Music,” 226.
41 Gelbart, The Invention of “Folk Music,” 226 7.
42 Gelbart, The Invention of “Folk Music,” 228.
43 Curtis, Music Makes the Nation, 105.
52 folk songs themselves were considered coarse and unlearned. Many collectors felt it necessary to refine and improve the texts and melodies for general consumption.44 As an example, Gelbart recounts a story about how Leopold Kozeluch (1747 1818) was commissioned by George Thomson (along with Haydn, Pleyel, and Beethoven) to write settings for Thomson’s collection of modal, Scottish folk melodies. Upon receiving the music, Kozeluch “sent back the melodies, assuming that the various offending pitches were copying errors.”45 After the record was set straight, Kozeluch subsequently referred to several of the melodies as “une musique barbare.”46
Nevertheless, the Czechs took Herder’s writings to heart, using their own folk songs and dances as the basis for creating a national art music. For much of the first two thirds of the nineteenth century the employment of folk music was considered to be the preferred method of composing intrinsically “Czech” music, relying on quoting either folksong texts or melodies (or both). However, more on this, as well as Smetana’s objection to the practice, will be discussed in the following section.
44 Curtis, Music Makes the Nation, 106.
45 Gelbart, The Invention of “Folk Music,” 205.
46 Gelbart, The Invention of “Folk Music,” 205.
53 2. “Czechness” in Music
As Czech nationalists worked actively throughout the nineteenth century to construct a national identity, notions of what made something “Czech” or “national” were in constant flux, and the evaluation of music was no different. During his career,
Smetana’s supporters acknowledged him as the founder of a national style of composition, but at the same time his critics accused him of writing in a more cosmopolitan style, or worse, of becoming a Wagnerian. The accusations of Wagnerism became particularly vehement in the 1860s and early 1870s when Smetana’s enemies depicted him as selling out his homeland in favor of German influence.
To truly understand what makes Smetana’s music characteristically “Czech” it is perhaps helpful to first examine the musical scene in Bohemia prior to Smetana’s arrival.
Czech Music before Smetana
The events after the Battle of White Mountain in 1620 had an equally detrimental effect on music as they did on politics. With the imperial capital in Vienna and many of the Bohemian aristocracy sent into exile, the Czech patronage system changed dramatically. Scarce employment prospects and high taxes led many Bohemian and
Moravian composers and musicians to leave their homeland in search of positions in other European capitals. The Stamitz (Stamic) family in Mannheim and the Benda brothers, Franz (František) and Georg (Ji í) in Potsdam and Gotha, respectively, are the
54 most notable examples, but the list also includes Jan Dismas Zelenka in Dresden, Josef
Myslive ek, known as Venatorini or “Il divino Boemo” in Italy, Anton Reicha in Paris
and Vienna, and Franz Krommer, Johann Baptist Vanhal, and Paul Wranitzky
(Vranický) in Vienna. Towards the end of the eighteenth century there were so many
Bohemians performing and composing across Europe that Charles Burney referred to
Bohemia as the “Conservatoire of Europe.”47
In Prague the “cult of Mozart” reigned supreme long after the composer’s death.
Le Nozze di Figaro (1786) and especially the operas commissioned by Prague, Don
Giovanni (1787) and La Clemenza di Tito (1791) were highly popular and influential.
Important native composers and teachers like Václav Tomášek ensured that the classical
style lingered further into the nineteenth century than other European locales, thereby
shutting off “the musical life of the city to the progressive ideas which had sprung up
meanwhile in other [European] centres.”48 This musical conservatism was reinforced by
Dionys Weber, the first director of the Prague Conservatory, and Jan August Vitašek,
the first head of the Prague Organ School.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as the language revival took
shape, Czech translations of Italian, French, German Romantic and Mozart operas were
47 As quoted in Jan Smaczny, “Czech Republic,” in The Oxford Companion to Music, ed. Alison Latham. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t114/e1773 (accessed 14 July 2009).
48 Rosa Newmarch, The Music of Czechoslovakia (New York: J. and J. Harper, 1969), 42.
55 common. In addition to an affinity for Italian opera, operas in early nineteenth century
Bohemia were also highly influenced by folk idioms. The last decades of the previous century had witnessed initial attempts at opera through the “folk” or “popular” musicals, known as lidové zp vohry. These productions featured folk settings and characters, typically with three solo roles and a small orchestra. Benjamin Curtis describes them as “entertainments evincing no real musical ambition.” 49 By the early decades of the nineteenth century the popular genre evolved to the point where most of the musical forms (including da capo arias) were Italian, but the libretto was in Czech.50
Considered to be the first native opera of any substance, František Škroup’s opera Dráteník (The Tinker) premiered to great fanfare in 1826. Škroup (1801 1862) was a lawyer by trade, but also a conductor and opera singer, who sung the title role at the premiere. Dráteník, in two acts, is a light hearted Singspiel with a simple plot about local, middle class characters and folk like music. Škroup’s subsequent Czech and German operas and Singspiele, including Old ich a Božena (Oldrich and Bozena, 1828) and Libušin s atek (Libussa’s Wedding, 1835), never reached the popularity of Dráteník, but even today he is still revered in the Czech Republic for having composed the incidental music to Josef Kajetán Tyl’s play Fidlova ka (The Shoemakers’ Feast, 1834). One of the
49 Curtis, Music Makes the Nation, 124.
50 Curtis, Music Makes the Nation, 124.
56 songs, “Kde domov m h?” (Where is my home?), became the national hymn, and after
1918, the national anthem of Czechoslovakia.
Škroup’s operas were held up as models for subsequent Czech operas, with folk inspired, historical, or national mythological themes, and an imitation of or quotation of
Bohemian folk melodies. Several twentieth century scholars, however, including Rosa
Newmarch and Benjamin Curtis, have criticized Dráteník for its lack of musical depth:
“While having some value in contributing to Czech culture, [the opera] did relatively little to further Czech art.”51 Later composers of Czech opera included František’s brother, Jan Nepomuk Škroup, Ji í Macourek, and František Bed ich Kott, and
Smetana’s contemporaries František Skuherský and Karel Šebor; however, in the nearly forty years between Dráteník and Smetana’s first opera, Branibo i v echách (The
Brandenburgers in Bohemia), no other operatic composer seems to have made a lasting contribution to the construction of Czech national identity.
