Travel tips for classic lovers – Prague and Bedřich Smetana

The Bohemian composer was born Friedrich Smetana in the Bohemian province in 1824. Educated in the German language in the tradition of the time, he did not learn the Czech language until he was an adult. His musical awakening, however, came as a teenager in Prague, when he heard Franz Liszt, with whom he later became friends. In his young adult years, he wrote minor works and he earned a living as a music teacher, partly as an employee of the court. In 1856, he left for Gothenburg with his wife and children because he was unhappy with the autocratic government in his homeland. Within a few years, two children died, and on the return trip from Gothenburg in 1859, his wife died of tuberculosis.

In 1860, the “Bartered Bride” was performed with good success at the Prague Interim Theater, the forerunner of the National Theater, where Smetana held the post of Kapellmeister. He actually wanted to become director of the theater, but because he was a supporter of the New Germans around Liszt and Wagner, he was denied. This feud dragged on during his tenure with many intrigues and quarrels, which ruined Smetana’s health. A tinnitus (according to him, an A-flat major sex chord) made itself felt and by 1873 Smetana was completely deaf and he retired from his post. Nevertheless, in the following years he composed his best-known work, “Ma Vlast” (“My Fatherland”). He wrote it in the countryside, where he had moved out with his second wife and children to live with his sister. The first piece of this 6-part cycle is called Vyšehrad, it is about the castle on the Vltava River, at the foot of which he was buried 10 years later.