6. Operas.

Smetana is regarded as the ‘father of Czech opera’ (and indeed of Czech ‘modern’ music) not because he was the first composer to write operas in Czech, but because his operas were the first to stay in the Czech repertory and thus form the basis for a continuous tradition which has lasted to this day. Professional composers such as František Škroup wrote operas in Czech from the 1820s onwards (Škroup himself was preceded by half a century of semi-amateur attempts), but apart from Škroup's The Tinker none was given more than a couple of times.

The opening of the Czech Provisional Theatre in 1862 provided the greatest incentive towards the establishment of a permanent Czech operatic tradition. The first opera given there was Cherubini's Les deux journées – there was no suitable Czech piece – but 19 years later when the Czech National Theatre was finally opened, it was with Smetana's Libuše (1881). In between these dates all but one of Smetana's completed operas were performed at the theatre or its summer alternatives. Smetana was not alone in taking advantage of the new possibilities. Even before his first opera The Brandenburgers had been staged in 1866 a German opera by his older contemporary Skuherský had been translated into Czech and given at the Provisional Theatre, and The Templars in Moravia by Smetana's younger contemporary Šebor had narrowly anticipated Smetana's première. As well as Šebor, other Czech composers of the new generation such as Bendl, Rozkošný and Blodek were all enthusiastically composing operas – their premières mingled with those of Smetana – but of their operas only a single one, Blodek's unassuming one-acter In the Well, has managed to maintain a place in the Czech repertory. It is the canon of Smetana's eight completed operas which dominate the early history of Czech opera and consciously provided models for his contemporaries and successors.

Smetana's eight operas fall into three groups: three serious operas based on Czech history and myths (The Brandenburgers in Bohemia, Dalibor and Libuše); two comic operas conceived as opéras comiques (The Bartered Bride and The Two Widows) – the spoken dialogue was later adapted to recitative; and the three final operas all to librettos by Eliška Krásnohorská. Libuše, with its static monumentality, is best described as a sort of musical tableau vivant (a popular genre in Prague at that time). Paradoxically the other two overtly nationalist operas are the nearest to common European patterns: The Brandenburgers in Bohemia a rather clumsy French grand opera, and Dalibor a straightforward tragedy with the death of hero and heroine at the end.

The five other operas share a common thread. All are comedies, the later ones increasingly serious, and all concern the healing of a central relationship. This relationship has been soured either by a failure of communication (Jeník and Mařenka in The Bartered Bride), or by the passing of years – Smetana's later central couples are distinctly middle-aged, one of them usually a widow or a widower, or long unmarried. Healing is achieved in The Two Widows by shock treatment, but in the Krásnohorská operas it is internal, and suggested by physical metaphor: in the deep forest (The Kiss), the dark tunnel (The Secret) or by a perilous crossing of the swollen waters of the Vltava (The Devil's Wall). Such plots have little to do with contemporary operatic models and much more to do with Shakespeare's comedies and romances or with Mozart's Die Zauberflöte: the Viennese musical, magical ‘quest’ plays transplanted easily to the Prague stage and their Czech successors were a dominant strain in Czech theatre of the generation before Smetana and Krásnohorská.

Smetana's mission to create a canon of Czech operas did not prevent his drawing on existing traditions of European opera. His attitude towards these can be inferred from the reviews that he wrote in Národní listy (1864–5) and from the repertory he maintained and introduced at the Provisional Theatre during his time there as chief conductor. Most of the objections in his reviews were to the Italian repertory, which he found faded and dramatically inept. German opera – in the language of the oppressor – was understandably unpopular (and was anyway available in Prague at the German opera house), so Smetana sought to move towards the inclusion of more Slavonic repertory and, despite the cramped resources, tiny chorus and orchestra, towards the French repertory.