In the realm of instrumental music, symphonic works played a significant role, with symphonies by Jan Václav Vo íšek, Jan Bed ich Kittl, and later Smetana. As the nineteenth century progressed, however, the symphonic poem became the preferred symphonic genre, exemplified by those of Smetana. The symphonic poem’s
51 Curtis, Music Makes the Nation, 123. (Emphasis original) See also Newmarch, The Music of Czechoslovakia, 52.
57 programmatic potential and poetic title offered a vehicle for communicating national sentiments and imagery.
Nineteenth century Bohemian instrumental music favored shorter forms intended for the salon, with the piano miniature being especially popular. Early
Romantic character pieces such as the Eclogues, Dithyrambs, Impromptus, and
Rhapsodies of Tomášek and Vo íšek offered little in the way of advancing the nationalist cause. Later in the century, miniatures based on national dances, typified by those of Smetana, provided the model for the later composers Antonín Dvo ák and
Zden k Fibich.
Dance music became especially important as the nineteenth century progressed and the use of Czech national dances, as in Chopin’s Poland, gave music a patriotic flavor. Czech society balls began in the first half of the nineteenth century, featuring not only foreign dances, but favorite national dances as well, including the furiant (with its characteristic hemiola), sko ná, rejdovák, t asák, and sousedská (a ländler like dance). One of the most popular dances of all was the polka, a ballroom dance of Czech origin with a folk like quality. Scholar Gracian ernušák points out that “the polka is the [Czech dance] that most commonly denotes notions of Czechness,” and as such was commonly integrated into Czech art music as part of a collection of dance suites, as a movement in a multi movement composition (often replacing the Scherzo) or as a polka like section
58 within a larger work.52 The polka is also suggestive of the Czech language, in that the strong, duple time downbeats seem to parallel the first syllable accents of the spoken vernacular: Czech is predominantly a trochaic/dactylic language—setting music to a trochaic Czech verse generates a polka rhythm.53
Folk music was not only significant to the shaping of a Czech style of opera, but influenced instrumental music as well, appearing in instrumental dance movements, symphonic works, and chamber music. Collections of folk tunes by Erben, elakovský, and Rittersberk were motivated by the language revival and the writings of Herder, but acted as a catalyst for developing a national style of music. Musical works were more likely to meet with broad audience appeal if they quoted tunes from the above collections, or even if the music imitated the style of conventional Bohemian and
Moravian folk melodies.
Bohemia and western Moravia’s folksongs share many common characteristics with their German and Austrian counterparts owing to the influence of geography.
These tunes feature regular meters, and simple, often triadic melodies. In ensembles, folk melodies are often doubled at the third or sixth. The folksongs of eastern Moravia, more removed from German influences, bear more resemblance to Hungarian, Gypsy, and Slovakian folksongs, and are more rhapsodic in character, featuring irregular 52 Gracian ernušák, et al., “Polka,” in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/22020 (accessed 10 April 2009).
53 Gracian ernušák, et al., “Polka,” Grove Music Online.
59 meters and tendencies towards raised fourth and lowered seventh scale degrees.54 Folk ensemble instrumentation in both Bohemia and Moravia typically included violins and clarinets, with the bass part frequently played by the bagpipes (dudy) in Bohemia, and by a combination of string bass and dulcimer in Moravia.
Working in Moravia, the choirmaster and composer Pavel K ížkovský (1820 1885) was among the first to assimilate, rather than simply quote, Moravian folk music into his choral compositions. According to Rosa Newmarch, K ížkovský was the “first
Czech composer whose knowledge of music as an art combined with his profound insight into the spirit of the folk songs enabled him to fuse the two elements in a satisfactory way.”55 At times he employed folksong texts as the poetry that formed the basis of his newly composed songs and choruses; in other works he set folksong texts and melodies, re harmonized. Later in his career he was freer in his usage and quotation of folk melodies, reshaping melodies or adapting them to larger forms.”56
This manner of incorporating folk music appealed to Smetana, who admired
K ížkovský’s works and conducted several of his choruses while director of Hlahol.
54 Smaczny, “Czech Republic.”
55 Newmarch, The Music of Czechoslovakia, 51.
56 Ji í Vysloužil, “K ížkovský, Pavel,”in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/15555 (accessed 16 July 2009).
60 Smetana and National Music
During his lifetime Smetana was regarded as the founder of a characteristically
Czech style of music, and after his death the shadow of his legacy loomed large over subsequent Czech national composers. But just what makes Smetana’s music so
“national?” Michael Beckerman suggests as a starting point, in addition to an exploration of musical characteristics, to also examine the “rhapsodic pronouncements of Czech composers,” in other words, to take into consideration the composers intentions, as notated in their letters and diaries.57
Several of Smetana’s letters clearly outline his goals, such as one to a former schoolmate written in 1880:
I hope that if I have not yet reached the goal I set for myself I am at least approaching it. And that goal is to prove that we Czechs are not mere practicing musicians as other nations nickname us, saying that our talent lies only in our fingers but not in our brains, but that we are endowed with creative force, yes, that we have our own characteristic music.58 Just two years later he wrote to one of his former students: “I am, according to my merits and according to my efforts a Czech, and a creator of a Czech style in the branches of dramatic and symphonic music—exclusively Czech.”59 Although not taken directly from Smetana’s writings, the Czech composer Václav Juda Novotný recounts a
