Sunday Classics: It's not for nothing that Smetana was dubbed "the father of Czech music"

The Bartered Bride outdoors in Danzig, 1919. We hear the first of the wonderful dances that Smetana added to the score, the Polka that brings Act I to such a spirited close:

After the orchestra has its turn with the Polka, the men of the village join in:

Hey there, maidens, dance the polka!
Maidens, come and dance the polka!
Arm in arm and glance to glance,
we dance in our good fortune.
Growling basses blare and fiddles cheer,
and the clarinets tootle away with each other.
Everything is turning all the way around,
hold me tight, I can't take anymore.

[The performance is from Eurodisc's April 1975 recording of the complete opera, in German (the lead roles sung by Teresa Stratas, René Kollo, and Walter Berry), with the Bavarian Radio Chorus and Munich Radio Orchestra led rousingly by Jaroslav Krombholc.]

by Ken

Twice now we've bumped up against the Czechs' first great composer, Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884). This week I thought we'd just pull those earlier sideways glances together and round out our picture. And generally listen to some wonderful music.

I.
BARTERED BRIDE OVERTURE AND DANCES

We first heard the wonderful polka that ends Act I of Smetana's comic opera The Bartered Bride in our "polkamania" post, along with rather different specimens by Johann Strauss II (Amid Thunder and Lightning), his brother Eduard (Bahn frei!), and Dmitri Shostakovich (orchestra and string quartet versions of the Polka from The Age of Gold).

The Bartered Bride Polka, I wrote, is "one of a series of dances Smetana sprinkled through the opera, which go a long way toward defining its spirit. In the opera, in fact, the final iteration of the Polka is sung, in potentially roof-raising fashion, by Smetana's villagers." Back then I didn't have a video clip to offer the operatic version of the Polka. Now, thanks to Maestro Krombholc and his Bavarian cohorts, I think we can consider the roof duly raised.

I had to have it pointed out to me by a learned commentator that, in the course of The Bartered Bride's difficult, drawn-out creation, the dances were the last layer that Smetana added. The commentator who pointed this out seemed to think the significance of this information was that the dances are superficial "add-ons," and not really integral to the composer's conception of the score. I'm inclined to view it the opposite way: that it wasn't till this final stage of composition that the composer finally crystallized his conception to the point of grasping that these dances were just what it needed to seal the deal.

Which is not to deny that the opera's rousing Overture and three dances make for an exhilarating orchestral suite, though it seems to have fallen out of favor in both concert and on records -- damned if I know why. I'm surprised how few choices I have in my CD collection. Leonard Bernstein made a perfectly good recording back in his New York Philharmonic days (the Overture first, the dances two years later), and we're going to hear all of that, but I thought we'd mix it up a little at the front and back ends. For the Overture, we've also got a 1960 RCA recording by that most wizardly of orchestral wizards, Leopold Stokowski (from a BMG Living Stereo CD called Rhapsodies). Then, after Lenny B's Polka and Furiant (from Act II), we'd bring in Stoky's Philadelphia successor, Eugene Ormandy, for the irresistible "Dance of the Comedians" (from a CD in BMG's High Performance series called The Fantastic Philadelphians).

Overture

RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, cond. RCA/BMG, recorded February 1960

New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia/Sony, recorded Jan. 28, 1963

Polka (Act I)

New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia/Sony, recorded Feb. 1, 1965

Furiant (Act II)

New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia/Sony, recorded Feb. 1, 1965

Dance of the Comedians (Act III)

New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia/Sony, recorded Feb. 1, 1965

Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, cond. RCA/BMG, recorded Apr. 25, 1972

Before we leave the Bartered Bride dances, I thought it might be fun to hear the "Dance of the Comedians" in context, as the motley troupe of traveling players approaches our village in Act III, to the wonderfully ramshackle "March of the Comedians," after which the leader of the troupe does his breathless sales pitch, culminating in a sample of the troupe's artistry, done to the "Dance of the Comedians."

