CZECH MUSIC
FROM SMETANA TO MARTINU
This term Matthew Taylor will be dealing in particular with differing aspects of five major Czech composers from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Chronologically, they are:-
Bedrich Smetana (1824-1884) and the particular aspect will be the symphonic poems from the cycle, Ma Vlast.
Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904) particularly concentrating on his string quartets but also a comparison between his sixth symphony with that of Brahms’ second.
Josef Suk (1874 – 1935). Here Matthew has singled out for study Suk’s Asrael symphony completed in 1906
Leos Janacek (1853-1928) once described by me, in my note on Taras Bulba, as a weirdo. The particular focus in this case will be on the operas, Jenufa and the Cunning Little Vixen
Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959). His symphonies were composed at annual intervals in America between 1941 and 1945 with one stray late comer in 1951. Matthew will also introduce us to Martinu’s second string quartet written in 1925 and which will be played at the halls by the Wihan Quartet.
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Smetana, who was born in Bohemia, then forming part of the Hapsburg Empire, is said to be the first of the great Czech composers. Not quite so as there were several Bohemian composers, particularly in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, whose names do not appear in concert programmes alongside their contemporary Austrian top notchers. What there is no doubt about is that Smetana gave the lead to the emergent Czech nationalist movement during the nineteenth century. Interestingly, Smetana was primarily a German speaking Czech and only took up advocacy of the Czech language in his thirties. Even later on, in one of his most famous works, Ma Vlast, the river Vltava was also accorded its German name of Moldau.
His father was a brewer on the estate of Count Waldstein – now there’s a name to link back to Beethoven. Smetana started playing the violin at the age of five and clearly had talent. His father was himself an amateur player when he had the time. He had had three marriages and eighteen children. Anyway, he did not entertain any thought of a son of his playing professionally. That was no job for a Czech boy when you could be a brewer.
In 1840 Smetana moved to Pilsen for his general education and here he met up again with Katerina Kolar with whom he used to play piano duets in his boyhood. The 19-year-old Smetana was smitten. At this time she was studying piano in Prague with a celebrated teacher, Josef Proksch. She managed to persuade him to accept the impoverished Smetana as a student in composition and theory, allowing him to defer payment until he could afford it. This brought Smetana to Prague where he got to know the Director of Prague Conservatoire. In turn, he recommended Smetana to Count Leopold Thun to be the resident music master and piano tutor to his family. Smetana was then able to combine his extended stays in the country with the family during the summer with periods in town attending the Prague social “season”.
To begin with his ambition was to be a virtuoso in the Lisztian manner but he began to make out as a composer with a strong personality of his own. His early piano pieces, bagatelles and impromptus, had a charm which contained his already recognizable stamp. In 1848 political unrest was leading to revolution throughout Europe and with the build up and turbulence Smetana began to feel ill at ease with service in the Thun household. He decided to set up his own music school in Prague. He then sought financial help from a number of quarters including Liszt who gave Smetana his encouraging support including offering to find a publisher for Smetana’s music. With the outbreak of the 1848 uprisings (to which he felt passionately committed), Smetana left the employ of the Thun family and opened the music school. In the following year he and Katerina got married.
Unfortunately the music school did not turn out to be a financial success and Mr and Mrs Smetana, against a background of a number of childbirths only one of which survived infancy, were soon struggling. Smetana himself was getting known and admired, not only by Liszt but he also had met Berlioz and the Schumanns. Despite such hobnobbing, his music was not achieving a breakthrough in Prague. In 1855 Katerina began developing signs of consumption. With this and with the growing political difficulties in Prague he grabbed at a chance to move to Gothenberg to take up a conductorship which had been offered to him. He and Katerina moved there. Alas the climate was not kind and Katerina died in 1857. Smetana stayed on living in Sweden till 1861. It was during this Gothenberg period that he was to write his first symphonic poems, a musical form invented by Liszt. Richard III is very much Liszt influenced. Its dramatic character appears to reflect the drama of Shakespeare’s play although Smetana had in fact written the music before choosing his subject. Wallenstein’s Camp, was based on one of a trilogy of plays by Schiller. The setting was set in Pilsen, his old stamping ground, during the thirty years war. Haakon Jarl was based Norwegian history of the 10th century with fighting going on between Haakon and various people, all called Harald. A year after Katerina’’s death, Smetana married his brother’s sister in law, Bettina Ferdinandova but the marriage was not a happy one and Smetana sought other consolations over which we will draw a curtain..
