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If Smetana owes anything to anybody it is to Mozart, whose form and system of orchestration his own occasionally recalls, but his music is so thoroughly saturated with the melodies and rhythms of Bohemia, that it is quite unnecessary to look for any source of inspiration other than the composer's own native land.
'Das Geheimniss' and 'Der Kuss' are comic operas of a thoroughly national type, while 'Dalibor' and 'Libusa' deal with stirring episodes of Bohemian history. His operas, 'Der Bauer ein Schelm' and 'Der Dickschädel, appear to follow the style of Smetana very closely.
Smetana, Grieg, Tschaikovsky were the first to follow this path, in which the majority of the moderns, including Franck and Debussy, have followed them. And in addition, many among the most advanced modern composers strive for orchestral effects that often lie outside the natural capabilities of the strings!
But the reason modern French composers give the viola special attention is because France now is ahead of the other nations in virtuose viola playing. It is practically the only country which may be said to have a 'school' of viola playing. In the Smetana quartet the viola plays a most important part, and Dvořák, who himself played viola, emphasized the instrument in his quartets.
She accompanied him on his first tour, but after that, not. The Bohemian composer Smetana married his pupil, Katharine Kolar; he was another of those whose happiness deafness ruined. He was immortalised in a composition as harrowing as any of Poe's stories, or as Huneker's "The Lord's Prayer in B," the torment of one high note that rang in his head unceasingly, until it drove him mad.
We will take it for granted that it was Libuša who, with the seer's eye penetrating the future, laid the foundations of that right royal pile, Prague's crown of glory, the Hradšany. We have the authority of Cosmas for this; also Smetana composed an opera all about Libuša, so all our doubts are dispelled.
I thought I was writing about my country, conceived of myself in a reversed snobbishness, a haughty humility, a proud abasement, as a sort of superior Smetana. Boston, Massachusetts "I interrupted this letter to sketch some of the middle section of the fourth movement and I have wasted a precious week following a false trail.
Their peoples are different racially, and their national music, especially in the latter case, has a distinctive character of its own. Smetana and Dvorak are the most famous types of the German dependency, while the music of the Austrian province partakes of the wild gipsy flavour that is so well reflected in some of Schubert's works.
There is little in it which cannot be traced more or less directly to a prototype in the works of Wagner, and it need scarcely be said that Goldmark does not improve upon his model In 'Das Heimchen am Herd' , the libretto of which is founded upon Dickens's famous story 'The Cricket on the Hearth, Goldmark seems to have tried to emulate the success of Humperdinck's 'Hänsel und Gretel, There are suggestions in it, too, of the influence of Smetana who dawned upon the Viennese horizon in 1890.
It is not necessary to seek in this modern culmination a correspondence with an impending danger of political suppression. Art does not follow history with so instant a reflection. The intensity of this national feeling appears when Smetana himself, the minstrel of the people, is charged at home with yielding to the foreign influence.
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