57 Michael Beckerman, “In Search of Czechness in Music,” 66.
58 František Bartoš, Bed ich Smetana: Letters and Reminscences, trans. Daphne Rusbridge (Prague: Artia, 1955), 210.
59 Bartoš, Letters and Reminiscences, 250 251.
61 story of Smetana’s visit to Weimar in 1857 to visit Liszt. Another of Liszt’s visitors, the
Viennese composer and conductor Johann Ritter von Herbeck (1831 1877) criticized the
Czechs as merely performers, talented at instrumental execution, but incapable composing a uniquely Czech art. The argument between the two grew heated until
Liszt stepped in with proof of an authentically Czech compositional style and sat down at the piano to perform some of Smetana’s earliest character pieces. After the performance Liszt pronounced “Here is a composer with a genuine Czech heart, an artist by the grace of God.”60 According to Novotný, Smetana pledged from that day forward to devote himself to the cultivation of a Czech style of music.61
Smetana’s writings as a music critic for Národní listy and other journals also provide insight into his intentions. Upon returning to Prague from Sweden Smetana found the state of musical life in the still provincial capital to be abysmal. Performance standards remained quite low in the Bohemian capital, and of the few public performances taking place, Smetana found most works on the program lacked artistic integrity:
If we examine with an impartial but keen eye our current musical conditions, comparing them with the life developing in this direction in the great cities abroad, we must acknowledge—even though it is unfortunate—that all the activity up to now in the musical field is deplorable, effectively zero. The art of
60 Bartoš, Letters and Reminiscences, 47.
61 Bartoš, Letters and Reminiscences, 45 47.
62 which we speak declines day by day, and all the more so as floozies tend to use it for diversion and entertainment.62 Smetana also found the musical training taking place at the Prague Conservatory to be too conservative, focusing on outdated musical traditions and ignoring current
European trends in music, especially those represented by Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner.
Smetana worried that, without an education in what he believed to be the most
“progressive” music, Czech music would continue to languish and decline.63
In addition to music students, Smetana found the public’s education and taste in music to be lacking as well. To improve the situation, Smetana took action by organizing high quality public subscription concerts, reopening the music school he had founded in 1848, and helping to found the Um lecká beseda in 1863. Smetana worked tirelessly to not only improve musical standards, but to promote the music of Czech and other Slavic composers, as well. When he finally became Music Director of the
Provisional Theater in 1866, in addition to his own operas Smetana frequently programmed works by Škroup and Kittl, as well as those by fellow Slavs, Stanis aw
Moniuszko, Mikhail Glinka, and Anton Rubinstein.
Smetana cultivated for himself the image of a trailblazing nationalist, laying the foundation for future Czech composers to follow in his footsteps. Benjamin Curtis
62 Curtis, Music Makes the Nation, 59.
63 Curtis, Music Makes the Nation, 61.
63 explains that Smetana’s operas were seemingly designed to provide a roadmap for how to compose a Czech opera by providing an example in every genre:
The Brandenburgers in Bohemia is a grand opera, The Bartered Bride is the paragon of the folk opera, Dalibor is a ‘heroic romantic’ opera, Libuše is a ‘solemn festival tableau,’ The Two Widows is a salon comedy, and so on.64 By writing operas in such a diverse array of styles and genres, Smetana also ensured that the National Theater would have a wide variety of Czech repertoire.
Beyond his writings and his actions an examination of Smetana’s music also conveys his sense of patriotism. His use of programs and poetic titles hints at national themes, in works such as the late violin and piano pieces Z domoviny (From the
Homeland, 1880), his autobiographical first string quartet, Z mého života (From My Life,
1876) and its follow up, the String Quartet No. 2 (1882 3), his 1848 revolutionary pieces, the Píse svobody (Song of Freedom), and the March for the Prague Students’ Legion.
Furthermore, Smetana’s music is imbued with the spirit of Czech nationalism by his incorporation of historical, mythological, national, and patriotic themes and subjects, including those that glorify the local geography. Many of the operas, including The
Brandenburgers in Bohemia, Dalibor, and Libuše, are based on events in Bohemia’s history or national legends. Others, like The Bartered Bride, Hubi ka (The Kiss, 1876), and
Tajemství (The Secret, 1878) represent the everyday life of ordinary Czech people. The cycle of symphonic poems Má Vlast includes representatives of both national historical
64 Curtis, Music Makes the Nation, 69.
64 legendary themes (Vyšehrad, Šarka, Tábor, Blaník) and those that venerate the national landscape (Vltava, Z eských luh a háj [From Bohemia’s Fields and Groves]). Smetana described the latter composition as a “hymn of praise” that functions as a “general description of the feelings which the sight of the Czech countryside conjures up.”65
Within several of his compositions, including the finale of Libuše and the last two movements of Má Vlast, Smetana interpolates the Hussite chorale and war hymn, “Ktož jsú Boži bojovnící” (Ye Who are Warriors of God). With the many nineteenth century
Bohemian histories depicting the Hussites as national defenders, the use of this chorale at key dramatic moments represented a sort of national call to arms. The final two movements in Má Vlast, Tábor and Blaník, form two parts of a larger whole, as both are based upon the chorale for melodic material. To Smetana, the Czechs, and to all who read his program notes, the use of the chorale signified the Hussites’ (and by extension, the Czechs’) “strong will, victorious fights, constancy and endurance and stubborn refusal to yield” and foretold the “resurrection of the Czech nation, its future happiness and glory.”66
Another way Smetana signifies his nationalist intentions in music is through the integration of folk music and dance. Smetana, born into a middle class family, had little exposure to any type of folk music growing up, and so came to appreciate Czech folk
65 Bartoš, Bed ich Smetana: Letters and Reminscences, 264 5. (Emphasis original)
66 Bartoš, Letters and Reminiscences, 265.
65 tunes and national dances only in adulthood. Perhaps for this reason Smetana seems to have a complicated relationship with folk music.
In his Memoirs of Ferdinand Heller, Ferdinand’s son Aleš tells of a time when
Smetana mockingly referred to folk tunes as “jig jogs,” leaving Ferdinand and Jan
Neruda, both vocal advocates of the national dances, to defend them as national treasures.67 Several years later, however, Smetana seems to have changed his mind.
“You were right…about the national songs and dances,” he told Ferdinand Heller.
