The Moldau from Má vlast

Bedřich Smetana wrote the six parts of his symphonic cycle Má vlast (My Homeland) just as he reached age 50, when fame and fortune were knocking regularly at his door — and just when sudden deafness created a nearly irreconcilable gulf between him and the everyday world. These tone poems were, perhaps in part, a way for the composer to recapture and hold onto the sounds of the world around him, musically encapsulating the joy and emotion of life.

Smetana originally conceived the cycle as a four-part symphony that would extol the glories of his native Bohemia and its Czech people. Only after the initial success of its opening movements, each premiered separately, did he decide to “complete” the work by adding two final sections. Since 1952, it has been performed annually on the anniversary of Smetana’s death each May 12th as part of the Prague Spring Festival.

Despite being a cycle of connected and intertwined symphonic poems, these well-crafted works are frequently performed alone, especially the second, titled Vltava (The Moldau) after the mighty river that runs through the Czech Republic. The opening three movements are often played as a group and provide a well-focused view of Smetana’s original idea for creating a “symphony” on Czech themes.

The main musical theme of The Moldau is today a popular Czech folk song, which was not the case when Smetana wrote the piece. Smetana had, in fact, often voiced violent opposition to the idea of adopting actual folk song melodies into the national musical language he was trying to create. His borrowing, in this case, reached quite far geographically, when he adapted (perhaps subconsciously) a folk melody he had heard while teaching in Sweden. (Dvořák crossed much the same path and controversy with some of the adapted borrowings in his “New World” Symphony.)

Smetana’s words about this tone poem clearly lay out the river’s migration from mountain spring through Bohemia toward the sea:

Two springs pour forth in the shade of the Bohemian Forest, one warm and gushing, the other cold and peaceful. Their waves flow quickly over rocky beds, joining together and glistening in the morning sun. The forest brook, hastening on, becomes the river Moldau. Coursing through Bohemia’s valleys, it grows into a mighty stream. Through thick woods it flows, as the triumphant sounds of the hunt and the notes of hunters’ horns are heard ever nearer. It flows through grass-grown pastures and lowlands where a wedding feast is being celebrated in song and dance. At night, wood and water nymphs revel in its sparkling waves. Reflected on its surface are fortresses and castles — witnesses to bygone days of knightly splendor and the vanished glory of fighting times. At the St. John Rapids, the stream races ahead, winding through the cataracts, hewing out a path with its foaming waves through the rocky chasm into the broad riverbed — finally, flowing on in majestic peace toward Prague and welcomed by the time-honored castle Vyšehrad. Then it vanishes beyond our gaze.

Like Verdi and Wagner, Smetana devoted most of his creative energies to writing opera. Like them, he pioneered the art form both as music and as an expression of his country’s nationhood.  However, Smetana is best known today — especially outside his homeland — for Má vlast. And, as originally conceived, this cycle of tone poems remains closer to a traditional symphony in form and function than Smetana cared to admit.

When the whole of Má vlast was first performed as a cycle in November 1882, Smetana had been deaf for eight years. The music was greeted with great acclaim and rejoicing. Smetana heard none of it, of course, but appears to have understood — two years before his death, and just as his mind was succumbing to dementia — that he had finally been anointed the musical saint of his struggling Czech homeland.

— Eric Sellen

Eric Sellen is The Cleveland Orchestra’s Editor Emeritus. He previously was Program Book Editor for 28 seasons.