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It contains the famous symphonic poem "Vltava", also popularly known by its German name "Die Moldau" (in English, "The Moldau"). Smetana was naturally gifted as a composer, and gave his first public performance at the age of six. After conventional schooling, he studied music under Josef Proksch in Prague.
Smetana’s fame increased with the 100th performance of The Bartered Bride, and in 1881, his new opera, Libuše, was chosen to open the new National Theater. However, his mental health deteriorated, and he was committed to an asylum in 1884, where he died within three months.
Biography. Beyond Czech-speaking countries Smetana is best known for his cycle of six orchestral tone poems, Má vlast (‘My Country’), especially ‘Vltava’, his depiction of the river that flows through Prague. In the Czech Republic, he is widely regarded as the father of Czech musical nationalism.
- He Was A Child Prodigy.
- He Was Bullied Out of School For Being An Uneducated Country Boy.
- He Didn’T Learn Czech Until He Was Nearly 40.
- Czech Audiences Loved Smetana, But German Critics Thought He Was Too German.
- He Never Heard His Own Later work.
- He’S A Czech National Hero.
Under his father’s tutelage, Smetana began to show musical talent at a very young age. He performed in a string quartet at age 5, gave a solo piano performance at age 6, and wrote his first composition at age 8.
Smetana’s father, František Smetana, was an accomplished musician—but he was also a working-class brewer who lived out in farm country. When Smetana moved to Prague to attend school at age 15, more privileged students openly ridiculed him for his poor grasp of Czech (German being the vernacular of the broader region) and his lack of city manners. H...
It’s hard to imagine how different Smetana’s life might have been if his peers in Prague had treated him more kindly, but he did end up learning Czech anyway as an adult—and doing more for Czech-language folk music than almost anybody.
After the 1862 debut of Smetana’s symphonic poems Richard III and Wallenstein’s Camp, audiences in Prague were thrilled but German critics were not. “Singular notices in the press!,” Smetana wrote at the time. “The Czech papers praise uniformly. It is the German papers that reproach me with belonging to the neo-German school.” In Liszt and His Worl...
Smetana’s health began to deteriorate (which he blamed, in large part, on the stress caused by his critics) and he went completely deaf in the early 1870s, but the last decade of his life was his most prolific. He wrote five of his nine operas and a number of instrumental pieces, including an autobiographical string quartets (performed, in a privat...
“It is mostly loss,” Arthur Schopenhauer once remarked, “which teaches us about the worth of things.” The same might be said of people. Driven out of the public eye by German criticism and Czech power struggles, Smetana lived most fully as a composer while he was slowly dying as a man. By the time of his death, his genius had been fully recognized ...
- Tom Head
Bedřich Smetana is often considered the father of Czech music, one of the first to incorporate elements of Czech folklore into his music and, most notably, to use the Czech language in his operas instead of the more widely-used German.
Feb 27, 2024 · Through his music, Bedřich Smetana described the beauty of Czechia like no other composer before or since. This year marks the 200th anniversary of his birth and 140 years since his death. We present the story of a man whose worldwide fame rivals that of Mozart and other great symphonic masters.
Bedřich Smetana (March 2, 1824 - 12 May 12, 1884) is considered one of the greatest Czech composers of the nineteenth century and the country's first nationalist composer, having incorporated folk songs, dances, written operas and other works in celebration of the Czech history and language.