Playing through the newly composed polka to The Bartered Bride, Smetana asked “What do you say to that? I’ve changed, haven’t I?”68
Smetana had composed numerous polkas for the piano since childhood, often naming them after friends or other dedicatees, or grouping them into small sets. He owned one of Erben’s largest collections of folk songs and poetry, and conducted
K ížkovský’s folk song settings with Hlahol. So why was he initially so hesitant to integrate folk tunes in his art music? His objections seem to stem from his operatic predecessors and the light entertainments they created in the early nineteenth century by setting new Czech texts to a series of preexisting folk melodies. Smetana objected to the folk inflected light hearted entertainment that resulted from this process, as
Smetana believed that operatic music should, above all, serve the drama of the work.
67 Bartoš, Letters and Reminiscences, 81.
68 Bartoš, Letters and Reminiscences, 82.
66 The verbatim quotation of folksongs limited the dramatic possibilities in a given work, reducing such an opera to a pastiche of melodies and styles.69 While composing The
Brandenburgers of Bohemia, Smetana got into a disagreement with František Rieger on such a topic. Rieger had suggested that, to write an opera about the life of the Czech people, a composer would need to base the music on Czech folk songs. Smetana objected, citing that a medley of folksongs would make a sort of “quodlibet” that would lack any dramatic continuity.70 This debate provoked Smetana to begin composing The
Bartered Bride, a work folk like in style, but lacking—at least in its initial version—in any folk song quotations.
Smetana’s solution was to compose in a folk like style when it suited his dramatic purposes, much like Chopin in his mazurkas and polonaises for piano. For a
Czech who only a few short years before had referred to folksongs as “jig jogs,”
Smetana was adept at imitating the melody, rhythm, and style of his national dances.
Only one melody from The Bartered Bride is borrowed from a folk source. The remainder of the opera, including all of the arias, recitatives, choruses, the polka, and the sko ná
(“Dance of the Comedians”) all sprang forth purely from Smetana’s imagination.
On rare occasions Smetana borrowed directly from folk tunes in his compositions. One of the few exceptions that overtly quotes or paraphrases a folksong
69 Curtis, Music Makes the Nation, 126.
70 Bartoš, Letters and Reminiscences, 67.
67 is the furiant in The Bartered Bride, first added to the opera in 1869. The original melody,
“Sedlák, sedlák” (Farmer, farmer) is from Erben’s collection Prostonárodní eské písn a
íkadla (Popular Czech Songs and Nursery Rhymes) (Figure 2.1). In Smetana’s furiant, the melody is harmonized, given an introduction, and transposed from G major to F major, but is still instantly recognizable as the folk tune (Figure 2.2, following the caesura).
Figure 2.1. Erben, “Sedlák, sedlák,” Popular Czech Songs and Nursery Rhymes, #588
Figure 2.2. Smetana, “Furiant” from The Bartered Bride, mm. 1 14.
68
The famous theme from Vltava is also a paraphrase of a Bohemian folk melody.
In this case the flowing theme (Figure 2.3) is a minor mode variation of the folk tune,
“Ko ka leze dírou” (The Cat is Crawling Through the Hole) (Figure 2.4). Near the end of the movement, Smetana does include a major mode variant of the theme (Figure 2.5), closely approximating the original folk tune.
Figure 2.3. Smetana, “Vltava” from Má Vlast, mm. 40 47
69 Figure 2.4. Traditional, “Ko ka leze dírou”71
Figure 2.5. Smetana, “Vltava” from Má Vlast, mm. 333 346.
71 Traditional folksong, “Ko ka leze dírou,” http://www.mcberuska.wz.cz/data/zpevnik/ zpevnik_clip_image002_0011.jpg (accessed 6 July, 2009).
70 Even when Smetana is nearly exact in his quotation, however, his music never sounds like a “quodlibet.” Smetana was able to elevate simple folksongs to the level of art music, and in doing so, provided a model for later composers to emulate.
Other compositions that include folk song quotation and paraphrase are more upfront in citing their reliance on quotation, including Fantasie na eské národní písn
(Fantasy on Czech National Songs, 1862) for solo piano, Fantaisie sur un air bohemian
(Fantasy on a Bohemian Song, 1843) for violin and piano, and several movements of the second volume of Czech Dances (1879).
71 CHAPTER 3 CZECH DANCES, BOOK 2
In the summer of 1878 Smetana’s friend brought him a copy of Dvo ák’s new
Slavonic Dances, Op. 46 for piano, four hands, which was attracting a lot of attention for
the young composer. These were not just traditional Bohemian folk dances, but
included dances from Moravia, Slovakia, Silesia, Serbia, Poland, and the Ukraine.
Inspired by Dvo ák’s success—and perhaps by a twinge of jealousy—Smetana decided
to compose his own set of purely Bohemian dances in what he considered to be a more
authentically Czech spirit. He wrote to his publisher that he was planning to make a
“comeback,” and suggested a collection of Czech dances which could be published
singly or as a set, for one or two pianos, or for orchestra:1
I suggest publishing folkdances under the title Czech Dances. Every dance under its own name, e.g. ‘Furiant,’ ’Sko ná,’ ‘Rejdovák and Rejdova ka,’ ‘Sousedská,’ ‘Hulán,’…etc…. Whereas Dvo ák gives his pieces just a general name ‘Slawische Tänze’ with people not knowing which they are, and whether they exist at all, we would show which dances with real names we Czechs have.2 But Smetana, accustomed to dances from the music hall and ballroom like the polka and
the waltz, was not very familiar with Czech folk dances until late in life. He had
typically avoided the incorporation of folk melodies in his compositions because of his 1 Brian Large, Smetana (New York: Praeger, 1970), 340.
2 Marta Ottlová, et. al., ”Smetana, Bed ich,” in Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/52076 (accessed March 29, 2009).
72 progressive aesthetic, although polka rhythms dominate many of his compositions and he sometimes quoted the occasional folk tune in his operas when it served a dramatic function. For this undertaking he would need a better understanding of the native folk tunes and dances. He drew upon Karel Erben’s Popular Czech Songs and Nursery Rhymes
(1862 1864) for some of his melodic material, and received further instruction on
Bohemian and Moravian folk song and dance steps from an eighty year old retired teacher named Suchý, who was a neighbor to the Smetana household in the country.
