The Czechs, or Bohemians, like other Slavic peoples, are extremely gifted in music by nature; but, while their cousins, the Russians, exemplify this gift largely in songs of a melancholy cast, they are, on the contrary, gay and sociable, and rejoice above all in dancing. They are said to have no less than forty native dances. Of these the most famous is the polka, improvised in 1830 by a Bohemian farm girl, and quickly disseminated over the whole world. The wild 'furiant' and the meditative poetic 'dumka' have been happily used by Smetana, Dvořák, and others. Still other dances bear such unpronounceable names as the beseda, the dudik, the hulan, the kozak, the sedlák, the trinozka. They are accompanied by the national instrument, the 'dudy,' a sort of bagpipe. 'On the whole,' says Mr. Waldo S. Pratt,[19] 'Bohemian ... music shows a fondness for noisy and hilarious forms whose origin is in ardent social merrymaking, or for somewhat grandiose and sumptuous effects, such as imply a half-barbaric notion of splendor. In these respects the eastern music stands in contrast with the much more personal and subjective musical poesy to which northern composers have tended.' This characterization, it is interesting to note, would apply as well to the music of Smetana and Dvořák, in which the kind of thoughtfulness we find in Schumann is almost always wanting, as to the folk-music of their country.
The songs, if naturally less boisterous than the dances, are animated, forthright, and cheerful, rather than profound. They are usually in major rather than in minor, and vigorous though graceful in rhythm. As in the spoken language the accent is almost always put on the first word or syllable, the music usually begins, too, with an accented note. Another peculiarity that may be traceable to the language is that the phrases are very apt to have an uneven number of accents, such as three or five, instead of the two or four to which we are accustomed. This gives them, for our ears, an indescribable piquant charm. On the other hand, as Bohemia is the most western of Slav countries, and consequently the nearest to the seats of musical culture in Germany, its songs show in the regularity of their structure and sometimes in considerably extended development of the musical thought, a superiority over those of more remote and inaccessible lands. Music has been taught, too, for many generations in the Bohemian schools as carefully as 'the three R's,' and it is usual for the village school teachers to act also as organists, choir- and bandmasters. The Bohemian common people seem really to love music. It has been truly said: 'If a Bohemian school of music can now be said to exist, it is as much due to the peasant as to the conscious efforts of Bendl, Smetana, Fibich, A. Stradal, and Dvořák.'[20]
As in Poland, Russia, Italy, and other countries, however, music suffered long in Bohemia from political oppressions and from lack of leadership. In the seventeenth century, after the Thirty Years' War, Bohemia, in spite of her proud past, found herself enslaved, intellectually as well as politically. Her music was overlaid and smothered by fashions imported from Germany, France, and Italy, and her gifted musicians, as Mr. Hadow points out, emigrated thither. During the eighteenth century her Germanization was almost complete, and even the Czech language seemed in danger of dying out. George Benda (1721-1795) wrote fourteen operas for the German stage; Anton Reicha (1770-1836) settled in Paris as a teacher; J. L. Dussek (1761-1812), best known of all, was a cosmopolitan musician, more German than Czech.
Then, early in the nineteenth century, began a gradual reassertion, timid and halting at first, of the national individuality. Kalliwoda, Kittl, Dionys Weber, and others tried to restore the prestige of the folk-songs; Tomášek founded instrumental works upon them; Skroup made in 1826 a collection of them. This Frantisek Skroup (1801-1862) deserves as much as any single musician to be considered the pioneer of the Czech renaissanace. Conductor of the Bohemian Theatre at Prague, he composed the first typically national operas, performed in 1825 and later, and the most universally loved of Bohemian songs, 'Where is My Home?' His life spans the whole period of gestation of the movement, for it was in 1862, the year of his death, that it reached tangible fruition in the founding of the national opera house, the 'Interimstheater,' at Prague. Two years before this, in October, 1860, the gift of political liberty had been granted Bohemia by Austrian imperial diploma. In May, 1861, Smetana, most gifted of native musicians, had returned from a long sojourn in Sweden. Thus the national music now found itself for the first time with an abiding place, liberty, and a great leader.
