10. Posthumous reputation.

Smetana's achievement as a composer is the composition of a canon of Czech opera where none before existed and the creation of a personal style, both in his operas but also in his symphonic and chamber works, which came to be equated with the Czech style of the time. This achievement has been complicated both by the fact that his sudden deafness at a crucial time has led to the Romantic image of artist-as-hero (and a vein of sentimental protectiveness in some writings about him) and by the close connections with Czech nationalism, which have monumentalized him into a figure where criticism of aspects of his life or work was discouraged. Thus Smetana's syphilis, which resulted in his deafness, madness and death, is not generally acknowledged by Czech sources. German aspects of his life, perfectly natural for the time, have until recently been airbrushed out of the picture. In his music there has been careful control over which influences are conceded in his mature works: those of Liszt and Wagner are made much of, being ‘progressive’; those of other figures such as Rossini, Donizetti, Verdi, Meyerbeer or Offenbach are dismissed. Furthermore and often quite destructively, Smetana became, in the hands of his proselytes, the starting-point for a prescriptive view of Czech music which excluded figures such as Dvořák, Janáček and Suk. Since critical writings are of their time and quickly superseded none of this might have mattered were it not for the fact that the sympathetic and zealous advocacy of his contemporaries such as Otakar Hostinský turned in the next generation into dogma, most wilfully in the hands of the masterly polemicist, Zdeněk Nejedlý. Furthermore, the political developments which brought Nejedlý, as an old but powerful man, into the postwar communist administration of Czechoslovakia as minister of education, atrophied attitudes almost to the end of the 20th century.

Much of this is a source of bemusement for foreign commentators, who generally find Dvořák a more substantial composer. Such attitudes have halted scholarly work on certain areas of Smetana's life or on the interesting minor figures around him such as Šebor, Bendl or Rozkožný. And, for all the adulation, several major scholarly tasks in connection with Smetana remain to be done. It is perhaps not surprising that Nejedlý’s grandiosely conceived biography only reached volume 7 (taking Smetana to 1843). But there is still no published thematic catalogue of his works: Bartoš's was incomplete at his death; Berkovec's, whose new numbers are supplied in the work-list to this article, may at last remedy this. For the biographer it is especially infuriating that there is no complete edition of Smetana's letters and no edition at all of his diaries, despite the generous provision for scholarly ventures by the communist administration. It presumably did not help that the diaries were kept in German up to 1860, and that both they and the letters may occasionally disturb the sanitized view that generations of Czechs have had of their hero. A Czech 21st-century view of Smetana will perhaps be rather different.