Smetana started work on the second volume of Czech Dances in the summer of
1879, outlining six dance types, intending to compose two of each type:
1) Individual dances for a man or woman. 2) Dances for pairs of men renouncing love. 3) Dances for pairs of men declaring love. 4) Dances for pairs of women renouncing love. 5) Dances for pairs of women declaring love. 6) Collective dances for men and women.3 Even with Erben’s collection of folk tunes and Suchý as resources, however, Smetana found himself short on material for the fourth and fifth categories and decided to reduce the movements to ten, cutting his planned redovák and the chimneysweep’s dance.4 Not all ten dances, however, quote folk melodies. Those that incorporate folk tunes either paraphrase the melody or use it as the basis for theme and variations, but several of the movements are entirely of Smetana’s own invention, composed in a folk 3 Large, Smetana, 340.
4 Large, Smetana, 340.
73 like style. True to his stated goal to his publisher, Smetana gave each of the final dances a Czech name, either reflecting a type of Bohemian dance (Furiant, Dupák, Obkro ák,
Sousedská, Sko ná), or naming the dance after the folk tune incorporated into the movement (Oves, Medv d, Cibuli ka, Hulán).
Each of the dances is highly stylized. These are not movements to be danced to, but virtuosic concert paraphrases of comparable weight, according to Vladimír Tichý, to a piano sonata.5 Tichý asserts that these are no mere quotations or imitations of dances, but that Smetana extends them into larger forms by adding ancillary sections such as introductions, transitions, developments, and codas.6 Movements are carefully arranged for contrast between tempi and moods, with fast, virtuosic showpieces framing the set. The collection presents great technical challenges for the performer, including double octaves, frequent tempo changes, wide leaps, extended staccato passages, thick chordal sonorities, rapid, leggiero passages of filigree, and complex inner voicings. Even the slower, more lyrical dances make technical demands on the performer, including a notable passage in Hulán where the principle melody is passed back and forth between the thumbs of each hand in a style reminiscent of the piano compositions of Sigismond Thalberg.
5 Vladimír Tichý, “The Structural Role of Kinetics in Bed ich Smetana’s eské Tance,” in Bed ich Smetana: 1824 1884. Report of the International Musicological Conference 24 26 May 1994, ed. Olga Mojžíšová and Marta Ottlová (Prague: Muzeum Bed icha Smetany, 1995), 141.
6 Tichý, “The Structural Role of Kinetics,” 141.
74 This chapter examines each dance in greater detail, evaluating its rhythmic qualities and national dance characteristics. It further details the specific folk context, where applicable, and analyzes Smetana’s varied applications (quotation, paraphrase, imitation) of folk material. The final section of the chapter frames the collection in terms of Czech nationalism, exploring how, through these ten dances, Smetana effectively represented the Czech national spirit.
The Dances
1. Furiant
The opening furiant forms a brilliant and memorable introduction to the collection. This couples’ dance relies on a characteristic hemiola effect, created by three duple metric units followed by two triple metric units, although the dance is notated uniformly in triple meter throughout. Folk music scholar Paul Nettl describes the dance as a
pantomime of the dancer trying to act the part of a proud peasant, with arms akimbo, stamping his feet and taking off his coat, shoving his lady partner ahead of him while she dances gracefully before him and then around him, then turns on her heels around and around at the same place, until finally the male partner clasps her and begins to dance quite slowly and solemnly the steps of a sousedská.7
7 Paul Nettl, The Story of Dance Music (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947), 296.
75 Smetana had famously added a furiant for inclusion in the 1869 version of The Bartered
Bride, basing the melody on “Sedlák, sedlák” (Farmer, farmer) from Erben’s collection
(See Figure 2.1). For the Furiant in the Czech Dances, Smetana drew inspiration from the same tune, notating the melody at the top of his manuscript; but instead of quoting the folk song verbatim, he paraphrases it, keeping only the lively, syncopated rhythm and three note motive, but changing the mode, key, harmony, and melodic contour (Figure
3.1).
Figure 3.1. Smetana, “Furiant” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 29 36.
The dance’s introduction sounds to the listener like an improvisatory whirlwind of activity, seemingly notated in duple meter; but Smetana carefully crafts it to create metric ambiguity on multiple levels. Written in triple meter, the surface rhythm of the passage emphasizes rhythmic groupings of the half note value. Because the opening neighbor tone motive repeats in three different octave registers before being chromatically altered, however, Smetana also creates the effect of 3/2 meter, according
76 to each chromatic change (Figure 3.2). Harmonically, the introduction serves as an increasingly colorful dominant (E major) sonority used to propel the motion into the opening strains of the main furiant motive in A minor.
Figure 3.2. Smetana, “Furiant” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 1 4.
Half note groupings 3/2 meter groupings
Following the introduction, the principle furiant theme alternates with more waltz like material until a central section again causes metric ambiguity, this time by means of pitting the pianist’s right hand, playing syncopated chords, against the left hand, which sounds a drawn out two measure stride bass idea. The right hand chords not only sound on a weak beat in the measure, but the right hand’s accents fall on the left hand’s weak measure its two bar pattern (Figure 3.3).
Figure 3.3. Smetana, “Furiant” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 167 174.
77
This seemingly new material returns in the coda to bring the movement to a triumphant close.
2. Slepi ka (Little Hen)
This women’s dance most closely resembles a polka in that it is predominantly in
2/4 time; however, following the introduction, the final measure of the eight bar principal theme is notated in 3/8 time (Figure 3.4). The effect is both unexpected and humorous, and adds a folk like twist to a movement that is not based upon a preexisting folk tune. Much of the movement is notated in extended passages of staccato, creating an endurance challenge for the pianist, but vividly portraying the pecking of the “little hen.”
Figure 3.4. Smetana, “Slepi ka” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 11 18.
78 The leggierissimo central section alters the theme, transforming it into a “dazzling showpiece recalling the bravura compositions of Liszt,” thereby elevating a simple folk like tune into a virtuoso concert paraphrase.8
3. Oves (Oats)
The third movement, Oves, is a grain dance, one of many agricultural themed dances with a “pantomimic element,” such as ezanka (The Chaff), Kedluben (The
Turnip), and Cibuli ka (Little Onion).9 Smetana noted the title and opening lines of text of the folksong from Erben’s collection in his score:
I was sowing yesterday and today, but I won’t love you anymore, my sweetheart. No, I won’t love you ever again!10 Smetana borrows part of Erben’s melody (Figure 3.5) to create a five measure theme that informs the entire movement (Figure 3.6). The theme is at times presented with a countermelody, and over the course of the brief dance builds to a surprising intensity.
