Bedrich Smetana on Music Theory Print

Dalibor (opera)

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Performance history#

Smetana had great affection for the opera, but because of the lukewarm reception, died thinking that he had failed with this opera. The revival in 1886, however, two years after the composer’s death, was a success. Gustav Mahler conducted an 1892 production in Vienna.

Synopsis#

:Time: 15th century :Place: Prague

Act 1#

Dalibor, a Czech Knight is on trial before the king for having murdered the burgrave of Ploskovice in revenge for execution of his friend, the musician Zdeněk. At the trial, the king calls upon the burgrave’s sister, Milada, who demands his execution. As Dalibor is brought in, the crowd rises in support of him. When Dalibor tells of his friend’s capture and murder the court reduces his sentence from death to lifetime imprisonment. Milada painfully realized that she is falling in love with Dalibor, and in collusion with Jitka, an orphan befriended by the knight, she resolves to set him free.

Hakon Jarl (Smetana)

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Background and performance history#

Hakon Jarl is the third and last of Smetana’s so-called “Swedish” symphonic poems, composed during the years he spent in Gothenburg (1857–1861). His visit to Franz Liszt at Weimar in the summer of 1857, where he heard Liszt’s Faust Symphony and Die Ideale, caused a material reorientation of Smetana’s orchestral music and suggested to him a means for expressing literary subjects by a synthesis between music and text, rather than by simple musical illustration. These insights are reflected in Hakon Jarl and the first two symphonic poems he wrote in Gothenburg: Richard III (1858), and Wallenstein’s Camp (1859). The subject matter of Hakon Jarl, which was based on Oehlenschläger’s 1804 play about a legendary Norse ruler and the triumph of Christianity over paganism in Scandinavia, was possibly chosen to appeal to Smetana’s intended audience in Gothenburg. However, according to musicologist Richard Taruskin, the work’s poetic and musical themes show no particular Scandinavian colour and are “universally heroic and religious” in nature. In the end, Hakon Jarl and Smetana’s previous two symphonic poems premiered in his Czech homeland instead of Sweden. Smetana finished the first sketch of Hakon Jarl on 6 January 1860 and completed the work on 24 March 1861. Shortly thereafter he returned permanently to Prague where it was performed for the first time on 24 February 1864. Although not as well known as Smetana’s later symphonic poem cycle Má vlast, the three “Swedish” symphonic poems are still regularly performed in concert halls. :

Libuše (opera)

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Background#

The opera was composed in 1871–72. From the very beginning, the new opera’s premiere was destined to mark a major, exceptional event. After abandoning an initial idea to dedicate it to the coronation of the Austrian Emperor as King of Bohemia (which actually never happened), Smetana focused on a historic occasion whose dimension was indeed exclusively national, namely, the inauguration of the National Theatre in Prague. Consequently, the premiere had to wait for nine years after the opera’s completion, until 11 June, 1881. After that, Libuše was also performed as part of the National Theatre’s definitive reopening on 18 November, 1883, following its previous destruction by a fire. By then, however, Smetana had already suffered a complete loss of hearing and was unable to listen to his music. Smetana’s aim was to create a ”glorious tableau”. He carried out his declared task with honour, and being a consummate dramatist he did not in the process limit himself to producing a static illustration of a well-known story. Rather, the opera’s score stands out for its wealth of musical architecture, alternating monumental passages with lyric images of nature, professions of love with scenes of strife packed with drama, a rustic dance with a ceremonial march. Commentators have noted the pageant-like nature of the opera and the influence of Richard Wagner in the music. Finally, the whole is topped off by a closing scene of Libuše’s prophecy, manifesting confidence in the lasting vitality and glory of the Czech nation. Smetana was well aware of his opera’s exceptional status; he did not intend it to become a standard repertoire number, but wished its performances to be limited to ”festive occasions marked by the entire Czech nation”. This wish of the composer has since his time continued to be the norm to this day.

