bedřich smetana

Although he was his father’s eleventh child, and seven more siblings followed, the family did not suffer any privations; his father provided him with a good education, including a musical one. Little Bedřich learned the violin and piano from the age of five and performed in public for the first time at six. Although he wasn’t the child prodigy that Mozart was 70 years earlier, it was clear from an early age that he had talent.

When Bedřich was seven, his father transferred his business to Jindřichův Hradec, where he finished primary school and his first year of secondary school. Here, he had two significant experiences – he encountered the family of his future wife, Kateřina, née Kolářová, for the first time (who, of course, was undoubtedly indifferent to him at the time). And during a children’s game, a bottle of gunpowder exploded in his hand. The explosion lacerated his face, permanently disfiguring him and condemning him to a lifetime of recurring pain due to chronic infection and inflammation. It may even have had an impact on his later hearing loss.

The future composer did not fare well at the local secondary school, so when the family moved to the Benešov region a year later, Bedřich began further secondary school studies in Jihlava. However, his academic results were similar to those in Jindřichův Hradec, and he changed secondary schools three more times – in Německý Brod, Prague, and Pilsen – before finally graduating with miserable results. In Pilsen, he not only finished his studies but also fell in love twice – first with his cousin Aloysia, for whom he wrote Louisa’s Polka, his first fully preserved composition, and then with Kateřina Kolářová. This love was not only a source of incomparably more musical material but later led to his first marriage.

All the very unconvincing academic results Smetana achieved at the secondary schools he attended failed to deter his father from the idea that his son would continue his studies at the university and become a civil servant. But Bedřich had entirely different plans: “With God’s help, I will one day be a Liszt in technique and a Mozart in composition,” he wrote in his diary. He defied his father’s wishes and left home to make a living in Prague. He rightly suspected that in the mid-19th century, artistic fame, at least in Czech terms, was accomplished exclusively in the shadow of Prague’s towers. In Litomyšl, Benešov, or Pilsen, you could brew beer. But you can only write and perform a world-class symphony in the country’s greatest cultural centre.

The break with his father, however, also meant the loss of financial support. Smetana lived in Prague with a sympathetic relative and was destitute. As we know from his diaries, there were days when all he had to eat was a bread roll and a cup of coffee. Yet a return to prosperous unfreedom was unthinkable. Thanks to the director of the Prague Conservatory, he obtained a position as a private music teacher for the Thun family and, with it, a decent salary to allow him to study music theory and composition with Josef Proksch in Prague’s Old Town. Once he had barely finished his studies, he gave notice to the Thuns and opened his music school on Prague’s Old Town Square.

At first, the school fared so well that Smetana dared to ask Kateřina Kolářová, whom he had loved since secondary school, to marry him. Katynka, who had also studied with Proksch (she studied piano there), dithered for a long time. Smetana was not her love at first sight – over the past seven years, her feelings for him ran hot and cold. But now she agreed, and on 29 August 1849, she told the parish priest at St. Stephen’s in New Town: yes – for better or worse. They moved to an apartment on the corner of V Jámě and Vodičkova streets, and here Katy gave birth to four daughters over the next five years. However, three of them died within a single year. Only Žofie survived. Smetana was deeply attached to her, and they had a lifelong close relationship. On the other hand, his relationship with Katy withered like a flower from grief over the loss of her children and the change in her character due to tuberculosis.

Gone, too, were the days when Smetana’s Piano Institute made a decent profit.. Eager to compose and make a name for himself musically, he ended up as a regular teacher, one of many in the city. His dream of a great work began to fade away under the circumstances. In this bleak atmosphere came the offer of the conductorship of the Gothenburg Society for Classical Music in Sweden. In fact, it was offered to the Prague pianist Alexander Dreyschock; however, he was not interested and offered it instead to Smetana. Smetana accepted and travelled to the city, where the average daily temperature does not exceed 14 °C even in July. After the first year, his wife moved there with him.