According to Paul Nettl:
From this simple dance of the people, Smetana has wrought an admirable plastic little dance drama as the girl singing the naïve song is overpowered by the mighty force of love and deeply disturbed by her emotions until she finds peace and repose again in the resolve within her heart.11
8 Large, Smetana, 341.
9 Paul Nettl, The Story of Dance Music, 294.
10 Translation provided in Large, Smetana, 342.
79
Figure 3.5. Erben, Popular Czech Songs and Nursery Rhymes, #592.
Figure 3.6. Smetana, “Oves” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 9 13.
Although the movement is almost entirely based upon the original five bar theme,
Smetana’s invention and sense of drama create a kind of narrative out of the folk dance.
11 Paul Nettl, The Story of Dance Music, 295.
80 4. Medv d (The Bear)
The fourth movement is a bavorák, a Bohemian dance characterized by an alternation between two measures of triple meter followed by three measures in duple meter. The melody of the dance’s principle section is based upon one of Erben’s folksongs (No. 118), with the text:
I won’t marry you my dear, because you look like a bear. A bear has hairy legs but you also have a cursed heart!12
Smetana depicts the boyfriend’s bear like appearance by means of fortissimo left hand chromatic octaves, made more clumsy sounding by the interpolated duple measures
(Figure 3.7).
Figure 3.7. Smetana, “Medv d” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 5 16.
12 Translation provided in Large, Smetana, 343.
81 This clumsiness is reinforced in the music by means of frequent two against three polyrhythms, heightened when the right and left hands are in imitation (Figure 3.8).
Figure 3.8. Smetana, “Medv d” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 17 24.
The central section, however, inhabits an entirely different world with respect to folksong influence, harmony, and key. Over the course of a brief transition reinforcing the note C sharp, the dance modulates from C major to F sharp major. The central section is marked “Dudácká”, after the Czech dudy, or bagpipes, and the left hand sounds a drone bass in fifths for sixty bars (Figure 3.9).
Figure 3.9. Smetana, “Medv d” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 104 111.
82 The effect is a serene, pastoral moment of calm in the midst of a rather bombastic, robust dance.
5. Cibuli ka (Little Onion)
The fifth dance is based on the song “Hop hej! Cibulá i” (Hop hey! Onioners), a tune sung by Czech onion vendors. In choosing this melody, one of Bohemia’s most widely known folksongs, Smetana ensured popular appeal for the entire collection.
Unlike some of the previous dances where he paraphrased the tune or quoted only a fragment, Smetana singles out this folk song to quote nearly verbatim in a simple setting, allowing it to be instantly recognizable to Czech audiences. This melody then becomes the theme for subsequent variations. A central section, marked dolce amoroso, introduces a new melody of Smetana’s own invention. Following the subsequent return of the “onion” motif, a coda based upon the central dolce amoroso music returns, now transformed into a stirring anthem.
6. Dupák (Stamping Dance)
The sixth dance, Dupák, is a men’s stamping dance in fast duple time. According to Carol Ann Roberts Bell, the dupák features strong accentuations on both the first and second beats of the 2/4 measure, with the “weak” beat almost as strong as the
83 downbeat.13 Smetana’s dance bears this out with the main theme presented in double octaves, with martellato indications adding an exclamation point to phrase endings
(Figure 3.10).
Figure 3.10. Smetana, “Dupák” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 1 8.
Brian Large cites a diatonic folksong that may have inspired Smetana’s highly chromatic dance, but the melody, key, and contour are almost entirely different.14 The principal influence exerted by the song from Erben’s collection can be traced is likely found at the ends of phrases—the falling third in the fourth measure and the rising half step in the eighth (Figure 3.11).
13 Carol Ann Roberts Bell, “A Performance Analysis of Selected Dances from the ‘Hungarian Dances’ of Johannes Brahms and the ‘Slavonic Dances’ by Antonín Dvo ák for one piano, four hands,” (D. M. A. doc., The University of Oklahoma, 1990), 133.
14 Large, Smetana, 344.
84 Figure 3.11. Erben, Popular Czech Songs and Nursery Rhymes, #471.
Allegro vivace (Dupak)
Dohrávka
Because of the double octaves, wide leaps, running sixteenth note passages, and
Vivacissimo tempo indication, this dance is one of the most demanding of the set to perform, akin to a Lisztian etude. Moments of respite occur, however, in central episodes, marked dolce, that occur twice within the movement. The first of these is also labeled “Dudácká,” reminiscent of the central pastoral section interpolated in the fourth dance Medv d. Here, too, Smetana evokes the drone of the dudy by writing only tonic and dominant notes for the left hand for nearly eighty measures. The second
“Dudácká” section maintains the same key as the original, but varies the right hand figuration, now setting triplets over the left hand eighth notes. The work ends with a coda marked Prestissimo and martellato and closes with final stamping gestures.
85
7. Hulán (The Lancer)
Next to the rowdy Dupák, the slow and lyrical female dance Hulán provides a significant contrast. The movement is constructed as a sort of theme and variations on folk song No. 379 in Erben’s collection with the text that depicts a young girl’s lament of her lover who is far away serving in the Habsburg army:
I had a sweetheart—a Lancer [young soldier] was he. I liked him dearly and gave him my silver ring. Now Lancer and ring are no more!15 In Empress Maria Theresa’s time, Czech members of the army spent between seven and fourteen years in service.16
Following an introduction, Smetana first presents the tune simply with an arpeggiated left hand accompaniment (Figure 3.12). After a brief transition the first variation begins, giving both the melody and accompaniment to the left hand while the right hand ornaments it above (Figure 3.13). The second variation, marked Più mosso, divides the melody between the thumbs of both hands while the left hand sounds octaves and blocked chords and the right hand arpeggiates the harmonies (Figure 3.14).
