3. In search of recognition abroad: Sweden, 1856–61.

‘Prague did not wish to acknowledge me, so I left it’, Smetana informed his parents in a letter of 23 December 1856, two months after his arrival in Sweden (16 October 1856). Although he had not fared badly financially in Prague, teaching in Göteborg, a commercially rich town, brought him more money. Apart from private lessons, immediately on his arrival he opened a music institute, and one year later a ladies’ singing school. In the mid-1840s Prague was a city of culture which fêted Berlioz, Liszt and the Schumanns and with a theatre which, in the 1850s, was a meeting point where all types of opera (Meyerbeer, Verdi and Wagner) were performed. In comparison Göteborg was merely provincial. ‘People are here continually firmly trapped in antediluvian artistic opinions. Mozart for them is the subject of unbounded admiration but at the same time they don't understand him. They are frightened of Beethoven, they proclaim Mendelssohn as indigestible and they are unaware of any more recent composers' (Smetana to Liszt, 10 April 1857). He added: ‘Here I have a splendid opportunity to work for progress and to cultivate the taste of the people and there is an impact which I could never have achieved in Prague’. In the period of neo-absolutism after 1848 in which run-of-the-mill institutionalism reigned, Prague could provide no new job opportunities. However, Göteborg to some extent fulfilled Smetana's goal of becoming a conductor. As director he had at his disposal the music society Harmoniska Salskapet, through which, despite its being amateur, he could promote his artistic orientation. This is evident from the very names of the composers whose works he performed both at concerts of vocal-instrumental music and at the chamber cycles he initiated. His programmes included the works of Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Wagner, Verdi, Rubinstein, Gade and not surprisingly Smetana. It was Franz Liszt who drew Smetana out of the artistic isolation which he suffered in Göteborg. The relationship of teacher and pupil, which Smetana maintained towards Liszt all his life, was no doubt strengthened by Smetana's two visits to Liszt in Weimar. Smetana's direction was determined by Liszt's ideas and above all by the quantity and character of the music which he now had the opportunity of getting to know. On the way to Göteborg for a second season Smetana visited Liszt in Weimar, where he heard the first performance of Liszt's Faust Symphony. ‘Regard me as your most passionate supporter of our artistic direction who in word and deed stands for its holy truth and also works for its aims’, he wrote to Liszt on 24 October 1858, a year after this first trip to Weimar. Shortly before a second visit to Liszt in Weimar (where he heard the Tristan prelude for the first time), Smetana was among the participants at the Künsterversammlung in Leipzig in June 1859 celebrating the 25th anniversary of the founding of Schumann's Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, an occasion where the Allgemeines Deutsches Musikverein was founded and the ‘Neudeutsche Schule’ was proclaimed. In the years 1858–61 Smetana returned intensively to his work as a composer, exploiting ideas from these trips, and writing his first three symphonic poems, Richard III, Walensteins Lager and Hakon Jarl. Their orchestral performances had to wait until his return to Prague.

During his stay in Sweden there were important changes in Smetana's personal life. The northern climate had badly affected the tuberculosis of his wife Kateřina, who died in Dresden on 19 April 1859, on the way home to Bohemia. During a holiday in Bohemia Smetana became acquainted with Bettina (Barbara) Ferdinandi (the sister-in-law of his brother Karel) and returned to Sweden already with the promise of marriage. These circumstances strengthened his ties to his homeland and so, after his second marriage (10 July 1860), he set off in the autumn of 1860 with Bettina and his surviving daughter Žofie to Sweden for a final season. It was not only personal reasons which drew Smetana back to his homeland. Throughout all this time he had carefully followed events at home (he read the Prague newspaper Bohemia) and the news which especially interested him was that of the imminent formation of a permanent Czech professional theatre, the Czech Provisional Theatre. Hopes appeared of new possibilities of employment, strengthened by political developments arising from the promises made in the emperor's October Diploma of 1860. In any event the pettiness of Göteborg's environment had already become unbearable. ‘follow other goals. … I cannot bury myself in Göteborg. … I must attempt finally to publish my compositions and create for myself the opportunity to gain new ideas. … Therefore up into the world and soon!’ (diary, 31 March 1861). After the financial failure of two final attempts at the career of a travelling piano virtuoso (Stockholm, Norrköping, Cologne, Leiden), Smetana returned home to Bohemia for good.

Smetana, Bedřich