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Šárka from Má Vlast
Bedřich Smetana (1824–1884)
Written: 1875
Movements: One
Style: Romantic nationalism
Duration: Ten minutes
Bedřich Smetana, the “father of Czech music,” could neither speak nor write Czech until he was well into
his thirties; German was the official language in Bohemia. That was typical for the many ethnic regions of
Europe in the middle part of the nineteenth century. However, it was during that time that those ethnic
groups began to assert their individuality and reject German domination. All sorts of composers began to
use folk music in their compositions in order to write in a “national” style. They looked to their own
heritage for subject matter. Smetana was the first Czech to do so. He wrote several operas about Bohemia,
all sung in Czech: The Brandenburgers in Bohemia dealt with a time when foreign troops invaded
Bohemia; Dalibor was about a legendary Czech hero; and Libuše, was a full-blown glorification of Czech
nationality.
While he was working on Libuše, Smetana began planning “a vast instrumental monument to his nation,”
the six tone poems collectively known as Má vlast (My Fatherland). Each deals with a different aspect of
the Czech homeland. The first is about the famous castle in Prague, Vyšehrad. Tábor and Blaník deal with
aspects of the Hussite wars. Two of them represent features of the Czech countryside: From Bohemia’s
Fields and Forests and Vltava (the Moldau). Šárka, the third in the series, is about the legendary Czech
heroine of the “Maiden’s War.” (Šárka is also a hilly area near Prague where the legend supposedly took
place.)
The legend deals with the power struggle between the followers of the recently deceased Queen Libuše
and her husband Přemysl. A rebel band of women led by Šárka entrap a group of men commanded by
Ctirad. Smetana’s description of Šárka for his publisher summarizes the legend and provides a complete
listening guide:
The composition opens with a portrait of the enraged girl, who swears to have vengeance on the
entire male sex because of her lover’s infidelity. In the distance is heard the arrival of Ctirad and
his warriors, who come to humiliate and punish the maidens. From afar they hear the cry
(although feigned) of a maiden bound to a tree. On seeing her, Ctirad is struck by her beauty, he
falls passionately in love with her and frees her. With a prepared potion, she cheers and
intoxicates Ctirad and his soldiers, who fall asleep. A signal on a horn summons the maidens
from the distant hiding place; they rush out to commit their bloodthirsty act. The horror of a mass
slaughter, the fury of the fulfilment of Šárka’s revenge—that is the end of the work.
Smetana started to lose his hearing at about the same time he began work on Ma Vlast. At a complete
performance of Ma Vlast in 1882, the audience in Prague went wild. They showered Smetana with
wreathes and kisses. But Smetana just stood there, “stone deaf, physically and mentally a broken man . . .
happy in the knowledge that he had made others happy.”
©2016 John P. Varineau
Concerto in C major for Flute, Harp, and Orchestra, K.299
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
Written: 1778
Movements: Three
Style: Classical
Duration: 25 minutes
When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote to his father Leopold that there is “no place in the world like
Paris,” he wasn’t being complimentary. “The filth of Paris is indescribable,” he wrote, and the French
manners “now border on coarseness and they are terribly discourteous.” Paris was not a place where
“people had ears to hear, hearts to feel and some measure of understanding of and taste for music. . . . I
am living among mere brute beasts.”
Mozart was in Paris looking for a job as court musician to any of the numerous French nobility. He still
had to pay the bills while he was looking, so he gave private composition lessons. One of his students,
Marie-Adrienne, was the daughter of the Duc de Guines. Mozart reported to his father:
I believe I told you in my last letter that the Duc de Guines, whose daughter is my pupil in
composition, plays the flute incomparably, and she plays the harp magnifique. She has much
talent and genius and in particular an incomparable memory so that she can play all her pieces,
actually some two hundred, by heart. She, however, has grave doubts as to whether she has any
talent for composition—especially on the score of ideas. . . . If she develops no ideas (for at
present she really has none) it is useless, for God knows I can give her none!