We're going to go back to the Krombholc-Eurodisc Bartered Bride recording, if only to hear the troupe director's spiel performed -- again in German -- by one of the leading character baritones of his time, Karl Dönch, a notable exponent of such roles as the nemesis of our hero Hans Sachs in Wagner's Die Meistersinger and the wacky Doctor in Berg's Wozzeck.

March of the Comedians; director Springer's spiel; Dance of the Comedians (Act III)

Karl Dönch, baritone (Springer); Munich Radio Orchestra, Jaroslav Krombholc, cond.
Eurodisc, complete opera, recorded April 1975

DIRECTOR SPRINGER [more or less in a single breath]: We announce to the public that today, on the occasion of your fair, a hitherto unseen show will be presented to you here by our troupe, both on earth and in the air, where especially Miss Esmeralda Salamanca will perform amazing dances on the tightrope, who will be followed by a veritable Indian, imported from Tahiti by way of Panama, 200,000 miles away from here, who will swallow wives, uh, knives and forks, but the best number comes last -- fanfare! -- a real, live American bear, from the Alaskan jungle, trained by Miss Salamanca, a miracle of charm, a never-before-offered artistic specimen, it will finally dance with Miss Esmeralda the cancan, and all of that for six crowns!

These never-before-seen attractions will be presented to you this evening in a special performance. But highly honored guests, you can see a rehearsal right now. Holla! Let's get started!

II.
STRING QUARTET, FROM MY LIFE

Our next encounter with Smetana was during the long run-up to Dvořák. We heard the two middle movements of his autobiographical First String Quartet, From My Life, as played by the Janáček Quartet, and also -- in an orchestral version made by George Szell -- by the London Symphony under Geoffrey Simon, though I indicated my displeasure with the lumbering Simon performance.

Since then I've taken my own advice and bought the terrific Sony two-CD reissue of Szell's classic Epic recordings of the last three Dvořák symphonies and a number of related orchestral works, including Szell's 1949 recording of his orchestration of From My Life, which he last performed in concert in 1948 and last performed period for the recording. Even in 1949 mono sound, the Szell performance trounces the Simon -- enough so that the orchestral version actually seems a viable alternative to the string quartet original.

So I thought we would return to From My Life, and this time hear the whole thing, in both its original form and the Szell-performed Szell orchestration. For the quartet version, I've chosen a powerful, resonant performance by the Prazak Quartet, the tone not as perfectly controlled as my beloved Janáček Quartet's, but a powerful and beautiful performance in its own right. One glorious touch: In the trio of the second-movement polka [1:31], listen to how forcefully yet elegantly violist Josef Klusa and cellist Micha Kanka deal with the melody on the right while on the left the violinists contribute bits of harmony from above. (With the Prazak performance not readily available, I might suggest the Panocha Quartet or the Talich Quartet,


SMETANA: Quartet No. 1 in F minor (From My Life)

i. Allegro vivo appassionato

THE FIRST MOVEMENT depicts Smetana's love of Art in his youth, his search for the imaginary, and the premonition of his approaching illness.


Prazak Quartet (Vacláv Remeš and Vlastimil Holek, violins; Josef Kluson, viola; Micha Kanka, cello). Praga, recorded January 1999

orchestrated by George Szell; Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell, cond. Columbia/Sony, recorded Apr. 26, 1949

ii. Allegro moderato alla polka

THE SECOND MOVEMENT, "Quasi Polka," refers to the carefree days of his youth and his passionate love for dancing at the period when he composed many dances.


Prazak Quartet

Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell, cond.

iii. Largo sostenuto

THE THIRD MOVEMENT, "Largo sostenuto," portrays his idyllic love for a young girl who later became his spouse.


Prazak Quartet

Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell, cond.

iv. Vivace

THE FOURTH MOVEMENT pictures the composer rejoicing over the recognition attained by Bohemian National Music and its achieved success. A sudden sustained high E indicates the noise in the composer's ears prior to his deafness. Then follows a painful recollection of his youthful days, a ray of hope against hope which gives way to resignation before the inevitable destiny.


Prazak Quartet

Cleveland Orchestra, George Szell, cond.