In the end, however, a five-year stay in Sweden did not bring Smetana closer to his dream. Provincial Gothenburg, with its hopelessly conservative audiences, brought him experience as a conductor and choirmaster and provided him with a decent income, but there ended the position’s strengths. What’s more, Kateřina fell into a depression, and her lung disease worsened. She died during her early return to Bohemia in April 1859, the third year of Smetana’s Scandinavian sojourn. It was certainly not the marriage of his dreams, but Smetana had loved her since she was a girl, and until she fell ill, she also provided him with emotional support.

The devastated composer, desperate to find a way to take care of his six-year-old daughter Žofie, married his brother’s sister-in-law Barbora a year later, which turned out to be a mistake from the very beginning. Twenty-year-old Betty, as Barbora called herself, was 16 years younger and felt neither love nor admiration for Smetana. She quickly gave him two daughters, after which the marriage essentially disintegrated – they had been separated since the mid-1860s. This caused Smetana to become even more devoted to his work. In 1861, he resigned his position in Gothenburg and, after a series of European journeys, settled permanently in Prague in 1862, thus beginning the peak of his artistic life.

The composer, mature with life experience, quickly became involved in Prague’s social circles (which is why he also worked hard to improve his Czech). He became a co-founder of the Art Discussion Society (Umělecká beseda, whose former seat is now occupied by the Na Prádle Theatre in the Lesser Town), became involved in Young Bohemian politics, and, together with Ferdinand Heller, founded a music school in the Lažanský Palace on what is today known as the Smetana Embankment. He published music criticism in the Národní listy newspaper and focused primarily on composing music – two of his highly successful operas, The Brandenburgers in Bohemia (Braniboři v Čechách) and the first version of The Bartered Bride (Prodaná nevěsta), belong to this period.

In 1866, Smetana became the first principal conductor of the Provisional Theatre. It was a position he aspired to and simultaneously brought him much unpleasantness: resentment, envy, and strife. He attempted to present a high-quality and demanding world repertoire and, at the same time, to promote a distinctive national musical culture. However, he ran afoul of the poor technical and spatial qualities of the Provisional Theatre and the relatively undemanding taste of the audience. Throughout this time, he also had to fend off attacks from artistic, political, and quite personal positions: his conception and plans were massively criticised; the repertoire was described as pro-German; and soloists accused the Master of playing favourites among the performers. If the conductor’s baton had not been knocked out of his hand by illness in 1874, one of his competitors would have eventually done it.

The loss of his hearing, which affected him in the summer (right ear) and autumn (left ear) of 1874, forced him to resign from all positions in the Provisional Theatre. The cause is believed to be progressive paralysis as a symptom of syphilis, but it is also thought that the brain arteries were hardened or that there was a chronic infectious inflammation of the bone marrow caused by the accident mentioned above at the age of ten. However, the end of Smetana’s life speaks instead for the first possibility.

The theatre cooperative treated Smetana fairly and granted him a pension of 1,200 guilders a year (later raised to 1,500 guilders). Still, more was needed for the financially demanding life in Prague. Smetana, therefore, spent time with his daughter Žofie and her family in Jabkenice in central Bohemia and eventually moved there permanently in 1876. Despite his disability, he continued to compose: here he created the operas The Kiss (Hubička) and The Secret (Tajemství), several piano pieces, and above all, the compositions for his later symphonic poem My Country (Má vlast). He continued to give concerts in Prague and was a respected musical authority and admired composer. His opera Libuše opened the National Theatre for the first and second time.

But by then, the drama of his life was drawing to a close. As early as 1882, he had been expressing fears of madness to his friends, and in November, he had his first seizures. From 1883 onwards, he also experienced hallucinations and paranoid fantasies. He was unaware of the national celebration of his sixtieth birthday in March. At the end of April 1884, after a fit of rage, he was taken to the Institute for the Insane on Kateřinská Street in the New Town, where he died three weeks later, on 12 May 1884. The date of his death is the traditional opening day of the Prague Spring International Music Festival. Even 200 years after his birth, his music is still played and in demand, and although he is not as well-known worldwide as Dvořák, Janáček, or Martinů, for the Czechs, he remains their greatest composer.

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