In 1861 Smetana and Bettina returned to Prague which had returned to normal. Within a year of his arrival, the Provisional Theatre, dedicated to Czech language plays and operas, was opened, and Smetana became a leading light in the battle to establish it on a firm footing. This was achieved despite the fact that he had been a German speaker with considerable opposition from the conservative elements within Prague’s cultural society, who did not appreciate an ardent supporter of Wagner and Liszt, then arch-modernists, leading the way in Prague.
It was against this background that Smetana’s thoughts turned to creating musical dramas and orchestral pieces which celebrated the popular culture and history of the Czech people. There followed a series of operas, the first in 1863 being The Brandenburgers in Bohemia. This is a patriotic work which deals with Bohemia’s political history and a wholesale uprising. It was soon followed by The Bartered Bride, known by my friends in the orchestral pit at ENO as The Bastard Bride. Smetana had become the Theatre’s conductor, and things were looking up. The opera became such a runaway success that its position as the most popular Czech opera has remained unchallenged ever since. Smetana spent the rest of his life as an operatic composer trying to recreate this level of popular acclaim.
However, it was to music dramas that Smetana next turned and it is sad that these do not get sufficient performance in England. I would particularly recommend the next opera, Dalibor. It takes a more progressive musical stance. It has a plot reminiscent of Fidelio – hero locked up in prison and heroine planning his escape. Influenced by Wagner the work is based on leitmotifs but there is a greater melodic feel that only Czech music can produce. It was not well received but undaunted, he chose an equally ambitious political subject for his next opera, Libuše leading to the eventual triumph of the Czech people. Eight years passed before the first production and in the interim there were three further operas,The Two Widows (1874), a comedy, The Kiss (1876) and The Secret (1878), both inspired by stories set in the Bohemian countryside.
In 1874 Smetana began work on a cycle of symphonic poems to be entitled “Ma Vlast”, “My Country”. Effectively, having depicted his country in its many facets in his operas, he was about to do the same in his symphonic poems which he was to write over the next five years. During this period he began suffering from the physical disintegration caused by what was described as inherited syphilis, which was presumably a more respectable means of acquiring the disorder. Smetana realized he was going deaf and the incipient tinnitus was musically described in his string quartet “From My Life” with a long high pitched violin note interrupting the earlier joys. Ma Vlast finally consisted of six separate symphonic movements, the last two, Tabor and Blanik having been added later. Unlike the works written in Stockholm, these set about depicting various aspects of Bohemian history, geography, legend and dance. The best known, often played on its own, is the second, Vltava which, like the fourth, Bohemia’s Woods and Meadows, was issued separately in the days of 78 rpm records. However they are all best heard in context as part of the whole cycle. As Matthew will be analysing them, I will not attempt to do likewise but just make some passing comments.
The opening work is Vysherad, the name of a historic 10th century castle on a promontory overlooking the mouth of the Vltava river. It is much associated with legend. There is a cemetery there where the remains of Smetana and Dvorak are buried. The main theme of Vysherad is played at the start on two harps before being bandied round the orchestra. The importance of this theme becomes apparent as it appears in some, not all, the other works. For those who only know Vltava – it gets a daily performance on Classic FM – they may not realize that what sounds like a fanfare coda at the end is in fact the Vysherad theme denoting the river flowing past the castle towards the sea.
Vltava is a wonderful description of a river babbling at its source before flowing through the countryside, past peasants dancing, reaching a climax through its rapids until it flows majestically past Vysherad. The main theme of Vltava bears an uncanny resemblance to Hatikvah, the Zionist hymn of hope which became the Israeli national anthem. Co-incidence? I doubt it. Vltava is the same tune in the major to the minor of Hatikvah. Here is an abbreviated extract from one internet source:-
“The melody for Hatikvah derives from the La Mantovana, a 17th-century Italian song. Its earliest known appearance in print was in the del Biado’s collection of madrigals. Later known in early 17th-century Italy as “Ballo di Mantova” its melody gained wide currency in Renaissance Europe, and was also famously used by the Czech composer Bedřich Smetana in his symphonic poem celebrating Bohemia, “Má vlast,” as “Vltava” (Die Moldau).”