III.
MÁ VLAST (MY COUNTRY)

Friday night we had a preview of Smetana's iconic cycle of nationalistic symphonic poems, My Fatherland (or Country), and its most famous component, Vltava (The Moldau). We heard Vltava performed by the great Czech conductor Rafael Kubelik in 1952, as recorded by Mercury with the Chicago Symphony (of which he was then music director), and in 1990, on the occasion of his return to Czechoslovakia after 42 years in exile, reunited finally with "his" old orchestra, the Czech Philharmonic. Finally we heard the whole of Kubelik's 1952 Chicago recording of Má Vlast, with pretty much no comment or explanation. Now we're going to traverse the cycle with comment and explanation.

"Symphonic poems" (or "tone poems" or "symphonic tone poems") are by definition program music, which is to say that they have a program -- something not at all abstract is in some fashion depicted in the music. I think eventually most listeners tend to stop worrying about the program, once they become familiar with the music (at least I do; you'll notice that in presenting Sibelius's Swan of Tuonela, I made no attempt to describe the program at all), but the program accounts at least in part for how the music came to be what it is, and so perhaps in some sense "explains" it. This is especially true of the movements of Má Vlast, for which Smetana wrote quite a lot of descriptive-explanatory commentary.

The trick for later commentators is to pick out what's most pertinent in the composer's commentaries and add to them enough basic context that he may have taken for granted. I think it may be a tribute to both the composer and the music that a lot of these commentaries are actually quite helpful. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I'm simply going to crib the notes provided by the British writer W. A. Chislett as used in the Seraphim LP issue of the splendid recording by Sir Malcolm Sargent with. the Royal Philharmonic (hey, I'm contributing -- this is going to be a heckuva lot of typing, into which I plan to introduce many typos for an appropriately "rustic" feel), starting with this overall paragraph:

At the age of fifty, wearied by his struggles and the intrigues of the national theatre and already suffering from impaired hearing, [Smetana] embarked upon a series of symphonic poems to which he gave the general title of Má Vlast. His aural disorder was at first chiefly the illusion of hearing persistently a high-pitched note, but one night in October 1874, before he had finished the first of the six works which constitute the cycle, he became totally deaf. Undeterred, he completed Vyšehrad on November 18, 1874, and by 1879 the cycle was finished. Each work is complete in itself and is furnished with a detailed programme, but they are best heard together, as the composer intended. They are interrelated both programmatically and thematically to a considerable degree. -- W. A. Chislett

ABOUT OUR RECORDINGS: At this point I'm not sure anyone could count the number of times the Czech Philharmonic has recorded Má Vlast. I've split the cycle up totally arbitrarily among the versions recorded by Václav Smetáček (1980), Jiří Bělohlávek (1988), and Václav Neumann (1975). Looking quickly, I didn't see any of these versions listed at reasonable prices. Fortunately, Karel Ančerl's beautiful recording is available quite inexpensively in Supraphon's Ančerl Gold Edition. (This is not to say that fine recordings haven't been made with non-Czech orchestras, but we have to limit the discussion somehow.)

i. VYŠEHRAD (THE HIGH CASTLE)


Czech Philharmonic, Václav Smetáček, cond. (1980)

Boldly rising from the river known to the Czechs as Vltava, but to the rest of the world as the Moldau, is a great rocky prominence called The High Castle (Vyšehrad), where in bygone days the rulers lived in splendour. The opening chords for harp (or two harps when they are available) recall the poet Lumir, who proceeds to recount stories of ancient glories. There are tournaments in the castle courtyard, and the whole rock resounds with the triumphs of chivalry. But the bard also tells of the disasters which came in later years. Finally, all is in ruins, and Lumir's song ends with a long-drawn sigh for the days that are no more. -- W.A.C.

ii. VLTAVA (THE MOLDAU)

Czech Philharmonic, Václav Smetáček, cond. (1980)

Smetana appended an unusually detailed programme to the score of Vltava, and follows it very closely. The sources of the river are two small springs, one warm and swift (suggested by the flutes) and the other icy cold and slow (suggested by the clarinets). They are united into a small stream, and here the strings and oboe join in and give us for the first time the rich Vltava theme, which is said to derive from a folksong. The stream dances and chatters in the sunlight, passes through dark forests where a hunt is in progress, and as it widens in the plains there are wedding festivities on its banks. By moonlight the water nymphs disport themselves in the river, and then the turbulent rapids of St. John are reached. After passing through the gorge of St. John, the Vltava is a wide and mighty river, rolling majestically towards Prague, and its lapping of the great Vyšehrad rock is suggested by a reference to the main theme of the earlier work. The river finally fades into the distance. -- W.A.C.