There is some echo of French grand opera particularly in his early works. The Brandenburgers in Bohemia, for instance, is based on the Scribe-Meyerbeerian canvas of large-scale historical events against which the characters enact their own dramas. The build-up of atmosphere of Act 1 scene ii, with its genre choruses, ballet and ‘revolutionary chorus’, has similarities with Auber's La muette de Portici rather than with later Meyerbeer works. There is for instance no exploitation of double-chorus confrontations which the plot would suggest (in fact, apart from a single soldier, no musical depiction of any Brandenburger). Most of these ‘French’ traits in The Brandenburgers, however, can be traced back more to the librettist than to the composer.

Where Smetana made compositional choices he seems to have taken Italian rather than French models. There are several cantabile–caballetta arias and duets in The Brandenburgers, and the outer acts both make use of the concertato–stretta formula. Indeed such traits are sometimes present in Smetana's later operas: Act 1 of Smetana's most advanced opera, Dalibor, concludes with a cabaletta duet, and there are elements of the concertato reactive ensembles in all his later operas. Even when, in the later operas, the repetitions characterizing a cabaletta structure disappear, the slow–fast cantabile–cabaletta design underlies some of the solo arias and duets. Such survivals are puzzling in view of Smetana's stated aversions, but can be partly explained by the conditions in which he worked. Most of the singers at the Provisional Theatre were trained in the Italian school and felt more comfortable with its traditions. Smetana, furthermore, regularly complied with their requests for extra arias. Thus Act 3 of The Brandenburgers, dramatically far from clear, is further confused by two specifically requested insert arias. The first, for the baritone Josef Lev (as Jan Tausendmark), showed off Lev’s cantabile legato so well that there was a danger of this villain appearing too sympathetic.

Such habits cannot be dismissed as the composer's lack of assertiveness at the beginning of his operatic career: in the Hamburg revisions to The Two Widows (1882) he added a cabaletta ending for Anežka's aria as requested; by The Secret he was still adding music for Josef Lev, for instance the 115-bar expansion to his Act 2 aria added after the première. Smetana's admiration for Lev's especial gifts, which were wholly lyrical and undramatic, and his tailoring of leading baritone parts to them, meant that after The Brandenburgers baritone villains virtually disappeared from his operas. Similarly the fact that the Provisional Theatre lacked dramatic sopranos and Heldentenors as permanent members of the ensemble, meant that Smetana generally avoided writing for these heavier voices in his operas: he learnt his lesson in Dalibor. And for all his reservations about italianate traits he included coloratura when appropriate to the singer. The leading Czech prima donna Eleonora z Ehrenbergů did not hide her contempt for a part she was allocated in The Bartered Bride (Mařenka) with no scope for her talents. Thereafter Smetana made sure to give something to please her (such as Jitka's melismatic flourishes over the Act 2 soldiers' chorus in Dalibor or the trill-laden part of the First Reaper in Libuše). This also accounts for the presence in The Kiss of Barče's ‘lark song’, written expressly for the coloratura soubrette talents of Marie Laušmannová. The small and fairly stable group of singers assembled at the Provisional Theatre during Smetana's time there had a lasting effect on his future voice typing – even in his final opera The Devil's Wall he was writing with their specific voices in mind. In general Smetana confined himself to light, lyrical voices; and after the unfieldable demands of The Brandenburgers (three tenors, including a Heldentenor) and Dalibor, he and his last librettist Eliška Krásnohorská were careful to write for what was on hand.

The role of Krásnohorská as Smetana's last librettist was a particularly dominant one. She chose the subjects of his last three completed operas (two of them her invention), determined the voice types and the conventions. She believed in ensembles (as she wrote forcefully to Fibich when negotiating a libretto of Blaník with him), and consequently included many in her librettos. She determined where there was duet writing, where there were formal solos. Smetana took what was given him (he mentioned that he had left out only four lines of Act 1 in The Secret) and, apart from obliging favoured singers, made no specific requests other than for more ‘comedy’ in the final opera.