Má vlast

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Structure#

Má vlast consists of six pieces: # Vyšehrad (The High Castle) # Vltava (The Moldau) # Šárka, named after a legendary female warrior # Z českých luhů a hájů (From Bohemia’s Woods and Fields) # Tábor, a town in South Bohemia # Blaník, a mountain

1. Vyšehrad#

The first poem, Vyšehrad (The High Castle), composed between the end of September and 18 November 1874 and premiered on 14 March 1875 at the Prague Philharmonic, describes the Vyšehrad castle in Prague which was the seat of the earliest Czech kings. During the summer of 1874, Smetana began to lose his hearing, and total deafness soon followed; he described the gradual, but rapid loss of his hearing in a letter of resignation to the director of the Royal Provincial Czech Theatre, Antonín Čížek. In July 1874 he began hearing anomalous noise and then a permanent buzzing. Not long after the onset he was unable to distinguish individual sounds. At the beginning of October he lost all hearing in his right ear, and finally on 20 October in his left. His treatment was based on maintaining isolation from all sounds, but was unsuccessful. The poem begins with the sounds of the harp of the mythical singer Lumír, and then crosses over into the tones of the castle’s arsenal. This section of the music introduces the main motifs, which are used in other parts of the cycle. A four note motif (B–E–D–B) represents the castle of Vyšehrad; this is heard again at the end of ‘Vltava’ and once more, to round the whole cycle off, at the conclusion of ‘Blaník’. : In the score two harps are required to perform the opening arpeggios. After a dominant seventh chord, the winds take up the theme, followed by the strings, before the whole orchestra is employed to reach a climax. In the next part, Smetana recalls the story of the castle, using a faster tempo which becomes a march. A seemingly triumphant climax is cut short by a descending passage depicting the collapse of the castle, and the music falls quiet. Then the opening harp material is heard again and the music reminds again of the beauty of the castle, now in ruins. The music ends quietly, depicting the river Vltava flowing below the castle. Conceived between 1872 and 1874, it is the only piece in the cycle to be mostly completed before Smetana began to go noticeably deaf in the summer of 1874. Most performances last about fifteen minutes.

Piano Trio in G minor (Smetana)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Structure#

This piano trio consists of three movements:

I. Moderato assai#

The first movement (3/4, G minor) follows a sonata form beginning with a seven-measure violin solo that is in the lowest register (, on the G string) that starts on the dominant. These seven measures will indicate the first theme that will also be featured in the development of the work. The second theme is introduced in measure 48 featuring the cello (with piano accompaniment). This theme can be identified as more diatonic in contrast to the first, and it is expanded on in the Più Animato section of the movement. There is a Tempo Rubato section that will lead to the Recapitulation that has the first theme abridged by the Violin solo once again. This piece ends with a Coda that is an elaboration of the first theme reiterated in the Tonic. This movement ends with three sforzandi that have varying inversions of G Minor.

String Quartet No. 1 (Smetana)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Autobiography#

At an unknown point in Smetana’s life, he contracted syphilis—in 1874, at 50 years old, his health began to swiftly decline. After a gradual decrease in his hearing, he became completely deaf by October of that year. It is widely believed that his deafness was caused by syphilis. After becoming deaf, Smetana moved in 1876 from Prague to Jabkenice. He still hoped that the condition would not be permanent. In the autumn of that year, he began to compose a new work. It was to be his intimate confession, a work depicting the course of his life. Included in the work was a high-pitched E natural which mimicked the ringing in his ears. He completed the composition on 29 December 1876. In a letter to his friend Josef Srb-Debrnov, Smetana formulated the work’s ideological conception and the features of the individual movements. Smetana endured many hardships throughout his life, and these hardships inspired him to write music. For example, his daughter’s death was the inspiration to write his Piano Trio in G minor, while the death of his first wife, Catherine, was the inspiration for the third movement of his String Quartet No. 1. The work was published in 1880 by Fr. Urbánek in Prague.