15 Translation provided in Large, Smetana, 345.
16 Ivan Ruml, jacket notes to Bed ich Smetana, Czech Dances, Jan Novotný, trans. Ivan Vom ká (Supraphon Records SU 3070 2 111, 1996).
86 Figure 3.12. Smetana, “Hulán” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 12 21.
Figure 3.13. Smetana, “Hulán” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 41 44.
87 Figure 3.14. Smetana, “Hulán” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 62 75.
Among the slowest of the collection of dances, Hulán nevertheless poses numerous challenges for the performer in terms of coordination, voicing, and balance.
This dance, in particular, demonstrates Smetana’s varied settings of folk material.
8. Obkro ák (Stepping Dance)
The Obkro ák is another women’s dance, sometimes called “Obro ák” or
“Okro ák.”17 In a quick, duple meter, the dance steps consist of turning on the ball of
17 The former term is used by Large, Smetana, 345; the latter, by Paul Nettl, Story of Dance Music, 284, and Karel Jaromír Erben, Prostonárodní eské Písn a íkadla (Popular Czech Songs and Nursery Rhymes) (Prague: Alois Hynek, 1886), v. 88 each foot with a short hop in between.18 In the score, Smetana acknowledges his debt to
Erben for his first theme, to which he again gives variation treatment; however, Brian
Large points out that a subsidiary section also draws upon folk material from Erben’s collection: the tune “Haj husy ze pšenice” (Hey, geese, come out of the corn) (Figures
3.15 and 3.16).19
Figure 3.15. Smetana, “Obkro ák” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 55 58.
Figure 3.16. Erben, Popular Czech Songs and Nursery Rhymes, #114.
18 Roberts Bell, “Performance Analysis of Selected Dances,” 132.
19 Large, Smetana, 345.
89
9. Sousedská (Neighbors’ Dance)
According to John Clapham, the moderately paced sousedská was created to “give
elderly people the opportunity of dancing when other popular dances were too rapid
for them.”20 The dance is akin to a slow waltz or ländler. Nineteenth century Czech
music contains many sousedská or sousedská type movements, although they are
relatively rare in Smetana’s output. He included one earlier in his final movement of
Svatební scény (Wedding Scenes, 1849), but examples can be found in Dvo ák’s output,
including the Slavonic Dances (nos. 4, 6, and 16), the eská suita (1879), and the trio
section of the scherzo in his Ninth Symphony (1893).21 Here, Smetana gives free rein to
his imagination. There are no quotes or paraphrases of folk tunes, but it is constructed
as a sectional fantasia based upon traditional dance rhythms.
10. Sko ná (Leaping Dance)
The sko ná is a fast, energetic, and exuberant peasant dance in duple time whose
steps are similar to those of an obkro ák, but with two leaps replacing the hop.22 Here,
20 John Clapham, “The National Origins of Dvo ák’s Art,” Proceedings of the Royal Music Association 89 (1962), 83.
21 John Tyrrell, “Sousedská,” in Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/43853 (accessed 10 April 2009).
22 Roberts Bell, “Performance Analysis of Selected Dances,” 132 33.
90 too, Smetana does not rely on any preexisting folk material, but lets his imagination run wild depicting the energy and whirling motion of the group dance.
This was not Smetana’s first attempt to write a sko ná, as his two earliest operas incorporated them: The Brandenburgers in Bohemia and The Bartered Bride, where the dance is more widely known as the “Dance of the Comedians.” In the latter opera, as in the Czech Dances, Smetana builds a cadential figure into the introduction, representative of the dance’s “characteristic initial stamping” (Figure 3.17).23
Figure 3.17. Smetana, “Sko ná” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 1 2.
With its wide leaps, whirling passages of sixteenth notes, and lively tempo, this dance provides a joyous and energetic conclusion to the set that rarely fails to raise a concert audience to its feet.
23 Clapham, “The National Origins of Dvo ák’s Art,” 82.
91 “Czechness” in the Czech Dances
Direct in folk idiom, and rich in invention, the [second volume of Czech Dances] represents the highest form of dance music to come from Smetana’s pen; but the pieces are not imitations, nor are they merely coloured by folk characteristics as are some of Dvo ák, Brahms, or Grieg. These are glittering paraphrases of a virtuoso order, conceived in the most masterly fashion and founded on genuine folk forms which interpret the national spirit.24
Smetana intended from the beginning to imbue the second volume of Czech
Dances with “national spirit,” as evidenced by his letter to his publisher and his stated goal to compose something more characteristically “Czech” than Dvo ák. Instead of the hodgepodge of pan Slavic folk influences Dvo ák employed in his Slavonic Dances,
Smetana specifically chose only Bohemian folk songs and Czech national dances as the inspiration for his collection.
The “Czechness” of the Czech Dances, however, is based on more than mere folksong quotation. Sidney Finkelstein explains that there are two components of
Smetana’s musical nationalism:
One offers realistic images of the Czech common people in terms of domestic and village life…treating characters with great warmth and dignity. The other, the call to Czech freedom and independence, is presented in terms of the heroic, semi historical and semi legendary Bohemian past.25
24 Large, Smetana, 346.
25 Sidney Finkelstein, Composer and Nation: The Folk Heritage in Music (New York: International Publishers, 1989), 163 64.
92 Jaroslav Jiránek strikes a similar tone when he describes three “intonations”
representative of Smetana’s output: the pastoral, the polka, and the fanfare.26
According to Raymond Monelle, the pastoral topic, represented in the eighteenth
century by shepherds, shepherdesses, satyrs, and fauns, by the nineteenth century came
to take on a different connotation:
In [its] place…a new kind of pastoralism emerged. It too idealized the peasantry and shepherds, but they were not center stage; the protagonist was now the landscape, the woods and fields and brooks, the mountains, sunshine, moonlight, and distant vistas that formed the setting.27 This nineteenth century pastoral topic can be found throughout the works of Smetana,
beginning with some of earliest compositions, including his Op. 1, Six morceaux
caractéristiques (1847 48), with programmatic titles such as “In the Forest” and
“Shepherdess,” and Lesní city a dojmy: Nocturno (Forest Emotions and Impressions, 1847,
rev. 1883). This is even more evident in mature works, including Vltava (1874) and Z
eských luh a háj (From Bohemia’s Fields and Groves, 1875). Within the second volume
of Czech Dances the pastoral “intonation” is represented by the use of folk songs and
national dances, idealizing the peasant culture. This is reinforced by the evocation of the
26 Jaroslav Jiránek, “Regarding the Question of Smetana’s Originality,” in Bed ich Smetana: 1824 1884. Report of the International Musicological Conference 24 26 May 1994, ed. Olga Mojžíšová and Marta Ottlová (Prague: Muzeum Bed icha Smetany, 1995), 18 20.
