Download BEDRICH SMETANA (1824 – 1884) He was a Czech composer

BEDRICH SMETANA
(1824 – 1884)
He was a Czech composer widely regarded in his homeland as the father of Czech music.
Internationally he is best known for his opera The Bartered Bride, for the symphonic
cycle Má vlast ("My Fatherland"), which portrays the history, legends and landscape of
the composer's native land, and for his First String Quartet From My Life.
Smetana was naturally gifted as a pianist, and gave his first public performance at the
age of six. He studied violin too. He studied music in Prague, then he was music master
to a noble family and later he established his own music school.
At age 50, Smetana had become completely deaf but he began a period of sustained
composition that continued for almost the rest of his life. In Má vlast, Smetana uses
tone painting to evoke the sounds of one of Bohemia's great rivers. In his own words:
The composition describes the course of the Vltava, starting from the two small
springs, the Cold and Warm Vltava, to the unification of both streams into a single
current, the course of the Vltava through woods and meadows, through landscapes
where a farmer's wedding is celebrated, the round dance of the mermaids in the night's
moonshine: on the nearby rocks loom proud castles, palaces and ruins aloft. The Vltava
swirls into the St John's Rapids; then it widens and flows toward Prague, past the
Vyšehrad, and then majestically vanishes into the distance, ending at the Labe.
His contributions to Czech music were increasingly recognised and honoured, but a
mental collapse early in 1884 led to his incarceration in an asylum, and his subsequent
death. Smetana's reputation as the founding father of Czech music has endured in his
native country, where advocates have raised his status above that of his contemporaries
and successors.
CONNECTION: the painter paints nature, the composer paints nature with sounds.