Bedřich Smetana

The brewer's son

Smetana was born in 1824 in Litomyšl, a small town in Bohemia, the son of a brewer. His music-loving father had him learn violin and piano from early childhood, and he reportedly played the piano in public at six. Bohemia was then part of the Habsburg Austrian Empire, and schools and cultivated families mostly used German. Smetana, too, grew up speaking German.

A poor young man in Prague

In his late teens he went to Prague to become a musician. With his father opposed and money scarce, he studied the hard way while working as piano teacher to an aristocratic family. Amid the fervor of the 1848 revolution he opened a small music school in Prague. He wrote to Liszt, whom he admired, asking for help, and Liszt introduced his music to a publisher.

Years in Sweden

In 1856 Smetana went to Gothenburg in Sweden, working for about five years as conductor and teacher. He also suffered great grief in those years: young daughters died one after another, and he lost his first wife, Kateřina, to illness. Missing home, he nursed the resolve to write music for the Czech people one day.

Opera in Czech

Back in Prague in the early 1860s, Smetana stood at the center of the movement to revive Czech culture. Yet he could not write Czech properly and had to study its grammar from scratch as an adult. His Czech-language comic opera The Bartered Bride of 1866 was greatly loved, and that year he became principal conductor of Prague's Provisional Theatre.

With deaf ears

In 1874 Smetana went completely deaf within a few months and had to resign as conductor. But from then on he wrote the six-part orchestral cycle Má vlast and the string quartet From My Life, looking back on his own life. The high note near the end of that quartet is the sound that rang in his ears.

The end

In his last years he suffered an illness that clouded even his memory and mind, and in 1884 he died in a Prague institution at sixty. Crowds gathered at his funeral to bid farewell to the man who had founded Czech music.

Music to hear on Pyeongeum

• "Vltava" from Má vlastthe journey of a river from two springs, through Prague and beyond.

As you listen, picture what passes in each scene: hunting horns, a village wedding, nymphs in moonlight, rushing rapids and Prague's old fortress, the land he loved unfolding in turn.

People around him

• Franz Lisztwho helped the young Smetana by introducing his music to a publisher.
• His first wife Kateřinaa pianist who shared his young years.
• Antonín Dvořákonce a violist in the theater Smetana led, and later heir to Czech music.