Friedrich Smetana, born at Leitomischl, Bohemia, March 2, 1824, showed pronounced musical talent from the first, and was highly successful as a boy pianist. His father, however, averse to his becoming a professional musician, refused to support him when in his nineteenth year he went to Prague to study. The severe struggle with poverty and even hunger which he had at this time, together with his close application to the theory of music, may have had something to do with the nervous and mental troubles which later overtook him. His need of study was great, for his musical experience had hitherto been chiefly of the national dances and other popular pieces. In 1848, looking over a manuscript composition of six years before, he noted on its title page that it had been 'written in the utter darkness of mental musical education,' and was preserved as 'a curiosity of natural composition' only at the request of 'the owner'—that is, his friend Katharina Kolář, who in 1849 became his wife. He settled for a time in Prague as a teacher, and even opened a school of his own; but musical conditions in Bohemia were at that time so primitive that in 1857 he accepted an appointment as director of a choral and orchestral society at Gothenburg in Sweden.
During his residence abroad he composed, in addition to many piano pieces and small works, three symphonic poems in which are to be found much of the spontaneity and buoyancy of thought and the brilliancy of orchestral coloring of his later works of this type. These are 'Richard III' (1858), 'Wallensteins Lager' (1859), and 'Hakon Jarl' (1861). Nevertheless he had not yet really found his place. In 1859 his wife died, and the following year he married Barbara Ferdinandi, a Bohemian. It was partly due to her homesickness, partly to the projected erection of the Interimstheater, that he decided to return to Prague in 1861. He was then nearly forty, but his lifework was still ahead of him. He entered with enthusiasm into the national movement. He established with Ferdinand Heller a music school, through which he secured an ample living. He was one of the founders of a singing society, and also of a general society for the development of Bohemian arts. Above all, he began the long series of operas written for the new national opera house with 'The Brandenbergers in Bohemia,' composed in 1863, and 'The Bartered Bride' (1866). Later came Dalibor (1868), Libusa, composed in 1872 but not performed until 1881, Die beiden Witwen (1873-74), Der Kuss (1876), Das Geheimnis (1878), and Die Teufelsmauer (1882).
The most famous of Smetana's operas, 'The Bartered Bride,' performed for the first time at Prague, in 1866, became only gradually known outside Bohemia, but is now a favorite all over the world. It is a story of village life, full of intrigue, love, and drollery. To this spirited and amusing story Smetana has set equally amusing and spirited music. From the whirling violin figures of the overture to the final chord the good humor remains unquenchable. In the polka closing Act I and the furiant opening Act II is village merriment of the most contagious kind; in the march of the showman and his troupe, in the third act, orchestrated for drums, cymbals, trumpet, and piccolo, is humor of the broadest; and in Wenzel's stammering song, opening the same act, is characterization of a more subtle kind, in which humor and real feeling are blended as only a master can blend them. There are, too, many passages of simple tenderness, notably Marie's air and the duet of the lovers in the first scene, and their terzet with Kezal in the last, in which is revealed the composer's unfailing fund of lyrical melody. 'This opera,' says Mr. Philip Hale,[21] 'was a step in a new direction, for it united the richness of melody, as seen in Mozart's operas, with a new and modern comprehension of the purpose of operatic composition, the accuracy of characterization, the wish to be realistic.' We may note, furthermore, how free is this realism of Smetana's from the brutality of some more modern operas on similar subjects, such as those of Mascagni, Leoncavallo, and Puccini. The village life depicted in 'The Bartered Bride' is never repulsive; it is not even tragic; it is simply pathetic, comic, and endlessly appealing.
