The National and the Confessional in Smetana and Dvorak

Is music universal? Maybe, but I have my doubts. Just as there are individual people who have no use for or response to music (consider the  famous cases of Sigmund Freud and Vladimir Nabokov, for instance), I rather suspect that there are probably nations or cultures that have no use for music. Nations of Ullyses Grants (“I know two tunes: one of ‘em’s “Yankee Doodle” and the other one ain’t.”). This mildly amusing Grant anecdote may be apocryphal for all I know, and it may be that a learned anthropologist would tell me that they’ve never encountered an amusical cuture. But this I know: if amusical cultures exist, the Czechs ain’t one of them.

How should we feel about avowedly “national” music? Remember, if you value “patriotism”, for instance, as all the presidential candidates are required to avow every hour, on the hour, you must respect patriotism in nations other than your own. Otherwise it’s not patriotism per se you value, but some kind of hegemony, cultural or political.

A few years ago I had an annoying incident at O’Hare airport, returning from Europe. I think it may have been from France or Germany, but let’s just say it was from Prague. I somehow got in the wrong line for passport control and an exasperated agent called me over to the appropriate line, the one for American citizens. (For better or worse, I’m always immediately recognizable as an American… hmm, maybe it’s due to the loud Hawaiian shirts, the loud voice, and the chic ensemble of plaid shorts with socks and sandals. On the other hand, if I tried to wear a leather jacket and an earring, I would be immediately perceived as an “ugly American” trying to be an “ugly European”)…

Anyway, the agent berated me thusly: “You shouldn’t have to wait in line, you belong here, not like those other people.” And his tone dripped contempt for “those other people”. Maybe he meant to show comraderie with me, or whatnot. But I didn’t like it, it stuck in my craw. Before the death of the dollar I went to Europe quite frequently, and I promise you, I sure wouldn’t want that jackass on the reception committee at the other end.

Which brings us to the case of Smetana, a composer who explicitly stated that he valued the “national” more than the “universal”; this view even caused a rift with a friend. Now, Smetana’s experience abroad, in Sweden primarily, but Germany as well, cemented his narrowly Czech outlook… he had a rough time getting his career going as well as he wanted it to go, he was homesick and estranged from his family. Also, the fate of the Czech lands for much of its history has been to be a victim of Austrian and German control, and of course this pattern continued in the generations after Smetana’s death, with the Soviet Union added to the list of offenders against Czech sovereignty most recently.

So Smetana’s view is understandable, to say the least. But does it limit his appeal? Does knowing that a composer isn’t writing for you cause you any qualms? Do you prefer Beethoven, who is writing for you? In his aspirations Smetana is more Czech than Schubert is Viennese, more Czech than Tchaikovsky is Russian, more Czech than Ives is American. Is this a problem?

No, because music is abstract, and a composer cannot control the intrinsic meaning of an abstraction, only its outward semblance. It’s out of his hands. Case in point, “From Bohemia’s Woods and Valleys” uses a polka as the symbol of nationhood, the people, which is then combined with music representing nature in a mystical epiphany. If Gershwin were to use a fox-trot in “From America’s Woods and Valleys” should polka dancers feel left out? Nietzsche had it right, it’s neither the best nor the worst that is lost in translation. And don’t ever let a Russian tell you that you can’t “really understand” Mussorgsky, or a Norwegian tell you that you can’t “really understand” Grieg. But when it comes to non-Western cultures, I’m mute. I just don’t know enough.

Dvorak was a staunch Catholic as well as a staunch nationalist. His frustration with the publisher Simrock ignoring his pleas to publish his name in the Czech manner, as well as providing Czech texts in his scores is well known. And I’d go so far to say that a fair minded person would be almost obliged to respect the nationalism of a Czech vis a vis. the dominant and foreign German influence and control, politically and culturally, in the Czech lands at the time.

Dvorak’s confessionalism might be more palateable than the nationalism of Smetana for non-Czechs, partly because Dvorak didn’t hesitate to include Hussite themes in for instance, his “The Hussites” overture, although the Hussites were completely opposed to Catholocism. Dvorak thought that the Hussites nevertheless represented important and admirable traits. And confessionalism is often trans-national; Catholocism certainly is. But is confessional exclusivity any better than national exclusivity, especially since typically in the former case those left out are thought to be denied salvation?

Once again, music itself provides an elegant rebuttal to the exclusiveness crowd. Consider the case of William Byrd, or Bach himself, who signed some document condemning the beliefs of the prince of Anhalt-Coethen, and then memorably eulogized him with movements from a (Catholic!) mass setting. Consider the poignant and instructive case of Shostakovich, who wrote thrilling and moving music for the Soviet ideology, that so many people insist on appropriating for very different ideologies! Consider the anti-ecclesiast Verdi in his “Four Sacred Pieces” and Requiem. 