The Zionist movement was born in Bohemia. The music for Hatikvah is said to have been written by one Shmuel Cohen in 1888. Either he was influenced by a common ancestor of Vltava or he had heard Vltava which had received its first performance in 1882 and thought “Now that’s the tune I’ve been waiting for”.
The third work of the cycle is Sarka who was an Amazon like figure of legend who was apart from being a feminist warrior was a misandrist who seduced her man before killing him. She must have been worth dying for.
Bohemias Woods and Meadows is a succession of themes developing from one to the other. It tells no story but is a combination of nature painting and country dancing.
The last two are both separate and linked. Tabor is based on the wars of the Protestant leader Jan Huss, who lived some hundred years before Luther. It starts with a statement of the Hussite hymn, “Ye who are the warriors of God”, used also by Dvorak in his overture, The Hussite. Its theme is like a Morse code tattoo. It is with this theme that Tabor ends with the tattoo as a question mark. It is immediately followed with exactly the same phrase for the opening of Blanik. There is even more symphonic development as it reaches a climax with the Hussite hymn combined with the Vysherad theme giving the whole cycle a feel of thematic cohesion.
Ma Vlast is a work of great national and emotional appeal. In particular it was Rafael Kubelik who conducted it with the Czech Philharmonic when the Nazis entered Prague in March 1939 and again when Kubelik returned to Prague in 1990 after the Velvet Revolution.
Smetana could not conduct Ma Vlast because of his disability. He went on to write the first act of the opera Viola in 1883, based on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. However he suffered his final mental collapse in April 1884. In mid-May he died, as did Schumann, in an asylum.
ANTONIN DVORAK (1841 – 1904)
Dvorak. Let’s start with the pronunciation. We have what is a perceived Czech pronunciation as Vorsjark. But is it and is that D pronounced or not? And does it matter anyway? Well in England we like to think that we pronounce foreign words as they should be… and we rarely get it right. Take lingerie, a French word where, as we all know our French, or so we think, we pronounce “lingerie” as “longerie” whilst the French pronounce “lingerie” like “langerie”! Now the French are about as bad as we are with names but they do make a point of francophoning a foreign name into a French one. I am not certain how the French president’s Hungarian ancestors pronounced it but in his native France he is Sarc-o-zee, the o being the short o for orange and not the long o for ohm. In England we tend to say Sar-cosy, like Tea Cosy. And, by the way, the French don’t pronounce the painter’s name as Day Gar but d’Ga. Still,vive la différence. So, what about Dvorak? The Czechs usually put their emphasis on the first syllable, Smetana or Martinu. My research on the Czech pronunciation of Dvorak is that it is D’vor-sjark with a distinct D and a slight lengthened emphasis on the sjark. My further researches on the internet reveal Dvorak also to be a typewriter keyboard system to compete with QUERTY; a Pennsylvanian wrestling champion and an advert for the increase of the size of the phallus. If anyone is interested they can do their own googling.
Perhaps the most lovable of composers, Dvořák was born in 1841, in a village not far from Prague (then part of Bohemia in the Austrian Empire, now in the Czech Republic). His father was a butcher, an innkeeper and a professional player of the zither. Although his father wanted him to be a butcher as well, Dvořák with full parental support pursued a career in music. Nevertheless he was a man who could be trusted to carve a joint. At 16 he studied music in Prague and became an accomplished player of the violin and the viola as well as the organ. He wrote his first string quartet when he was 20 years old, two years after graduating.
By the time he was 18, Dvořák had become a full-time musician, playing in various dance bands, usually as a violist. One of the groups with which he played formed the core of the Provisional Theatre orchestra, the first Czech-language theatre in Prague, and which Smetana directed from 1866. The income of a player in the orchestra pit was somewhat less than that my friends in the pit of the ENO would settle for and there was a constant need for Dvorak to supplement his income which he did by giving piano lessons. It was through these piano lessons that he met his pupil, Josefína Čermáková, for whom he got starry eyed and composed “Cypress Trees”. He proposed to her but he did not carve a place in her heart. No matter. There was her sister Anna next in the queue and in 1873 Dvořák married her.. They had nine children, three of whom died in infancy.