The simplicity of the musical idiom is notable. Not only does the composer incorporate folk-tunes bodily when it suits his purpose, as in the case of the polka and furiant already mentioned, but the melodies he invents himself are often equally simple, even naïve, and harmonized with a similar artlessness. The haunting refrain of the love duet might be sung by village serenaders. Yet this simplicity is the simplicity of distinction, not that of commonplaceness. There is a purity, a chivalric tenderness about it that can never be counterfeited by mediocrity, and that is in many of Smetana's tunes, as it is in Schubert's and in Mozart's. It is a very cheap form of snobbism that criticises such art as this for its lack of the complexities of the German music-drama or symphony. Smetana himself said: 'As Wagner writes, we cannot compose'—he might have added 'and would not.' 'To us,' says Mr. Hadow, speaking of the Bohemian composers in general, 'to us, who look upon Prague from the standpoints of Dresden or Vienna, the music of these men may seem unduly artless and immature: with Wagner on the one side, with Brahms on the other, we have little time to bestow on tentative efforts and incomplete production. Some day we shall learn that we are in error. The "Bartered Bride" is an achievement that would do credit to any nation in Europe.'
One effect of the great success of his opera was that Smetana was appointed conductor of the opera house. A few years later, in 1873, he also became director of the opera school connected with it, and one of the two conductors of the concerts of the Philharmonic Society at Prague. All these promising new activities, however, were suddenly arrested by a terrible affliction, perhaps the worst that can happen to a musician—deafness. On the score of the Vyšehrad, composed in 1874, the first of the series of six symphonic poems which bears the general title 'My Country' and constitutes his masterpiece in pure orchestral music, is the note, 'In a condition of ear-suffering.' The second, Vltava, composed later in the same year, bears the inscription, 'In complete deafness.' It was indeed in 1874 that he was obliged to give up all conducting. Part of a letter which he wrote some years later is worth quoting, both for the particulars it gives as to his trouble, and for the fine spirit of manly endurance it reveals, recalling vividly the similar spirit displayed by Beethoven in his famous letter to his brothers. 'The loud buzzing and roaring in the head,' he says, 'as though I were standing under a great waterfall, remains to-day, and continues day and night without any interruption, louder when my mind is employed actively, and weaker when I am in a calmer condition of mind. When I compose the buzzing is noisier. I hear absolutely nothing, not even my own voice. Shrill tones, as the cry of a child or the barking of a dog, I hear very well, just as I do loud whistling, and yet, I cannot determine what the noise is, or where it comes from. Conversation with me is impossible. I hear my own piano playing only in fancy, not in reality. I cannot hear the playing of anybody else, not even the performance of a full orchestra in opera or in concert. I do not think that it is possible for me to improve. I have no pain in the ear, and the physicians agree that my disease is none of the familiar diseases of the ear, but something else, perhaps a paralysis of the nerves and the labyrinth. And so I am completely determined to endure my sad fate in a manly and calm way as long as I live.'
Aside from its deep musical beauty, a peculiar interest attaches to the string quartet entitled by Smetana Aus meinen Leben ('From My Life') because of the account it gives in tones of his great affliction. The autobiographical character is maintained throughout. The first movement, in E minor, allegro vivo appassionato, with its constant turbulence and restless aspiration, depicts, according to the composer, his 'predisposition toward romanticism.' The second, quasi polka, 'bears me,' he says, 'back to the joyance of my youth, when as composer I overwhelmed the world with dance tunes and was known as a passionate dancer.' The largo sostenuto, the third movement, perhaps musically the finest of all, is built on two exceedingly earnest and noble melodies which are worked out with elaborate and most felicitous embroidering detail. They tell of the composer's love for his wife and his happy marriage. Of all the movements the finale is the most dramatic. Indeed, it is one of the most dramatic pieces in all chamber music. It opens in E major, Vivace, fortissimo—an indescribable bustle of happy folk themes jostling each other. A buoyant secondary melody is a little quieter but still full of childlike joy. These two themes alternate in rondo fashion, are developed with never-flagging energy, and suggest the composer's joy in his native folk-music and its use in his art. At the height of the jollity there is a sudden pause, a sinister tremolo of the middle strings, and the first violin sounds a long high E, shrill, piercing, insistent. 'It is,' says Smetana, 'the harmful piping of the highest tone in my ear that in 1878 announced my deafness.'[22] All the bustle dies away, we hear reminiscences, full now of a tragic meaning, of the themes of the first movement, and the music dies out with a mournful murmuring of the viola and a few pizzicato chords.