A bonus Moldau (I couldn't resist): RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, cond. (1960)


iii. ŠÁRKA

Czech Philharmonic, Jiří Bělohlávek, cond. (1988)

Šárka is both the heroine of a well-known Czech legend and the name of a district in Bohemia. Smetana states that his work does not reflect the place, but action. Šárka, a woman of enchanting beauty mortified by her lover's desertion, swears vengeance on men in general and forms an army of women. The warrior Citrid and his men are dispatched to quell the army of Amazons, but when Citrid sees Šárka (their meeting is depicted by a few bars for unaccompanied clarinet answered by the cellos), he falls in love with her. Citrid's men celebrate well rather than wisely. The second bassoon suggests comically that they are drinking freely, and eventually they subside into a drunken stupor. This is Šárka's opportunity. A horn gives the signal, and although a passage for clarinet hints that Šárka is beginning to have regrets, it is too late. In the finale, for full orchestra and marked frenetico, Citrid and his army are massacred. -- W.A.C.

iv. FROM BOHEMIA'S MEADOWS AND FORESTS

Czech Philharmonic, Jiří Bělohlávek, cond. (1988)

Like Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, From Bohemia's Meadows and Forests expresses feelings aroused by the sight of the countryside. But apart from this there is little resemblance between the two works. Smetana starts vigorously on the full orchestra, but soon we are transported from the jubilation of the people to the quiet rustling of leaves, twittering of birds and dreamy content of the noonday sun, with glimpses of the deep shadows of the forest. But snatches of the sounds of the joy of the people are never far distant, and these come nearer and nearer until after two false starts a rollicking polka gains the upper hand, and the work ends, as it began, in a mood of festivity, suggesting, as Smetana himself put it, "a harvest festival or any kind of peasant merry-making." -- W.A.C.

v. TÁBOR

Czech Philharmonic, Václav Neumann, cond. (1975)

Some miles from Prague, in the direction of the Austrian frontier, lies the ancient fortress town of Tábor. It was the centre of the Hussite movement in the fifteenth century, and many of the fortifications are still to be seen. During the Hussite uprising, the well-known chorale "Ye who are warriors of God" assumed the status of a patriotic hymn, and it is upon this great tune that the fantasia-like Tábor, which recalls stirring events in the life of the indomitable Czech reformer Jan Hus, is based. -- W.A.C.

vi. BLANÍK

Czech Philharmonic, Václav Neumann, cond. (1975)

Smetana described this, the last of the symphonic poems which constitute Má Vlast, as a continuation of Tábor. Blaník is a legendary hill within which the Hussite heroes are supposed to sleep soundly until required to come to the aid of their country when freedom is threatened. The chorale "Ye who are warriors of God" again supplies most of the thematic material, and further unity is given to the complete cycle by the reintroduction of the Vyšehrad theme. A contrasting middle section is in the form of a charming pastoral, with one canon for oboe and horn and another for oboe and clarinet. -- W.A.C.

SUNDAY CLASSICS POSTS

The current list is here.

#

Sunday Classics preview: A man, a river, and music that makes us all Czech

by Ken

Tomorrow we're going to be dealing with the whole of Smetana's Má Vlast (My Country). We're going to hear its six movements played by the Czech Philharmonic, divvied up among three conductors. For technical reasons, those conductors won't include Karel Ančerl (1908-1973), the orchestra's principal conductor from 1950 to 1968. The technical reasons are that while I just bought the CD transfer in Supraphon's Ančerl Gold Edition, I don't know what I did with it. Oh, it's here somewhere. I just don't know where.

