7. Orchestral works.

When in 1848–9 Smetana wrote his first extended orchestral composition, the Jubel-Overture, he was aware of the need to extend his technique in this medium. Copies have survived that he made of passages from various scores with interesting orchestration (Beethoven's symphonies nos.2 and 9 and Leonora no.1 Overture op.138, Mendelssohn's overtures Die schöne Melusine and Meerestille und glückliche Fahrt, Weber's Jubel-Overture and overture to Der Freischütz and Berlioz's arrangement of Meyer's March marocaine) as well as symphonic fragments and sketches culminating in the composition of the Triumf-Sinfonie in 1853–4. Known during this period as a teacher and chamber player, Smetana longed above all to be recognized as a composer by fellow artists and society. The external stimulus for the symphony was the marriage of Emperor Franz Joseph I with Elisabeth of Bavaria, and Smetana sought, unsuccessfully, official acceptance for the dedication of the composition at the Viennese court. The celebratory intent was underlined by his use of Haydn's melody for the Austrian National Anthem of the time. For future performances of Smetana's only symphony this turned out to be a fatal decision in view of the various political meanings which became attached to the anthem in the course of time. In the first half of the century hymns were used as the basis for variations or overtures. Smetana, however, wanted to show off his craft in the elevated form of the symphony. He employed the melody of the hymn as a solution to a compositional problem: to unify the four movements of the symphony including the monumental climax of the finale. Haydn's tune first emerges in a brief hint at the conclusion of the development of the first movement; its first strain is lyrically transformed as the second subject of the slow movement; its full version is displayed in the grandiose coda of the finale. While its identity as a melody is preserved, all the movements have their own independent logic. Smetana performed the symphony at his début as a conductor on 26 February 1855 and for the second time in Göteborg in 1860. It was performed in 1882 by Adolf Čech, at whose instigation Smetana, who continued to value the work, revised it and gave it the Czech title of Slavnostní symfonie.

Smetana's return to orchestral music in the years 1858–61, during his time in Sweden, brought a change of direction in the composition of symphonic poems. He wrote three: Richard III, Wallensteins Lager and Hakon Jarl, based respectively on plays by Shakespeare, Schiller and Oehlenschläger. This direction in his composition, however, is also evident in the piano sketch Macbeth, the unfinished piano sketches for Cid, the plan to elaborate an earlier fragment as Wikinger-Fahrt and in the unrealized plan to compose a Wallensteins Tod (after Schiller); it also possibly explains the musical sketches designated ‘Maria Stuart’. A powerful stimulus for this new orientation came from Smetana's visit to Liszt in Weimar 3–7 September 1857, during which time not only the strength of Listz's thoughts but also his music left an indelible impression on him. It was here that he heard the premières of Liszt's Faust Symphony and his tone poem Die Ideale as well as other pieces in piano arrangements. Also available at the time were Listz's first six symphonic poems, which had been published a year earlier by Breitkopf & Härtel. Liszt had presented him with one of these, Tasso, during his stay in Prague in September 1856. Smetana's response was all the more powerful since some of Liszt's compositional devices were already emerging as tendencies in Smetana's earlier music. Such shared features include unity within a variety of character, thematic transformation and the triumphal conclusion of large forms. Decisive for the whole of Smetana's output is the notion that a poetic thought or programme is changed into a completely musical form (in Richard III and Hakon Jarl on the basis of the sonata principle, with Wallensteins Lager on the basis of a symphonic cycle) always with its own autonomous musical logic. It is interesting that Smetana did not at first designate these pieces symphonic poems. Of Richard III he wrote to Josef Proksch on 9 September 1858 that is was ‘a composition in one movement, neither an overture nor a symphony: in short something still to be named’. After completing the first two, Smetana tried hard to get them performed, but Liszt did not keep the promise given to him on his second visit to Weimar in June 1859. Richard III and Wallensteins Lager were performed only during Smetana's first orchestral concert on 5 January 1862, on his return to Prague (as ‘fantasies for large orchestra’); Hakon Jarl was given (as a ‘symphonic poem’) on 24 February 1864.

Occupied by operatic work, except for occasional pieces, Smetana returned to orchestral music only in the middle of the 1870s with Má vlast. With the ‘Swedish’ poems Smetana had espoused the Lisztian idea of a symphonic poem centred on the expression of striking musical ideas and their mutual relationships; the thoughts behind the existing literary or graphic masterpieces which inspired them are taken further as part of a new synthesis rather than as the basis for mere musical illustration or a musical duplication of the programme. When he began composing Má vlast, however, Smetana had been serving Czech national emancipation for more than ten years and, in accordance with it, formulated his own programme for the cycle. The first traces of the conception go back to 1872, to a time when he was completing his opera Libuše. Although Smetana's conception crystallized only gradually, the basic idea did not change. This was of a cycle of symphonic poems celebrating the homeland headed by Vyšehrad and Vltava (respectively a rocky promontory in Prague with mythic associations, and the Bohemian river that runs through Prague). These two pieces were completed in full score in the second half of 1874, i.e. shortly after the composer went deaf. Another pair, Šárka (the name of a female warrior, well known from early Czech legends) and Z českých luhů a hájů (‘From Bohemian Fields and Groves’), followed a year later (see fig.5). After some years, in 1878–9, Smetana returned to what had seemed a closed tetralogy, expanding it with two more symphonic poems, Tábor and Blaník (respectively the names of the Hussite town and the magic mountain in which Czech warriors, according to legend, wait to come to the rescue of their homeland). Both were a celebration of Hyssitism (the Czech Hussite chorale ‘Kdož jste boží bojovnící – ‘Those who are Warriors of God’ – was used both as building material and emblematically), which nationally aware Czechs of the time regarded as one of the historical periods which could serve as a basis for a contemporary, nationally charged ideal. With this Smetana completed the monumental cycle which is a unique musical apotheosis of the homeland, of the country in which the existence of the nation is rooted, and a celebration of the countryside which for the emergent Czech nation was filled with mythical and historical reminiscences all bound up with a vision of the future. The individual movements of Má vlast were first performed separately. The cycle was heard as a whole for the first time on 5 November 1882 and as such was acclaimed by the Czech musical public as representing Czech national style. Smetana dedicated the cycle to the city of Prague.

Smetana's thoughts for a further symphonic cycle can be found in the year 1880 in a letter to Ludevít Procházka (25 February): ‘I would write … orchestral symphonic poems under the title “Böhmischer Karneval” or “Prager Karneval”, in which not only Czech dances would occur but also small scenes and characters, for example from my operas, as masques’. In 1883 he began composition, but managed to complete only the first section, the Introduction and Polonaise.

Smetana, Bedřich