Bedřich Smetana: Vltava from Má Vlast
Composed: 1874
Duration: c. 13 minutes

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Bedřich Smetana wrote a series of nationalist works that became synonymous with a Czech national musical style, such as Prodaná nevěsta (‘The Bartered Bride’), as well as his cycle of symphonic poems Má vlast (‘My Fatherland’), of which Vltava is the first movement. But after his death, Smetana became something more: a mythic symbol for Czechs navigating borders, politics, ethnicities and shifting identities. Elements from his biography (like his "Czechness," or his heroic struggle with deafness) spoke to the various needs, anxieties and interests of his audiences. A national hero was born.

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It's important to note that Smetana's Czechness was a construction, formed out of a wider political moment that was embracing self-determination. Across Europe in 1848, uprisings occurred in 50 European countries, caused by poor harvests, industrial hardship, and political repression. The young Smetana was extremely sympathetic to such causes. Originally born Friedrich, he spoke German as a child, as many middle-class Bohemians did. But he became involved in the National Revival movement, which stressed autonomy of Czechs within the Habsburg structure. With difficulty, in his 40s, he began using Czech as his main language, and wrote operas that would come to define a new national image.

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If The Bartered Bride became Smetana's nation-building force in opera, then Má vlast worked in parallel in the orchestral genre. It begins with Vltava, an evocation of the river running through Prague. It begins swirling winds of turbulent waters, before stretching out into its famous, wide-open theme. Smetana left a detailed programme of the river's journey. It begins high in the hills as a small mountain stream, passing through forests and meadows, and arrives a rustic peasant wedding dance. Then, it moves into darkness, through the scary rapids at St John's, and finally, in the approach to Prague, broadens out majestically.

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Vítězslava Kaprálová: Suita Rustica
Composed: 1938
Duration: c. 15 minutes

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I. Allegro rustica

II. Lento - Vivo - Lento

III. Allegro ma non troppo

 

In her short life, Vítězslava Kaprálová (1915—1940) was one of the most promising Czech composers. After being encouraged by her father, also a composer, to write music from an early age, she enrolled in the Brno Conservatory, later studying composition and conducting in Prague. Just before the Second World War, a government scholarship allowed her to move to Paris. She studied with Martinů, a compatriot and a compositional sparring partner: they seemed to write music in tandem. Her music bears some resemblance to Martinů's, with its polytonality, melancholy expression, and an interesting absorption of folk themes.

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Kaprálová died of tuberculosis in Paris during the evacuation in 1940, making the Suita rustica her final work. It shows just what a talent we lost. It begins with a spirited, exuberant Allegro rustico;  Kaprálová crams an impressive amount of detail into a very short space. The slow middle movement opens out, from a reflective melancholy melody into an upbeat Czech folk tune. (It'll be familiar if you ever sang Malcolm Sargent's arrangement The Zither Carol at Christmastime). The final movement opens with a Stravinskyan energy—imagine a distant cousin of Petrushka—and travels through fugues and military marches to a dazzling close.

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--- INTERVAL ---

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Dvořák: Symphony No. 9

Composed: 1893

Duration: 45 minutes

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I. Adagio - Allegro molto

II. Largo

III. Scherzo. Molto vivace

IV. Allegro con fuoco

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Two months after his arrival in America, Dvořák wrote to a friend, “The Americans expect great things from me... I am to show them a way into…the realm of a new, independent art.” To achieve his aim, Dvořák sought American folk idioms: just as Bartók and Vaughan Williams believed in the power of folk music in the building of national identity, Dvořák too saw the future of American music as being driven by these forms. Composers should turn always to them if they wished to “express the true sentiment of [their] people," he wrote.

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The heartfelt Symphony No. 9 (1893) grew out of this fascination and created a representation of the “New World." Many of the themes in the symphony appeared to be direct folk quotations but Dvořák was insistent that he crafted them from scratch. His distillations of this heritage came so naturally that this can be hard to believe. The finest example of this disbelief comes from the Symphony’s famous Largo movement and the music we now know familiarly as “Goin’ Home.” Though it is easy to imagine this as a pre-existing Negro Spiritual, Dvořák did create it himself, with words later added by William Arms Fisher.

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This is a traditional, four-movement symphony that looks in the direction of Beethoven and Brahms. But Dvořák's formal schemes also make this a symphony about memory, and even nostalgia: melodies from the first movement return in every successive movement, and there's a keening feeling to the symphony, like an evocation of something lost. 

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