Great composers have often expressed ugly jingoistic credos. But their own works as often as not belie their ideological intentions. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. This applies to Wagner as well, by the way, although you need several strong men to dump out the unusually deep tubs of bathwater.

Greatest Tone Poem? Don't Forget to Consider Smetana's "From Bohemia's Woods and Valleys"

Smetana’s Ma Vlast (Read Wikipedia | Play recording) constitutes the greatest orchestral score between Berlioz and Brahms. I don’t raise an eyebrow if you would like to correct that to “between Beethoven and Mahler”. And the jewel in the crown is “From Bohemia’s Woods and Valleys”. (Czech: Z českých luhů a hájů)

Ma Vlast as a whole has more coherence than most symphonies; not only that, “The Moldau”, “Sarka”, and “From Bohemia’s Woods and Valleys” constitute miniature symphonies of their own; “The Moldau” is a four movement symphony, where the scherzo is the peasant wedding and the slow movement the wood nymphs…although I prefer to think of that exquisite A-flat major passage as amorous lovers floating by, probably because A-flat was Beethoven’s “amorous” key, and because Beethoven generally represents the standard against which other composers are measured…his conceptions have assumed a sort of central position. Consider for instance Mozart’s great c minor piano fantasy.  How often have you heard it described as “Beethovenian”, for instance? Anyway, leaving Beethoven aside, “Sarka” is a miniature five movement program symphony (ever notice how often program symphonies have five movements? “Pastoral”, “Fantastique”, etc.).

“From Bohemia’s Woods and Valleys” is a symphony as well, but not as obvious a construction as “Moldau” and “Sarka”, although it is in fact more deeply motivically integrated. The awsome wall of sound representing mighty nature that engulfs the listener at the very beginning generates most of the material for the rest of the composition. Unlike “Moldau”, the movements in “Woods and Valleys” are not easily separable; Nature is constantly re-inventing itself, from terrible majesty to warm beauty to proliferative, burgeoning life to a great epiphany when nature collides with humankind. The shepherd girl’s pastoral piping echoes nature’s sounds; she is a sort of emanation of nature herself. As such, she doesn’t provide dramatic conflict. The institution of social, communal life of the people is necessary to provide dynamic contrast, the people being represently by a strangely fierce polka in nature’s key of g minor. And g minor is Smetana’s “intense” key, consider for instance his great requiem trio for his daughter Bedriska.  

The structure of the piece is essentially 1. Mighty nature 2. Nature in its benignant aspect, the Shepherdess. 3. Nature as a continual process of renewal; proliferative nature, represented as a fugue, which is both fitting and ironic. Fitting, because no musical strategy is as much about growth, variation, replication, and proliferativeness as the fugue, ironic becasue fugue is the most intellectual and learned musical device. Nature is many things, but it is not intellectual! Apropos this irony, I’d like to quote Arnold Schoenberg:  “The most beautiful birdsong is never music, but the simplest modulation, accomplished correctly, is already music.” 4. The intrusion of human institutions, represented by a polka, the musical symbol of the Czech people. 5. Humans and nature transcend their inherent limitations and spiritually unite in a oneness. Does my description sound “artsy-fartsy”? I assure you, the music is not.

The piece is sublime in both the scarifying real meaning of the word, and also in the casual meaning which loosely means transcendant. By the way, Ma Vlast isn’t so much six loosely connected masterpieces as it is one masterpiece in six necessary and dependant parts. Play the whole thing, in order, please.  

Listening

Smetana: Má Vlast

Supraphon

Rafael Kubelik’s triumphant return to the 1990 Prague Spring festival. This performance is briefly featured at the end of the Oscar-winning Czech film Kolya as the film’s protagonist resumes his rightful place in the cello section of the Czech phil.

Smetana and Deafness

Smetana went deaf in the early 1870s, his late 40s, around the time of the composition of his opera, “The Two Widows”. His deafness was the result of syphilitic infection. He composed his greatest work, the orchestral cycle Ma Vlast (Read Wikipedia | Play recording) while being stone deaf. I am frequently asked how a composer can compose when he is deaf.

It isn’t alchemy, it’s training.

Farting around at the piano until you find something appealing, and then writing it down is for amateurs. And by the way, the sort of person who proceeds in this method is likely to write it down inaccurately anyway, given that notation requires training as well. Idiot savants don’t exist in serious music. Leave that for “60 Minutes” segments. Authentic composers ‘hear music in their head”…not just “geniusses”; the good, the bad, and the ugly hear music in their head as well. This isn’t just opinion. It is possible to actually know some things in this world, and this is one of the things I know. I myself need recourse to a piano frequently, and there is no shame in that, although it is sometimes inconvenient.  String players often have better musical ears than pianists, because they have to make their own notes, whereas pianists have the notes ready made. 

