In all the years this column has been running, I don't think I have written one word about Bedrich Smetana.
Yet he is an important figure in Czech music of the 19th century, described by some as the first major Czech nationalist composer. He is regarded as a seminal figure in the development of nationalist music in his homeland.
I’ve always run hot and cold about Smetana. He wrote eight operas, which I can take or leave, though The Bartered Bride is a cracker. He also wrote a grand series of symphonic poems descriptive of his homeland. There are six of them, collectively titled Ma Vlast (My Fatherland) of which Vltava is the most regularly played. I’m an admirer of these pieces, and love the sweep of Vltava, but frankly I’d rather hear the individual pieces separately, which is how they tend to be done, if at all.
But there is one work of Smetana’s to which I am addicted, and I think it’s his greatest masterpiece: the First String Quartet, entitled From My Life. My attachment to the piece goes a long way back, and was, initially, for all the wrong reasons. As a youngster, I was obsessed with Beethoven (still am) and one of the endless fascinations to me was how he did what he did while losing his hearing and becoming stone deaf.
I knew, from my introduction to From My Life, that it was autobiographical. But when I learned that Smetana was deaf when he wrote it, I was suddenly electrified and wanted to know more. (Oh, the obsessions of a young lad.)
The more I learned about Smetana’s condition, how it affected him, and his life in general, the more he seemed to me a figure touched by tragedy. Whereas Beethoven had defied fate, declaring he would not be defeated by his deafness, Smetana had not -- though he somehow continued to produce music as his health, and his sanity, deserted him.
He also charted, to a degree, his own deterioration. He was 50 when, in 1874, his health began to decline. He complained of an ulcer, had a sore throat which persisted for a month, noticed that his ears were blocked and he felt giddy. It was syphilis. All of this was reported in the Prague press -- Smetana was a major figure by this time.
On September 7 that year, he wrote of his fear that he was losing his hearing. Within a month, he confided to his diary: “For the first time in ages I can hear the entire range of octaves in tune. Previously, they were jumbled up. But I can still hear nothing with my right ear.” Twelve days later he became totally deaf in his left ear too.
It was a catastrophic blow to a man who had already lost his wife and a number of his children through illness. There were work and financial pressures too. He had to give up his flat in Prague. He feared penury and his spirits sank. “How could I be cheerful,” he wrote to a librettist, “when continually I see only poverty and misery ahead of me, and all enthusiasm for my work goes?”
Incredibly, during this period, he produced this amazing first quartet, which is an extraordinary musical document that incorporates references to his youthful love of dancing, an achingly tender recall of the love for his wife, and an alarming representation of just some of the noise that went on in his head as his hearing collapsed, which at one stage he described as “a pounding and intense hissing in the head, day and night without ceasing, as if I was standing underneath a huge waterfall”.
It drove him mad. His reason fled, he became violent, and was incarcerated in the Prague lunatic asylum where he died in 1884. His music remains; and there is a sensational and revealing new recording of that great string quartet, From My Life, by the young Sacconi Quartet.
Review
Sacconi Quartet: Dvorak, Smetana and Suk String Quartets (Sacconi Records)
Here is a superlative disc from the Sacconi Quartet, on their own label, with a treasure trove of top-drawer performances from the rich Bohemian repertoire.
I absolutely love their warm, deeply idiomatic performance of Dvorak’s American Quartet, probably the best-loved and most recorded piece in all Czech chamber music. Competition is fierce in this corner.
In recent times there have been new recordings of the piece from the Wihan Quartet (too reverberant and leader-dominated for this palate) and the Pavel Haas Quartet (outstanding, but aggressively in your face).
To these ears the Sacconi’s version is a better choice: spacious, unforced, but losing none of the pell-mell exhilaration in the finale. And I have never heard a more characterful and sympathetic account of Smetana’s First Quartet, with a brilliant performance of the Scherzo, whose middle section is almost hilarious in its portrayal of rustic dancing. And Josef Suk’s haunting Meditation on an old Czech hymn is a beauty.
Michael Tumelty
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