The Duc de Guines, an occasional ambassador to both Berlin and London, was a favorite of MarieAntoinette. Mozart wasn’t very fond of either the flute or the harp, but when the Duc asked him to write a
concerto for the father/daughter duo, Mozart agreed, perhaps thinking this would be a way to impress the
French queen. The result was Mozart’s only composition for the harp. It is a charming piece—what
Mozart’s biographer Alfred Einstein calls an example of the finest French salon music—full of charming
melody.
Mozart wrote the concerto to be played in someone’s (rather palatial) home instead of a concert hall, so
the orchestra is small, using just strings, horns, and oboes. The scope of the piece is somewhat restrained,
too. The first movement is a simple concerto form in which the orchestra presents both of the main
themes before the soloists get a crack at them. A simple development leads to a restatement of the themes
before the soloists engage in a cadenza. The slow middle movement, accompanied only by the strings, is
meditative in character. The final movement, a sort of rondo in arch form, is all glitter and gaiety.
Throughout the concerto, the solo parts play off each other and the accompanying orchestra.
We don’t know if Marie-Antoinette ever heard the piece. We don’t even know if the Duc and his daughter
played the concerto. We do know Mozart never got paid. He wrote an exasperated letter to his father:
[The daughter] is betrothed and will no longer continue her studies (no great loss to my
reputation!). Moreover, I shall lose no money by her, for the Duc pays no more than anyone else
here. Only conceive that the Duc de Guines, where I went daily for two hours, let me give
twenty-four lessons . . . He wanted, you see, to pay me for one hour instead of for two—added to
which he has had a concerto of mine for flute and harp four months and has not yet paid me for it!
Mozart’s final words: “There’s noblesse (nobility) for you.”
©2016 John P. Varineau
Suite from “The Cunning Little Vixen”
Leoš Janáček (1854–1928)
Written: 1922–24
Movements: One
Style: Early 20th Century Nationalism
Duration: Seventeen minutes
Leoš Janáček was what you might call a “late bloomer.” He was one of thirteen children born into a
family of passionate amateur musicians. His father recognized his son’s musical abilities early on, and at
age ten young Leoš was sent to the Queen’s Monastery in nearby Brno, Moravia (later the Czech
Republic). It could have been the story of a child prodigy rising to fame, but it wasn’t. For decades,
Janáček spent his time diligently composing, studying Moravian folk songs, seeking higher education,
and engaging in various teaching positions in Brno. He demonstrated considerable talent his whole life,
especially as a composer of opera, but he composed in virtual anonymity.
When he was nearly fifty years old, Janáček wrote the opera Jenůfa, which received its premiere in Brno
in 1904. Though the work was well received in Brno, it would have been destined to fall into obscurity
but for a fortunate encounter ten years later. As the story goes, a literary gentleman from Prague was
vacationing in Brno when he chanced to hear a woman singing excerpts from Jenůfa. He was so taken by
the music that he brought it to the attention of the director of the National Theatre. At the insistence of the
two men, the work was eventually staged in Prague to unqualified success. “Overnight,” the unassuming
Professor Janáček had become a national treasure. Following World War I and Czechoslovakia’s
independence, Janáček’s success continued, particularly in the theater.
In 1920, Janáček’s hometown newspaper ran a comic strip written by Rudolf Těsnohlídek titled “The
Adventures of Vixen Sharp-Ears.” Inspired by his housekeeper’s suggestion that it would make a good
opera, Leoš wrote his own libretto and then spent two years writing the music. The opera tells the story of
a gamekeeper who catches a young fox and brings her home as a pet. Penned up, she is offended by the
ardent advances of a dog. Disgusted by a rooster’s advice to submit to her captivity, she kills him. She
escapes to the forest where she marries another fox and raises a litter of cubs. Eventually, a poacher kills
her. The gamekeeper returns to the forest and, seeing one the vixen’s daughters, is reminded of the great
circle of life.