After he married, Dvořák left the National Theatre Orchestra, in which he had been playing for 11 years, and secured the position of organist at St. Adalbert’s Church in Prague. This certainly provided him with financial security, higher social status, and enough free time to focus on composing. During this early period, he was able to compose a considerable output of music, learning much by the study of the scores of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. His later influences were Lizst and Wagner and, later still, Brahms. He was gradually finding his feet and one gets the feeling that in those earlier days he lacked a certain amount of self confidence and the music quality does vary, as one would expect. Some writers say that his music showed a little awkwardness as he developed his own style but it also shows imagination and invention. As well as songs and miniatures, there is a great deal of chamber music, in addition to an opera, and a concerto.
Matthew will be spending time on the string quartets, not all, as Dvorak published 14 of them. No need for analysis here but they all are all very tuneful with the American by far the most popular string quartet in the recital rooms.
Toward the end of this opening period, Liszt and Wagner dominate, although Dvořák still tried to contain them in classical forms. The big work of this phase is the Symphony No. 1 entitled “the Bells of Zlonice” which Dvorak thought was irretrievably lost. It seems he had entered it for competition and it had not been returned. In later life, when he told his composition students, he was asked by one of them, “What did you do?” “I sat down and wrote another one,” he replied. Fortunately, it turned out that this composition wasn’t lost, merely misplaced, but it did not surface again until 1923 when discovered in the shop of a music dealer in Leipzig. It was not played until 1936 and only published in 1961.For this reason Dvorak claimed only to have written eight symphonies when of course there had been nine. On top of this, his later publisher, Simrock, would only number five of them, the ones that had been published, (four by Simrock). The numbering and order of the Dvorak canon has therefore been a nightmare. Martinu was another for writing music commissioned for performance at short notice, putting it down and losing it and then having to write a replacement work at even shorter notice.
Dvorak’s Wagner period was short lived and then, having reassessed what he was about, he switched his artistic direction, combining Czech folklore with classical forms. Major works of this period – the 1870’s – include his second string quintet in 1875, the same year that his first son was born, the Stabat Mater (1877), the symphonies 4-6, the two lovely serenades, one for strings and one for winds, the violin concerto, and the enormously successful first set of the Slavonic Dances, written originally for piano duet and even more successful when later orchestrated. The sixth symphony in particular shows an affinity to Brahms 2nd written at much the same time. Matthew will be dealing with this in his lecture No 4.
In 1874, Dvořák made the first of four successful applications for a grant from the Austrian government. Apart from easing Dvořák’s financial stress, the grants also enabled him to submit works for competition which brought him to the attention of Brahms, who was one of the members of the jury. Brahms immediately became a fan and leaned on his own publisher, Simrock, to take on Dvořák, just as Liszt had earlier done for Smetana. Brahms was only just eight years older than Dvorak but he was more than well established by then and had a huge influence over Dvořák’s work, and the two later became friends. This was where Dvořák’s career outside Czechoslovakia began to set off. At home he had become the acknowledged successor to the ailing Smetana. His admiration for Brahms not only is reflected in the sixth symphony which sounds as Czech as they come, particularly with its furioso movement (Matthew will deal with this) but also with the seventh which for many is his most cherished.
One reason that led to the international spread of Dvorak’s reputation was Austro-Hungarian politics of the time. There were periodic bans on performances of Czech composers within the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Dvorak had to endure scheduled performances of major works like the sixth symphony being cancelled in Vienna. Dvořák’s international career can be said to take off from his first visit to London in 1883 at the invitation of Sir Joseph Barnby where he conducted his Stabat Mater. The British went crazy for the music – a bit like Haydn some 90 years earlier – and Dvorak was to return to England eight more times. He was to conduct regularly at the Birmingham Triennial Festival and he certainly left an impression on one orchestra violinist from nearby Worcester. Yes, you’ve got it, Edward Elgar.
It was the Royal Philharmonic Society which commissioned the seventh symphony. It has moved on from the sixth, and is a Germanic sounding work. It is not plagiarism but Dvorak donning Brahms’ clothes. It has a Brahms-like sound opening very like that of Brahms’ Tragic Overture. There are no quotes from Brahms but his fingerprints are all over it. With his growing international reputation Dvorak began to re-establish his own individuality from this influence and his later music would develop a much broader style. Another influence was Tchaikovsky (pronounced Chee-kors-kee by the way – I have that on the authority of Vladimir Ashkenazy) following a tour to Moscow and St Petersburg.