Most of their work was done when Smetana was at his most vulnerable – deaf, and with rapidly deteriorating health – so that it is not surprising that he was so passive. However, the scanty evidence available suggests that Smetana was no more assertive in his relationships with earlier librettists. The texts for Dalibor and Libuše were written ahead of any commission; similarly it would seem Smetana had no great say in the subject matter of the two texts he received from Karel Sabina, The Brandenburgers and The Bartered Bride, apart from specifying a comic opera of the latter and, for the former, a serious historical opera that would comply with the conditions for the Harrach competition. Conventions of ensemble and simultaneous singing tended to vary with the librettists. Sabina, lacking the time, patience and skills for the equal-length lines needed, provided little usable material for ensembles. Thus The Bartered Bride has few ensembles (compared, for instance, to The Two Widows, which benefited from Emanuel Züngel's much greater experience as an opera translator and versifier), and those in The Brandenburgers had to be eked out from scanty and unpromising material. Dalibor has so few ensembles that one suspects that its librettist, Josef Wenzig, conceived it originally as a play. Only in monumental Libuše did Wenzig attempt to provide material for ensembles.

Smetana wrote opera in a medium that was politicized almost the moment he began. In his preamble for his Czech opera competition, Count Harrach had suggested that use should be made of Czech country life and ‘old chorales’ to establish a Czech identity. This was a position which became associated with the conservative faction of Czech politics (the staročeši), whereas Smetana belonged to the progressive wing (the mladočeši) and was against the quotation of Czech folksong. Accordingly there are almost no direct quotations in his operas and the few that he employs – for instance the pastorella lullaby in The Kiss – are there for specific reasons. There are, however, pseudo-folksongs and/or choruses in all of Smetana's operas. The suggestion of folksong was usually made by the use of strophic structures, repetitive tunes and variable metres or tempos (a slow, ruminative beginning accelerating into a more regular and faster continuation, e.g. Ludiše's ‘folksong’ in The Brandenburgers).

Smetana may well have decided that his ‘progressive’, Lisztian orientation (which resulted for instance in the near monothematic construction of Dalibor) was not compatible with the quotation of folk music. But a crucial factor was that the music he imbibed in his youth was popular dance music from the town rather than genuine Czech folk music from the country. It is dance rhythms rather than folk tunes that provide the closest link between Smetana and vernacular music. A number of dances are specifically named, for instance the skočná and the furiant in The Bartered Bride. He also made frequent use of the sousedská (a ländler-type waltz), but the most common dance of all in his operas was the Polka, whose rhythms most clearly mirrored the stress patterns of the Czech language. Thus fast 2/4 pieces with well stressed beats and polka-like rhythmic figures underlie many of Smetana's operas from The Bartered Bride onwards. Lukáš's ironic serenade to Vendulka in The Kiss is ‘à la polka’. When the countryfolk celebrate at the end of The Two Widows, it is with a named polka, but many unnamed polkas (specifically allowed for in the predominantly trochaic libretto), can be heard throughout the opera, most noticeably in the Act 2 prelude and the associated duet for the two widows.

Other sources of ‘Czechness’ reside in the setting of the Czech language itself but, at least in Smetana's early operas, this is compromised by his poor word-setting (only by his fourth opera Libuše did he manage to avoid mis-stressings), and by the fact that in two operas, Dalibor and Libuše, the Czech text follows the rhythms and metres of the German originals. Although in the later operas the word-setting is fully idiomatic, Krásnohorská's penchant for high-style iambics (alien to Czech's distinctive first-syllable stress) led to less natural-sounding word-setting than Smetana achieved with the trochees in The Two Widows. If from the mid-1870s Czech audiences perceived Smetana's operas musically as particularly ‘Czech’ it may not merely be because of the use of dance rhythms or idiomatic setting of the Czech language but because familiarity with The Bartered Bride led to Smetana's personal voice being taken as the clearest expression of ‘Czechness’ in music.

Smetana, Bedřich