String Quartet No. 2 (Smetana)

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Background#

In June 1882, after composing the monumental cycle Má vlast, the operas Tajemství (The Secret), Čertova stěna (The Devil’s Wall) and other works, Smetana began thinking about the creation of his second string quartet. A month later, he finished the first movement. In a letter to his friend Josef Srba, the deaf and dejected composer presents the difficulties with the work, his misgivings and fears. He continued work very slowly, and the whole composition was not finished until 12 March 1883. Several minor changes were made after the work was completed. Smetana attended the first non-public performance in the spring (April?) of 1883. The first public performance took place on 3 January 1884, at the Konvikt Hall in Prague, performed by Ferdinand Lachner, Julius Raušer, Josef Krehan and Alois Neruda. The quartet was published posthumously, in 1889.

The Bartered Bride

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Context#

Until the middle 1850s Bedřich Smetana was known in Prague principally as a teacher, pianist and composer of salon pieces. His failure to achieve wider recognition in the Bohemian capital led him to depart in 1856 for Sweden, where he spent the next five years. During this period he extended his compositional range to large-scale orchestral works in the descriptive style championed by Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner. Liszt was Smetana’s long-time mentor; he had accepted a dedication of the latter’s Opus 1: Six Characteristic Pieces for Piano in 1848, and had encouraged the younger composer’s career since then. In September 1857 Smetana visited Liszt in Weimar, where he met Peter Cornelius, a follower of Liszt’s who was working on a comic opera, . Smetana did not act immediately on this aspiration. The announcement that a Provisional Theatre was to be opened in Prague, as a home for Czech opera and drama pending the building of a permanent National Theatre, influenced his decision to return permanently to his homeland in 1861. He was then spurred to creative action by the announcement of a prize competition, sponsored by the Czech patriot Jan von Harrach, to provide suitable operas for the Provisional Theatre. By 1863 he had written The Brandenburgers in Bohemia to a libretto by the Czech nationalist poet Karel Sabina, whom Smetana had met briefly in 1848. The Brandenburgers, which was awarded the opera prize, was a serious historical drama, but even before its completion Smetana was noting down themes for use in a future comic opera. By this time he had heard the music of Cornelius’s Der Barbier, and was ready to try his own hand at the comic genre.

The Brandenburgers in Bohemia

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Synopsis#

:Place: Prague :Time: the 13th century, during the occupation of Bohemia by forces of the Margraviate of Brandenburg. Upon the death of King Ottokar II in the 1278 Battle on the Marchfeld, his widow Kunigunda had called in the Brandenburgian troops to lend aid against the army of victorious Rudolf of Habsburg. Rudolf retired to Austria, nevertheless the Brandenburgers soon acted like occupants: they arrested Kunigunda and her seven-year-old son Wenceslaus at Bezděz Castle and agreed with Rudolf that they would retain the Bohemian rule for the next five years. The Prague people led by mayor Volfram Olbramovič suffer from the Brandenburg occupation. The citizen Junoš reports on plundering and looting Brandenburgian troops. Ludiše, the mayor’s daughter, rejects the approaches made by the German townsman Jan Tausendmark, who thereupon joins the occupants. The serf Jíra is designated the leader of a rebel movement. He openly charges Tausendmark with the kidnapping of the three daughters of the mayor, Ludiše, Vlčenka and Děčana. To avoid clashes of arms, Olbramovič has Jíra arrested. The mayor’s daughters are kept by Brandenburg troops, and Olbramovič asks Tausendmark to arrange for their liberation. However, the Brandenburg captain Varnemann demands a high ransom. Meanwhile, Jíra is put on trial and condemned to death. However, it is Junoš, in love with Ludiše, who manages to save Jíra. Tausendmark, who intends to abduct Ludiše, fails to reach an agreement with Varnemann. He and the Brandenburgers are driven out of Prague, and the city is liberated.

