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Bedrich Smetana: 2th March 1824-12th May 1884.

Article Excerpt
The founder of Czech national music--that is what almost any Czech who has finished elementary school thinks when he hears the name Smetana. Many will be able to identify him as the composer of The Bartered Bride and Libuse, and probably My Country too. Some will claim that he was a Wagnerian, while others will insist that he was a genuinely national or folk composer. Everyone, however, will probably agree that he was a suffering and persecuted genius, who--even when stricken with deafness--wrote great works of music. These and other stereotypes have become part of the Czech national consciousness of historical facts you need to know, and form a kind of fragmentary image which for many people is enough. Yet we are also continually witnesses to the fact that at crisis or celebratory moments in our community it is Smetana's music that is the means by which we express and communicate the elevating and even ritual feelings of mutual harmony and belonging that have a huge power to unite just in themselves. Smetana's work is therefore undergoing a kind of process of cleansing from all this accumulated silt of stereotypes and is proving ever capable of renewing the role that it had began to play in Czech society even in the last years of the composer's life. In this limited space let us try to take a necessarily brief look at his career before the time when--starting at the end of the 1870s--the Czech public began to adopt ever more of his works as their own, to see Smetana's individual composing style as the fulfilment of a notion of Czech national music and to see the composer himself as its creator and representative figure. And let a miniature portrait of the kind given here be just a little flake in the mosaic of the kaleidoscope from which, as from individual experience of his music, anyone who feels the need can create his own picture of the composer.

The Captive of Divine Music

"Divine music took up all my strength and all my time", so Smetana in 1860 characterised the whole of his life up to that point. Music had accompanied him from childhood in the family of the Litomysl brewer Frantisek Smetana, who loved family music making. Music kept distracting him from his high school studies in Jihlava, Nemecky...

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