The conductor Václav Talich arranged an orchestral suite from the opera by essentially using the first act
complete—without voices—and changing the orchestration. In the first movement, you’ll hear the
awakening of nature. Flies buzz around and dance with a dragonfly. They disperse as the gamekeeper
approaches. When he lies down to nap, a cricket, grasshopper, and mosquito dance a waltz. A frog tries to
catch the mosquito, but when the vixen tries to catch the frog, he jumps and lands on the gamekeeper’s
nose. The gamekeeper wakes up, sees and catches the vixen, and takes her home.
The second movement finds the vixen in the gamekeeper’s yard. The vixen repulses the dog’s advances
and attacks one of the gamekeeper’s children. After he ties her up, she dreams she is a young girl.
Disgusted with her captivity and the attitude of the other animals, she bites through her leash and escapes.
Janáček’s mature musical language is unashamedly nationalistic, fueled by diligent study of his people’s
music. His folk-like melodies arise from the rhythms and contours of his native tongue. He favors an
insistent use of repetitive melodic fragments. Altogether, the language is distinctively Janáček’s. It is, in
the composer’s words, “a kind of new sprouting from the soul which has made its peace with the rest of
the world and seeks only to be nearest to the ordinary Czech man.”
© 2016 John P. Varineau
Scherzo capriccioso, Op. 66
Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904)
Written: 1883
Movements: One
Style: Romantic
Duration: Fifteen minutes
“I am just an ordinary Czech musician,” Antonín Dvořák insisted just as his career was reaching its peak.
He may have started out as an ordinary Czech musician, but he certainly didn’t finish that way. His father
was a butcher in a small village near Prague. Antonín learned how to play the violin when he was quite
young and left home—against his father’s wishes—when he was thirteen to study music in Zlonice. He
developed his “chops” to the point that he could play viola in the town orchestra. Three years later, he
moved to Prague to continue his studies. Eventually, he became the principal violist at the National
Theater.
Throughout the 1860s, he remained “just an ordinary Czech musician,” but in the 1870s, his stature grew.
For several years, he received the Austrian State Prize—a sort of scholarship for budding young artists.
One of the members of the scholarship committee was none other than Johannes Brahms, who
subsequently wrote to his own publisher Simrock:
I have been receiving a lot of pleasure for several years past from the work of Anton Dvořák of
Prague. . . . [He] has written all kinds of things, operas, symphonies, quartets, piano pieces. He is
certainly a very talented fellow. And incidentally, poor! I beg you to consider that!
Simrock, did consider that and asked Dvořák to submit some dances—á la Brahms’s Hungarian dances—
for piano four-hands and offered the princely sum of 300 marks. There was a run at the music stores and
Simrock made a small fortune. More importantly, Dvořák was suddenly no longer a novelty composer
from what was considered a cultural backwater. Now he was famous throughout Europe.
Dvořák was a hero in his own country, but had not conducted outside its borders. Finally, as the result of
a performance of his Stabat Mater in England, Dvořák was invited to travel to London to conduct a
concert of his own works. One of those works was the Scherzo capriccioso.
Scherzo means “joke,” so much of the Scherzo capriccioso has a light-hearted character. Nevertheless,
there are also extended moments of aching beauty. The piece begins with a call by the horns. Various
sections of the orchestra answer until, finally, a rollicking first theme begins. It is in a triple meter, but the
cymbal plays in an obstinate duple time, forming one of Dvořák’s signature furiants, a type of Czech
folk-dance. The furiant theme eventually dissolves into the second theme of the piece, a tender lilting
waltz. The orchestra spends a good amount of time playing with motives from the furiant before bringing
it and the waltz back in full. The piece subsides into a beautiful, calm melody initially played by the
English horn. An agitated waltz interrupts the serenity. Furiant motives get tossed around until there is a
full return of the furiant and the second theme. The music then seems to run out of steam, coming to a
complete standstill. That’s no way to end a joke! Instead, there is a rip-roaring punchline.
©2016 John P. Varineau