The father of Czech music grew up barely speaking Czech
Bedřich Smetana gave his first public performance at six, wrote marches for the 1848 Prague uprising, and composed the river portrait known as The Moldau. He did much of his greatest work after going completely deaf, and he was raised in a household where German, not Czech, was the language of daily life.
He was born Friedrich Smetana on 2 March 1824 in Litomyšl, where his father brewed beer for Count Waldstein. German was the official language of Habsburg Bohemia, and the elder Smetana, though he knew Czech, seldom used it; his children did not learn it properly until much later. Music came from home, with a violin-playing father and a dancing mother, and in October 1830 the boy played a piano arrangement of an Auber overture to a delighted audience.
Schooling went badly at first. Sent to Prague in 1839, he was mocked for his country manners, skipped classes for concerts and the opera, and after hearing Liszt play wrote in his journal that he would match Mozart as a composer and Liszt at the keyboard. His father, who saw music as a pastime, pulled him out. In August 1843 he returned to Prague with twenty florins, studied under Josef Proksch, and supported himself teaching the children of Count Thun. Robert and Clara Schumann heard too much Berlioz in his G minor sonata.
The year 1848 made him briefly a revolutionary, writing patriotic songs and marches while Austrian forces attacked the city. He also wrote to Liszt asking for a loan of 400 florins to open a school; Liszt accepted a dedication but sent no money, and Smetana opened his Piano Institute anyway with twelve students. Frustrated in Prague, he later worked in Gothenburg as a teacher and choirmaster.
A freer political climate brought him back in the early 1860s. In 1866 The Bartered Bride opened at the Provisional Theatre and he became its principal conductor, though critics attacked his sympathy for Liszt and Wagner. By the end of 1874 he was totally deaf, yet the release from theatre duties opened years of steady composing, including Má vlast. A mental collapse in early 1884 led to confinement in an asylum, and he died on 12 May that year.
Source: Bedřich Smetana