I’m not saying that a sensitive and talented person might not come up with an attractive melody or even a song via trial and error at the piano, but on the other hand if a sensitive or talented person cares about his art, he tends to acquire professional skill. You occasionally hear that Pavarotti “couldn’t read notes”. I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it. It is possible, however, that certain popular performers may cultivate an idiot savant persona as a kind of “schtick”. And I know very well that hearing music in one’s head is a talent that manifests itself in different degrees. There’s Mozart, for instance, and then there is everyone else. And of course composers often need a piano for verification or to work out troublesome passages. And a primarily textural composition, such as Ligeti’s Atmospheres, presents unique problems to the inner ear. A composer who can’t pick up the score of a Haydn quartet and hear it is unlikely to be the sort of composer who will compose rewarding music. Maybe this is a hard truth, but there it is.

But if one is born deaf, forget about being a composer, unless you cultivate a style that completely eschews pitch or renders it irrelevant. And there are such styles.  

Who was the philosopher who said, “The tragedy of the world is that the fool knows he is right, while the wise man has doubts”? One of my few memories of that most worthless of times in my life, high school, was an incident in biology class. We had a sour and vain teacher who didn’t care for his subject, or attempt to communicate it. He “phoned it in”, as they say. So I drifted into the habit of reading miniature scores during class, effectively concealing those lovely Eulenberg or Universal editions under cover of the textbook. Teacher caught me at it, and tried to humiliate me by telling the class that I couldn’t really hear it in my head, that I was putting people on. Wrong he was. But then, the fool knows he is right! And to this day I am largely ignorant of biology. So don’t apply to Holdekunst for advice about dissecting frogs. You can save the frog’s legs for me, however, in a parsley flavored butter sauce,  witha glass of cold sweet white wine.

Smetana’s Ma Vlast is not an appreciably different work than it would have been if he had retained his hearing. Except for biographical factors. And sadly, Smetana suffered terrible pain and vertigo from his hearing loss, and the composition of the piece did indeed proceed in fits and starts, because he had to rest frequently from the physical pain composing cost him.  

Two More Worthy Works of Smetana and Dvorak

I do not anticipate having time in class to discuss Smetana’s Trio in g minor or Dvorak’s late folk/fairy tale opera “The Devil and Kate” but I’d like to recommend these fine pieces to my class, and of course my general readership as well.

The Smetana trio is one of a distinguished number of works that is an instrumental requiem; the Berg violin concerto being perhaps the best known exemplar of this category of works. In the case of the Smetana trio, the requiem is for his daughter Bedriska. The work also appears to be intended as therapy for Smetana himself. G minor is a special key for Smetana; consider his early sonata for piano and the later “From Bohemia’s Woods and Valleys”.  Effective but not particularly uncommon is the yoking of scherzo and slow movement in the middle movement. Striking is the similarity of some of the music in the second subject area of the first movement to the beginning of Schumann’s “Frauenliebe und Leben“… but please let me point out the relevant words in the finale of that great cycle: “Now for the first time you have given me pain… [by dying]”…and in the Schumann the theme comes back as an epilogue. Am I saying this is not merely co-incidental?

I ain’t sayin’, I’m jus’ sayin’.

Piano Trios, Naxos. Buy CD at: ArkivMusic

Smetana knew and loved Schumann’s music, by the way. There is a great deal of Schumannesque rhetoric in the piece. Uncanny in Smetana generally is that when he writes in reasonably conventional instrumental forms, it sounds fresh and new, as if he just invented the forms. Also, the mastery of the idiom is striking. All three parts are given music of considerable weight, complexity, lyricism and drama. And it is delightful to see a piano part that doesn’t look like accompaniment textures, but like a fully realized soloistic role, and the strings aren’t compromised by this, they are enhanced. The turn to the major at the end is not convincing, and not intended to be. It is not an affirmation that life goes one, but a try-out to see if life can go on. The works ends in an emotionally speculative vein, if I can put it thus. The famous Kuebler-Ross stages of death are very apparent in this often desperately sad, sometimes violent work.

Special note to a certain somebody: What the heck is wrong with Chamisso’s poetry for Schumann’s Frauenliebe? I reread all eight poems and found them moving. In both English and German, just for you. I ain’t afraid to be a weepy sentimentalist. But then, I like the prose styles of Franz Liszt and George Sand! 

