Smetana String Quartet No. 1 in E minor, Z mého zivota (“From My Life”)

Bedrich Smetana was born at Leitomischl, Bohemia (now Litomysl, Czech Republic) on 2 March 1824 and died in Prague on 12 May 1884.  He completed the score of the quartet on 29 December 1876. The premiere was scheduled for the inaugural concert of the Chamber Music Society of Prague on 19 February 1877 but did not occur due to the work being perceived as too difficult and orchestral in manner.  Smetana’s friend Josef Srb organized the private premiere of the work that took place in April 1878 (with composer Antonin Dvorak as violist). The public premiere took place on 29 March 1879. The quartet was published in March 1880 by Frantisek Augustin Urbanek.

Bedrich Smetana is regarded as the founder of Czech national music, although the path towards his obtaining this iconic status holds many interesting waypoints.  Bedrich was the son of a well-to-do brewer whose customers included Count Waldstein, one of Beethoven’s patrons. As Bohemia was at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, German was Smetana’s first language (and he was encouraged to use the name “Friedrich” in his youth).  His relationship to the Czech language was a complicated one, evidenced by his correspondence with his friend Leopold Prochazka:

First of all I must ask you to excuse all my mistakes, both in spelling and grammar, of which you will certainly find plenty in this letter, for up to the present day I have not had the good fortune to be able to perfect myself in our mother tongue. Educated from my youth in German, both at school and in society, I took no care, while still a student, to learn anything but what I was forced to learn, and later divine music monopolized all my energy and my time so that to my shame, I must now confess that I cannot express myself adequately or write correctly in Czech.

It’s interesting to note that although Smetana uses certain Bohemian elements in his music, he was adamantly opposed to using folk song material as inspiration for his compositions (unlike his compatriot Antonin Dvorak).  Jan Branberger’s 1904 statement on Smetana’s “Czechness” speaks to his approach to attaining a national character in his music:

When he began to write Czech folk operas, Smetana could not rely on any theory of Czech song, for he did not know its characteristics. He was, however, a great genius, a musician in whose soul slumbered unconscious sources of melody delightfully and faithfully Czech. He had no need to develop his Czechness, and with his first operatic note, he at the same time created a Czech dramatic style. Smetana grew out of his Czech inner self, thereby solving at a stroke all questions of style: he wrote just as his enormous instinct led him.

In 1840 the sixteen year-old Smetana heard Franz Liszt play a concert in Prague; this turned out to be a pivotal moment and leads Smetana to renounce his higher education to become a musician.  Smetana’s early career included taking up a teaching post in the Swedish city of Göteburg. Lizst’s influence on Smetana cemented itself when Smetana visited Lizst in Weimar while traveling between Göteburg and Prague, first in 1857 and then in 1859.  That second visit coincided with the first Tonkünstler-Versammlung (Musicians Assembly) organized by Liszt’s Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein (General German Music Association) where the core values of the “New German School” of music were outlined in a keynote address given by Franz Brendel, including the use of programmatic ideas in music as innovated by Liszt in his symphonic tone poems and Berlioz in his Symphonie Fantastique and Harold in Italy.

Smetana was to become an advocate of Liszt’s aesthetic principles for the remainder of his career and he famously told him to “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.”  Smetana’s many instrumental works have clear programmatic content. Vltava (The Moldau), the second in the set of six symphonic tone poems Má Vlast (My Fatherland) and his String Quartet No. 1 in E minor, Z mého zivota (From My Life) are two of the most famous examples.  While the symphonic works are clearly in the mold of Liszt, Smetana’s integration of a clear program into a work of chamber music (which at the time was usually thought of as “absolute music”) was truly revolutionary.

Smetana provided a very clear outline of the program of the string quartet (the first of five such written accounts) in a letter he wrote to his close friend Josef Srb-Debrnov in 1878:

“As regards my Quartet I gladly leave others to judge its style, and I shall not be in the least angry if this style does not find favor or is considered contrary to what was hitherto regarded as “quartet style.”  I did not set out to write a quartet according to recipe or custom in the usual forms. I have already worked through particulars of the necessary forms as a young student of music theory so that for me they are completely familiar, and I understand them well enough.–For me the form of every composition is dictated by the subject itself and thus the Quartet, too, shaped its own form.  My intention was to paint a tone picture of my life.

The first movement depicts my youthful leanings toward art, the Romantic atmosphere, the inexpressible yearning for something I could neither express nor define, and also a kind of warning of my future misfortune . . . The long insistent note in the finale owes its origin to this. It is the fateful ringing in my ears of the high-pitched tones which in 1874 announced the beginning of my deafness. I permitted myself this little joke, because it was so disastrous to me.

The second movement, a quasi- polka, brings to mind the joyful days of youth when I composed dance tunes and was known everywhere as a passionate lover of dancing.

The third movement . . . reminds me of the happiness of my first love, the girl who later became my first wife.

The fourth movement describes the discovery that I could treat national elements in music and my joy in following this path until it was checked by the catastrophe of the onset of my deafness, the outlook into the sad future, the tiny rays of hope of recovery, but remembering all the promise of my early career, a feeling of painful regret.

That is about the content of this composition, which, so to speak, is of a private character and therefore is deliberately written for four instruments.  These [four] are to talk to each other in a narrow circle of friends of what has so momentously affected me. No more.”

-Program notes by Dr. Daniel Doña