The Devil's Wall

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Background#

Krásnohorská had originally intended her scenario to be serious in nature, a symbolic representation of the conflict between the Church and the Devil. By contrast, Smetana had wanted a less serious treatment. She acceded to his demands and provided such a scenario, but then Smetana changed his thinking on the story. He reworked the plot such that he turned the young girl, Hedvika, into a surrogate for Lord Vok’s late first wife, and the story became more serious in that aspect. As a result of these changes, Krásnohorská and Smetana did not have contact for a year and a half, and Smetana made substantial changes to Krásnohorská’s submitted libretto without her input, deleting up to 500 of her original verses. Smetana completed Act 1 in March 1881, and Act 3 in April 1882. The opera was first performed on 29 October 1882, at the Nové České Divadlo (New Czech Theatre) in Prague. The premiere was not successful, with difficulties including the staging and the wildly conflicting appearance of two singers whose characters were supposed to resemble each other. In spite of the tensions between librettist and composer, Krásnohorská attended the premiere and defended Smetana, to the point of keeping silent on criticism directed towards the libretto, of the changes which she herself did not sanction.

The Kiss (opera)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Act 1#

Lukáš, a peasant, has always been in love with Vendulka. Unfortunately for the young couple, his parents insisted that he marry another girl. However, his wife dies, leaving him with an infant. As they are both still young, Lukáš intends to woo the very eligible Vendulka. Paloucký, Vendulka’s father, opposes the match: he reasons that since both Lukáš and Vendulka are stubborn people, they would make an incompatible couple. Vendulka is dismayed at his position, so Paloucký withdraws his objection, but his misgivings remain. With friends and relatives in his wake, Lukáš arrives at Paloucký’s home to formally make his intentions towards Vendulka known. Paloucký gives his blessing to the couple with a certain amount of reticence, which annoys Lukáš. The young widower means to kiss Vendulka, she evades it, and, as Paloucký predicted, the couple are already arguing. Only a well-timed drinking song from one of Lukáš’s kinsmen can stop the fight. When Lukáš and Vendulka are alone, he tries to kiss her again, but again he is rebuffed. It is near sundown and Vendulka spreads sand to see the tracks of Lukáš’ wife’s ghost, visiting her child. Vendulka believes that kissing Lukáš before the wedding would disturb his wife’s ghost, who watches over her child. Vendulka refuses to kiss him until they are married. When he insists, she threatens to throw him out of the house. Incensed, he leaves. Later, after falling asleep, Vendulka is awakened by the sound of a polka outside Paloucký’s home. It is Lukáš, dancing with and kissing the village girls. Vendulka is both enraged and mortified, and swears to leave home.

The Secret (opera)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Background#

Krásnohorská proposed the idea for a new opera to Smetana two weeks after the opening of The Kiss, but kept details of the plot a secret from the composer until July 1877, when a draft outline, drawing on several sources, including Les femmes et le secret by La Fontaine, was sent to him. The librettist had set the action in the town of Bělá pod Bezdězem, visible from Smetana’s home in the country. Fighting his increasing deafness and resultant depression, Smetana made a few small changes to Krásnohorská’s original draft and delivered a full score to the New Czech Theatre on 4 August 1877, for the premiere in September. The through composition evident in The Brandenburgers in Bohemia and Libuše is absent; a pot-pourri overture prefaces a sequence of choruses, duets, arias and ensemble pieces, but the characters are portrayed with more feeling and drawn from life, rather than the more stock characters of The Bartered Bride and The Two Widows.

The Two Widows

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Performance history#

The US premiere took place in New York on 23 October 1949 and it was first given in the UK on 17 June 1963 at the Guildhall School of Music. Kurt Honolka provided a German version in 1958. The opera was presented by Scottish Opera in January 1980 at the Theatre Royal Glasgow with Dennis O’Neill and William McCue among the cast, conducted by Guy Woolfenden, and then in 2008 at the Edinburgh Festival.