Now Dvorak moved into academic circles, having been invited in 1889 to become professor of composition at the Prague conservatory. His best student was undoubtedly his son-in-law, Josef Suk. Dvorak turned out to be no teaching wizard, insisting that his students have a finished technique before he allowed them into his class. He would criticize student scores, put his finger on weak passages whilst in general treat his pupils as colleagues, insisting that they find their own way, as he had found his. In sum, great composers do not always turn out to be great teachers, as Beethoven had discovered after taking lessons from Haydn. Dvorak was however to receive other honours from Academia, particularly Cambridge University where he was awarded an honorary doctorate and for whom he presented his eighth symphony. This is a sublime work of nature and exquisite melody, reminiscent of some of Smetana. It ends with a thunderous orchestral sound somewhat similar to the sounds produced by Beethoven in the last movement of his seventh symphony.
1892 to 1895 was to be Dvorak’s American period. Jeannette Thurber, a wealthy American music patron had offered him the position of artistic director and composition professor at New York’s National Music Conservatory, at a salary of $15,000. Now that was irresistible. It was not just big bucks but mega bucks, about twenty-five times what he had been earning in Prague. Now there were as yet no internationally recognized American composers and no recognized American style to speak of. This was the country of Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence. It was soon made clear that Dvorak was expected to pave the way for an “American” musical style. Just like that. I mean can you imagine in 1892 before the emergence of Elgar , Brahms or Verdi being asked to come here to create a national style of English music, I ask you?
Without any precedent of “home spun folksy music” to go by, Dvorak took this charge to heart. He set about discovering “American Music” much as he had used Czech folk idioms within his music. Shortly after his arrival in America in 1892, he would write newspaper articles reflecting on the state of American music. He supported the concept that African-American and native American music should be used as a foundation for the growth of the new American music. One of his pupils was Harry Burleigh (1867-1949), one of the earliest African-American composers. It was he who, at Dvorak’s request, introduced Dvorak to traditional American spirituals. It was Dvorak who urged Burleigh to collect and arrange the spirituals he sung, which he then set about doing, about 300 of them. His works included, Deep River; Steal Away; Go Down Moses. Without Harry Burleigh there would have been no Dvorak New World Symphony as we know it, no Child of Our Time by Michael Tippett and no Swing Low, Sweet Chariot by the English rugby team supporters which would have been a good thing as they do not know what it is about anyway.
Out of this mix emerged Dvorak’s ninth symphony, “From The New World”, ever popular, ever fresh and as American as Hopalong Cassidy; then the American Quartet, originally called the Nigger Quartet but renamed in the 1950’s. There followed his American Quintet which was so named. Dvorak was however also to continue to compose in his own home spun Czech style, particularly his Te Deum and his cello concerto which could be described as Slavonic sounding. It is a masterpiece which allows the cello to be heard against the largest of orchestras in the largest of halls. Brahms, who had written his double concerto in 1887 exclaimed, “Why on earth didn’t I know that one could write a cello concerto like this? If I had only known, I would have written one long ago!” It reflects in particular, as do many of the works of the American period, his longing for his homeland. His summers were spent in Iowa with Czech speaking fiends. As Bill Bryson has written that nothing in Iowa is more than six feet high I doubt that the place afforded Dvorak much scenic pleasure. Eventually, he had had enough. Added to his home sickness came the loss of the Thurber fortune in a financial disaster long before the Wall Street crash or the Dot Com fiasco were dreamed of. She was no longer able to keep to her part of the bargain and had stopped paying Dvorak. With $15,000 dollars a year going up the Swanee, Dvořák and his family packed their bags and returned to Prague.
Thus we come to Dvořák’s final period dominated by the superbly orchestrated tone poems (The Water Goblin, The Noon Witch, and The Golden Spinning-Wheel, among others). He also turned back to opera. Dvořák considered himself primarily an operatic composer, although, only two, Rusalka and The Devil and Kate, get staged outside the Czech Republic. Yet he wrote more operas (11) than he did symphonies (9).
In 1897 Dvořák’s daughter got married to his student, the composer Josef Suk. Her death following that of Dvořák would give birth to Suk’s Asrael Symphony which Matthew will discuss in Lecture 5. Dvorak’s 60th birthday in 1901was celebrated as a national event, with concerts and a banquet in his honour.
Antonin Dvořák remains the great 19th-century Czech composer, building on the achievement of Smetana, truly international, and outstanding in symphony, concerto, symphonic overture, and chamber music
