8. Chamber music.

Not many of Smetana's works were inspired by real incidents in his life but it was chamber music that became for him the area which, as an intimate conversation between instruments, belonged to the private sphere. The first of these works, the Piano Trio in G minor, arose, according to Smetana in 1855, as a reaction to the death of his first-born child, the musically talented daughter Bedřiška (Friederike). The three-movement composition sums up the composer's musical thoughts in a large-scale form which, before the composition of Smetana's first symphonic poems, was represented at the time only by the student Sonata in G minor for piano of 1846 and by the Triumf-Sinfonie. Thematic variation work, thematic affinities and transformation ensure the unity of the work as a whole as well as the unity of music of contrasting characters within individual movements. The trio was performed on 3 December 1855 with the composer at the piano. For contemporary critics the work's ‘rhapsodic’ nature went against the aesthetic ideal for chamber music of the time but nevertheless its reception was not as unfavourable as Smetana and later commentators would have us believe. In May 1857 Smetana reworked the first and third movements and performed the trio in a new version for the first time in 1858 in Göteborg.

The impulse for the creation of a further chamber work, Smetana's First String Quartet ‘Z mého života’ (‘From my Life’), written in 1876 and thus 20 years after the Piano Trio, came most probably from Ludevít Procházka. Procházka, a tireless promoter of Smetana's music, was one of the founders of the permanent institution for chamber concerts in Prague, the Czech-German Organization for Chamber Music, at whose first concert on 19 February 1877 Smetana's work was announced. ‘I wanted to depict in music the course of my life … the composition is almost only a private one and so purposely written for four instruments which, as in a small circle of friends, talk among themselves about what has oppressed me so significantly’, Smetana wrote to Josef Srb on 12 August 1878 in a letter in which he supplies the first of the five extant outlines of his programme for the work. Thus arose a work that is almost unique in the tradition of chamber music by virtue of its subjective nature and its use of a programme, something which was hitherto the domain of symphonic work. Against the background of the Classical plan for individual movements Smetana created poetic pictures through the play of individualized musical characters which have their own autonomous musical logic and which, together with their programme (which can be described as reminiscences of the state of mind at important junctures of Smetana's life) are capable of providing rich starting points for associative listening. Instead of a scherzo in the outer parts of the second movement there is a polka, following the precedent of Fibich’s and Dvořák's string quartets. In Smetana's case, for instance in his symphonic and operatic work, he used it as a symbol of Czech country life and Czech local colour. Here it is a reminiscence of his passionate devotion to dancing in his youth. In the coda of the finale, before the reminiscence of the lyrical theme from the first movement, a very high sustained note (E''') is heard as a fateful proclamation of Smetana's deafness. ‘I allowed myself this little trifle because it was so crucial for me’ (Smetana to Srb, 12 August 1878). The work was finally performed publicly at the concert of Umělecká Beseda on 29 March 1877 and during Smetana's life received several performances abroad (in 1880 in Weimar on Listz's initiative, but also in Hamburg, Vienna, Meiningen, Magdeburg, Paris, Dresden, Moscow and overseas).

The external stimulus for Smetana's last important work, the Second String Quartet in D minor, can also be traced to Procházka's efforts to promote Smetana's music. The quartet arose in the years 1882–3, when, on account of his worsening state of health, Smetana was able to compose only in snatches. This fact has influenced the view of many commentators on this work, going, as it does, against the more stable norms of the genre. Smetana's quartet is characterized by its remarkable shortwindedness, its aphoristic character and the density of its musical expression (for instance the first movement is a carefully thought out miniature double-function form) and looks forward to such tendencies of the future. It is significant that a comment by Arnold Schoenberg (although not substantiated) has been handed down in Smetana literature from the 1920s that it was this quartet which ‘opened the world to him’.

Smetana, Bedřich