27 Raymond Monelle, The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and Pastoral (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 202.
93 Czech bagpipes in Medv d and Dupák, whose drone basses are, according to Monelle,
“the most pervasive signifier of the pastoral topic.”28
Jiránek’s polka intonation is found throughout Smetana’s compositional output, not limited to his functional or stylized dances. In many cases, Smetana used the polka to represent unrestrained joy, such as in the scherzo movement of his String Quartet No.
1, From My Life. Other times, Smetana uses the polka in unexpected and uncharacteristic ways, such as his polka like depiction of the witches’ dance in his tone poem for piano,
Macbeth a arod jnice (Macbeth and the Witches, 1859). In the Czech Dances the connection to the polka and to national dances, in general, is clear. The first volume of
Czech Dances consists of four polkas, Smetana’s most stylized and mature examples; but the second volume relies almost as heavily on polka like dances (Slepi ka), other duple meter dances (Dupák, Obkro ák), and similar dances of wild, joyful abandon (Sko ná).
Jiránek’s final intonation is the fanfare, used to depict what Finkelstein dubbed the “heroic, semi historical and semi legendary Bohemian past.” This topic is quite common in Smetana’s operas, notably the festival opera Libuše, but also in the fanfare like principal theme from Vyšehrad and the chorale statements of “Ye Who Are Warriors of God” in Tábor and Blaník. This would seem an unusual topic to find in the Czech
Dances, which do not include a program that would allow for the depiction of Bohemian history or legend, per se, but fanfare like and heroic sounding motifs occur frequently
28 Monelle, The Musical Topic, 202.
94 in the music, notably in climaxes, including the return of the dolce amoroso material in
Cibuli ka (mm. 156 174) the Più mosso section of Oves (mm. 82 95), and in the coda of the
Furiant.
Several of Smetana’s contemporaries shared his vocabulary of intonations, but
Jiránek argues that Smetana’s genius, and what ultimately caused him to be set apart and widely accepted as the founder of a national style of Czech music, was in the combination or “hybridization” of these intonations.29 Within a single piece or movement Smetana blends components of each of the aforementioned style types, in some cases for only for a few measures, to create a complex web of associations and meanings that together form a stronger representation of “Czechness” than any single element alone.
The opening Furiant of the second volume of Czech Dances, for example, brings together all of these threads. The pastoral topic is represented by the peasant folk tune that informed the principal motive of the dance (See earlier Figures 2.1 and 3.1).
Although this dance, notated in triple meter, will never be mistaken for a polka (a duple meter dance), the furiant, too, is a popular national dance, whose characteristic patterns of cross rhythms serve as a widely recognizable symbol of Czech culture. It contains passages of functional sounding, sousedská like dance music based upon the folk tune’s neighbor tone motive (Figure 3.18), which over the course of the movement is
29 Jiránek, “Regarding the Question of Smetana’s Originality,” 20.
95 transformed into a passage played with exuberance and rapidly arpeggiated left hand eighth notes (Figure 3.19). Representing Jiránek’s final style type, the final coda, marked
Triomfale, transforms the material from a central episode (See earlier Figure 3.3) into an emphatic and heroic fanfare that covers much of the piano’s range (Figure 3.20). No one, single element makes this dance “Czech,” but the arrangement of national topics combined with their range of meanings, and brought together by Smetana’s unique compositional voice, serves to make the movement simultaneously memorable and national, and elevates the Furiant from a simple peasant dance to a large scale concert work of high art.
Figure 3.18. Smetana, “Furiant” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 81 88.
Figure 3.19. Smetana, “Furiant” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 284 291.
96
Figure 3.20. Smetana, “Furiant” from Czech Dances, Book 2, mm. 316 323.
97 CONCLUSION
The aim of this document is to set Smetana’s Czech Dances, Book 2 in the broad context of the construction of Czech national identity and the more general trend of nineteenth century European cultural nationalism. The Czech Dances not only symbolize the culmination of Smetana’s writing for the piano, but are among the handful of his late works truly representative of his mature, nationalist style of composition. The ten movements in the second volume are virtuosic and appealing examples of romantic pianism in their own right, but also serve a national purpose in idealizing native dances.
Smetana seems to have taken the ideas of Johann Gottfried von Herder to heart, creating an artwork even greater than the sum of its constituent parts. Using Czech folk songs and dances as “materials,” Smetana constructed a new form of “high” art music, blending a wealth of national songs and dances with a progressive, romantic aesthetic.
More than just simple imitations of folk songs, however, the Czech Dances are weighty, serious pieces in their own right. Inspired by other Eastern European models of nationalist music, including Chopin’s Polish dances, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, and even Dvo ák’s Slavonic Dances, Smetana was able to construct his own means of demonstrating the Czech spirit. The resulting works are quintessentially “Czech” in character not only because of their folk models, but because of Smetana’s stated intentions for the collection as a musical response to Dvo ák’s Slavonic Dances,
98 combined with the dances’ unique blend of dance inflected rhythms, folk like characteristics, pastoral evocations of the Bohemian countryside, and the heroic sounding fanfares representative of Bohemia’s historical legendary past.
This distinctive fusion of the national and the progressive, the folk and the cosmopolitan ultimately resulted in Smetana’s being regarded as the prototypical Czech composer. His example served as a beacon to subsequent composers, who happily imitated his example or lived under the weight of his legacy as the father of Czech nationalism.
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