Dvorak’s “Devil and Kate” is just like Rimsky-Korsakov’s fairy tale operas, especially “May Night”, but with the exception that the characters come to life in Dvorak; they’re human. Especially human are the devils Marbuel, the gatekeeper and Lucifer. Rimsky struggled bringing his characters to life. A significant flaw in his operas, but I think the only flaw. Rimsky is one of my heroes. In fact, I only have three portraits of composers in my workroom, Liszt, Wagner, and Rimsky. I did have Franz Lehar, but the cat ate it.  Kate herself is a delight-a pretty plump chatterbox who gives the devils what for. The agreeable strains of various dance styles permeate this delightful score, the orchestration is sumptuous, the lyricism is fresh and eloquent, and it’s under 2 hours long. The Supraphon recording from 1993 is a winner. You should hear this piece, it’ll put a smile on your face.

Dvorak: Kate and the Devil (Cert a Kácal) - ArkivMusic

Smetana: Date Revisions and Slight change for Wk. 1

The Dates I would like to use for Smetana Wk. 1 should be as follows: Macbeth and the Witches, 1859, Brandenburgers in Bohemia, 1864, Bartered Bride, 1866, Rev. 1869, Dalibor, 1867, Libuse, 1872. I lazily asked Bonnie to put in dates for Smetana, and I think she found first performance and or revision dates. I will change it in the on-line syllabus, but the handouts tomorrow will need to be adjusted. Printing materials for use in class may prove problematical for a while, there have been significant protocol changes in the Graham School hand-out printing operations, to which I’ll need to adjust, so online materials could very well be more up to date than actual handouts. Macbeth and the Wiches as well as Brandenburgers in Bohemia will be included tomorrow. That stuff is too good to lose!

A Note on Smetana's Macbeth

The orchestral version of “Macbeth and the Witches’ is, according to Brian Large, made by somebody named Otakar Jeremias. David’s research is correct, unsurprisingly! The orchestration is brilliant in the extreme. Nevertheless, the novelty of the piece is not primarily due to the orchestration. The quirky form of the piece and the exceedingly daring harmonic and textural idiom is attested to in Large’s book, and his musical illustrations are illuminating in this regard. Oddly, Liszt’s First Mephisto Waltz comes from 1859 as well, although Smetana almost certainly didn’t know it! The original title is simply “Macbeth”.

Is it patronizing of me to be surprised as the ferocity of this piece when Liszt had already done things even more experimental and daring well prior to Smetana’s effort? I don’t believe so, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the era of Liszt’s (and Berlioz’s and Chopin’s) heyday was marked by extraordinary radicalism, a radicalism that was essentially foreign to the age of Brahms, on the whole. Also, the status of Czech music itself in Smetana’s time was only just being established, and I know of no Czech predessessors doing anything like it. And Smetana was a conscious Nationalist, whose music frequently reflects a certain national pride occasionally bordering on jingoism. Smetana himself supposedly argued with a friend who tried to assert the international character of music, disagreeing vehemently.

Smetana set this poem, as “The Song of Freedom” in 1848:

“War! War! does the flag fly?

Rise up ye Czechs, for God is with us!

Stand firmly for your rights.

Guard your country and the glory of the Czechs!

The clamour that fills the air is

The sound of Zizka and of Tabor!

Whosoever is Czech must wield a sword!

Let there be blood and slaughter.

Let there be anger and terror.

Let there be cruel Hussite deeds!

Awake, take up your weapons you Czech lions!

God commands you to the Holy War!”

Given the conflicts of today’s world, this makes uncomfortable reading… 

A Splendid CD

Smetana: Macbeth and the Witches; Dvorak: Prelude to Spectre’s Bride, The Water Goblin, and The Hussites, Prague Symp.With Smetacek, Czech Phil with Chalarala, on Urania.

I can’t promise that these magnificently virile performances are still available, of course Arkiv has so much, maybe they have it.  

If you don’t know the Smetana poem (1859), run don’t walk to hear it. It has a terrifying grandeur and a thrilling  visceral impact. It is also strangely “modern” sounding; It is easily on the level of Ma Vlast; in fact, a little more daring, so to speak.  The Dvorak “Water Goblin” is attractive and scintillatingly colorful, it is, however exceedingly repetitive. If you don’t hate the water goblin for being an infanticide, you may hate him for smearing his theme all over the score with such greediness for attention. “The Hussites” concert overture (1883) ought to please those who are aficionados of Smetana’s “Tabor” and “Blanik”. It is indeed similar: Dvorak wrote it for the rebuilding of the Czech National Theatre in Prague, after a disastrous fire. Compare what Smetana was doing half a generation before Dvorak’s overture. As I’ve said again and again, musical progress doesn’t follow a straight line from the less “modern” to the more “modern”…