The Bohemian music
last poem, “Blaník”, is the credo of the composer. Blaník is a hill in southern Bohemia, in which, according to a folk myth, an army of knights is sleeping to come to help when Bohemia will be in the greatest danger. And all these splendid poems were written by a deaf master! In Smetana’s string quartet in E minor “Z mého života” (From my life), a gem of modern chamber music, Smetana marked in the finale by a high persistent note a similarly persistent accord whistling in his ear, which was the signal of his deafness. Among Smetana’s other works, piano compositions “The Bohemian dances” and “Polkas”, male choruses “Rolnická" (Farmer’s song), “Píseň na moři” (Song on the sea), the cantata “Česká píseň” (Bohemian Song), five songs “Večerní písně” (Evening songs) and the pompous Shakespeare March (written for the Shakespeare Festival in Prague in April, 1864) are the most important.
Smetana is the greatest Bohemian composer. He deliberately took his stand as an exponent of the art of his native country, and every note of his immortal bequest shows how passionately he loved his nation. His dreams were identical with our great hope of today: the resurrection of the independence of Bohemia!
Antonín Dvořák is the only composer from the three stars of the beginnings of the modern Bohemian music who knew the joy of world’s fame in his lifetime. Smetana’s works began to conquer the foreign countries only eight years after his death. Fibich’s compositions are still little known abroad. The luck was only in Dvořák’s favor. Although the privations he suffered till his thirty-fifth year had been great, his later successes were very remarkable.
Dvořák was born at Nelahozeves, a small village not far from Prague, on September 8, 1841. His father was the village butcher and innkeeper, and his ambition touching his son ran no higher than to make him his successor. “The fate which gave the world a composer of music robbed Bohemia of a butcher,” says H. E. Krehbiel.
In 1858 Dvořák entered the organ-school in Prague. From 1862 he began to compose, but he did not venture before the public until 1873, when he made his first bid
