World Premiere: April 4, 1875
Most Recent HSO Performance: December 6, 2009
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, bass drum, cymbals, and strings: violin I, violin II, viola, cello, and bass
Duration: 12'

Bedřich Smetana, “a composer with a genuine Czech heart” according to Franz Liszt, was one of the seminal figures in the music of his native country. He spent the five years after 1856 abroad, in Göteborg, Sweden as conductor of that city’s Philharmonic Society, but returned to Bohemia in 1861 to join the fledgling school of composers that was seeking to establish a national identity for the country’s music by incorporating into their works folk songs and dances, and by writing operas on Czech texts and subjects. In 1862, the National Theater was opened in Prague, and Smetana contributed to its repertory The Brandenburgers in Bohemia in 1863 and, three years later, The Bartered Bride, which was received with immense enthusiasm and quickly became the country’s favorite opera. He served as conductor of the National Theater from 1866 until 1874, and wrote six additional operas for the company. The last years of his tenure, however, were marked by growing criticism, and he resigned in 1874. Free of his duties at the Theater, he turned his attention from the opera to the symphonic poem and produced over the following five years the orchestral works for which he is best known.

Early in 1874, Smetana began to suffer from severe headaches. This symptom came and went, and he noted no other physical problems until October. “One night I listened with great pleasure to Leo Delibes’ Le Roi l’a dit,” he reported. “When I returned home after the last act, I sat at the piano and improvised for an hour on whatever came into my head. The following morning I was stone deaf.” Smetana was terrified. He wrote to his friend J. Finch Thorne that a ceaseless rushing filled his head: “It is stronger when my brain is active and less noticeable when I am quiet. When I compose it is always in evidence.” He tried many unguents, ointments and treatments during the ensuing months but they brought no relief — Smetana did not hear a sound for the last decade of his life. He continued to compose, but withdrew more and more from the world as he realized he could not be cured, eventually losing his reason (in the margin of score of the 1882 D minor Quartet he scrawled, “Composed in a state of disordered nerves — the outcome of my deafness”) and ending his days in a mental ward.

It is one of the great ironies in 19th century music that Smetana conceived the first melody for Má Vlast (“My Country”), the splendid cycle of six tone poems inspired by the land and lore of his native Bohemia, at the same time that he lost his hearing. Had he not been able to look to the example of the deaf Beethoven, he might well have abandoned this work, but he pressed on and completed Vyšehrad by November 1874 and immediately began The Moldau, which was finished in less than three weeks, on December 8th. Šárka and From Bohemia’s Woods and Meadows date from the following year; Tábor was finished in 1878 and Blaník in 1879. The first complete performance of Má Vlast, on November 2, 1882 in Prague (the cycle is dedicated to the city of Prague), was the occasion for a patriotic rally, and, like Sibelius’ great national hymn Finlandia, this music has since become an emblem of its country’s national pride. Má Vlast is the traditional music played every year on May 12th, the anniversary of Smetana’s death, to open the Prague Spring Festival.

The Moldau (“Vltava” in Czech) is the principal river of Czechoslovakia, rising in the hills in the south and flowing north through Prague to join with the Elbe. Smetana’s tone poem seems to trace its inspiration to a country trip he took along the river in 1870, a junket that included an exhilarating boat ride through the churning waters of the St. John Rapids. He first announced his intention to write a piece about the great river as early as 1872, as soon as he completed the opera Libuše, but he undertook another opera instead (The Two Widows), and had to postpone the tone poem for two more years. The Moldau is disposed in several sections intended to convey both the sense of a journey down the river and some of the sights seen along the way, as Smetana noted in his preface to the score:

“Two springs pour forth in the shade of the Bohemian Forest, one warm and gushing, the other cold and peaceful. Their waves, gaily flowing over rocky beds, join and glisten in the rays of the morning sun. The forest brook, hastening on, becomes the river Moldau. Coursing through Bohemia’s valleys, it grows into a mighty stream. Through thick woods it flows, as the gay sounds of the hunt and the notes of the hunter’s horn are heard ever nearer. It flows through grass-grown pastures and lowlands where a wedding feast is being celebrated with song and dance. At night, wood and water nymphs revel in its sparkling waves. Reflected on its surface are fortresses and castles — witnesses of bygone days of knightly splendor and the vanished glory of fighting times. At the St. John Rapids, the stream races ahead, winding through the cataracts, hewing out a path with its foaming waves through the rocky chasm into the broad river bed — finally, flowing on in majestic peace toward Prague and welcomed by the time-honored castle Vyšehrad. [At this point, there is a recall of the main theme of the complete cycle’s preceding tone poem, entirely devoted to depicting the ruined castle and its aura of ancient battles and forgotten bards.] Then it vanishes far beyond the poet’s gaze.”

The sweeping theme with which Smetana portrays the broad river was long thought to have been derived from a Czech folksong. Recent research, however, has shown that the melody is actually the Swedish tune, Ack, Värmland du sköna (‘Oh, Värmland, you beautiful land”) praising the beauties of the countryside north of Göteborg. The song was included in an anthology published in 1816 by Geijer and Afzelius, and incorporated into an 1846 play by the Swedish dramatist F.A. Dahlgren. The play and the song enjoyed a fine local success in Göteborg, and were still popular when Smetana was living there between 1856 and 1861. Indeed, Smetana may even have learned Ack, Värmland du sköna from Dahlgren himself, since the two were friends during those years. It is not certain whether Smetana deliberately quoted this song in The Moldau or whether it simply bubbled up from his subconscious while he was composing the piece, but his ardent patriotism suggests that it was the latter. Once migrated to Bohemia through Smetana’s music, the tune took on a new life as the Czech folksong, Kočka leze dirou.

Notes on the Program by Dr. Richard E. Rodda