Bedřich Smetana

Bedřich Smetana was born on 2 March 1824 at Litomyšl in Bohemia, then a province of the Austrian Empire. His father, František, was a wealthy brewer and passionate amateur violinist who taught him music. Bedřich was a child prodigy: at six he gave his first piano concert and began composing. Like most educated Czechs of his time, he grew up speaking German, the official language of the empire, and only learned to write Czech well as an adult.

After turbulent secondary schooling he moved to Prague in 1843, poor and with little family support. He studied composition with the teacher Josef Proksch and earned his living as music teacher in the family of Count Thun. He dreamed of becoming “a Mozart in composition and a Liszt in technique”. In 1848, the year of revolutions in Europe, he took part in the Prague barricades and composed patriotic marches. With the help of Liszt, to whom he had written and dedicated pieces, he opened a music school in Prague.

In 1849 he married Kateřina Kolářová, a pianist and childhood friend. They had four daughters, but three died in infancy. The grief of losing his eldest daughter, Bedřiška, inspired his Piano Trio in G minor in 1855. Disappointed by the lack of recognition in Prague, where musical life was dominated by German culture and political repression, he left in 1856 for Gothenburg in Sweden, where he became a conductor and teacher. He stayed five years and composed his first symphonic poems, inspired by Liszt.

His wife died of tuberculosis in 1859 on the journey home. He remarried the following year, to Bettina Ferdinandiová. In 1862 he returned to Prague, where the atmosphere had changed: Austria was loosening its grip and the Czechs were asserting their national identity. A Provisional Theatre opened to stage plays and operas in Czech. Smetana wanted to create a Czech national music. His first opera, The Brandenburgers in Bohemia (1866), was a great success.

That same year he premiered The Bartered Bride, a comic opera full of folk dances — polka, furiant — and village humour, which became the emblematic work of Czech music. Smetana was appointed principal conductor of the Provisional Theatre. He went on to compose Dalibor (1868), a heroic opera, and Libuše, about the legendary founder of Prague, performed in 1881 for the opening of the National Theatre. But his opponents accused him of being too influenced by Wagner.

In 1874 Smetana suddenly became totally deaf, probably as a result of illness. He had to give up conducting and retired to the country, to his daughter’s home at Jabkenice. Yet it was in silence that he composed his greatest works. Between 1874 and 1879 he wrote Má vlast (My Homeland), a cycle of six symphonic poems celebrating the history, legends and landscapes of Bohemia. The most famous, Vltava (The Moldau), follows the great river from its two sources to Prague.

In 1876 he composed String Quartet No. 1, “From My Life”, a true musical autobiography: in the finale a very high, sustained note on the first violin represents the whistling that heralded his deafness. His last years were marked by severe depression and mental illness. He was admitted to an asylum in Prague, where he died on 12 May 1884, aged sixty. He is regarded as the father of Czech music. Every year the Prague Spring festival opens on the anniversary of his death with Má vlast.