So I thought tonight we'd do a quick celebration of the maestro, who was 42 when he became principal conductor of the Czech Philharmonic. We talked last night about his countryman Rafael Kubelik, who left the country after the democratic government was seized by the coaltion government's Communist members. Kubelik's self-imposed exile lasted 42 years, until the fall of the Communist government. Happily, despite severely impaired health, he lived to make an emotional return in 1990.

Not so for Karel Ančerl. When the Soviet Union crushed the Prague Spring political liberalization of Alexander Dubček in August 1968, Ančerl already had commitments to conduct the Toronto Symphony. Although he returned for concerts during the 1969 Prague Spring festival, he accepted an invitation to become music director of the Toronto Symphony.

Here he is rehearsing Smetana's Vltava (The Moldau) with the Toronto Symphony:


And here's the performance that resulted:

Slipped out of tomorrow's post, here is a program note on Vltava by W. A. Chislett:

Smetana appended an unusually detailed programme to the score of Vltava, and follows it very closely. The sources of the river are two small springs, one warm and swift (suggested by the flutes) and the other icy cold and slow (suggested by the clarinets). They are united into a small stream, and here the strings and oboe join in and give us for the first time the rich Vltava theme, which is said to derive from a folksong. The stream dances and chatters in the sunlight, passes through dark forests where a hunt is in progress, and as it widens in the plains there are wedding festivities on its banks. By moonlight the water nymphs disport themselves in the river and then the turbulent rapids of St. John are reached. After passing through the gorge of St. John, the Vltava is a wide and mighty river, rolling majestically towards Prague, and its lapping of the great Vyšehrad rock is suggested by a reference to the main theme of the earlier work. The river finally fades into the distance.

Note: VAI has a 6:10 non-imbeddable promotional clip from its video issue of the Moldau rehearsal and performance.


SUNDAY CLASSICS POSTS

Here is the current list.

#

Sunday Classics preview: Before "Prague Spring" was a political reawakening, it was a music festival

KUBELIK COMES HOME: In 1990 Rafael Kubelik (1914-1996), already in retirement for five years because of debilitating physical ailments, set foot on Czechoslovak soil for the first time since 1948, and was reunited with the Czech Philharmonic, of which he had been principal conductor at the time of his exile. Honoring tradition, they opened the Prague Spring festival, of which Kubelik had been one of the founders, with Smetana's epic cycle of symphonic poems, Má Vlast (My Country). Here they play the first 7:07 of the beloved second movement, Vltava (The Moldau); you can find the concluding 4:26 here.

by Ken

To most people "Prague Spring" now probably suggests first the remarkable political liberalization wrought by reformist Czechoslovak Prime Minister Alexander Dubček from January to August 1968, when the Soviet overlords called a halt to it. But the political movement borrowed its name from the music festival founded In 1946 as part of the rebirth of the Czechoslovak republic, which had been overthrown by the Nazis in 1938-39. The country's leading orchestra, the Czech Phiharmonic, was celebrating its 50th anniversary, and one of the founders of Prague Spring, which had the patronage of President Edvard Beneš, was the orchestra's then-32-year-old principal conductor, Rafael Kubelik, who naturally enough conducted the festival's opening concert.

In February 1948, Beneš's Communist partners in the Czechoslovak coalition government staged a coup and took sole power. When Kubelik left the country to conduct for the first time at England's Glyndebourne Festival, he made the painful decision not to return -- until his homeland was liberated. As Wikipedia tells the story, he told an interviewer: "I had lived through one form of bestial tyranny, Nazism. As a matter of principle, I was not going to live through another." In 1953 he and his wife were stripped of their citizenship, and for the next 32 years he crammed about as much as can be crammed into a conductor's career.

Wherever he went, the uncommonly mild-mannered -- and accordingly increasingly loved -- conductor played the music of his homeland, above all his great compatriots Bedřich Smetana and Antonin Dvořák. As early as 1952 he recorded the national epic of Czech music, Smetana's Má Vlast (My Country or Fatherland), the 75-minute-or-so cycle of six symphonic poems depicting places and moments in national history, in (of all places) Chicago, where he spent three productive but not terribly happy seasons, 1950-53, as music director of the Chicago Symphony.

Here's how Kubelik's Moldau sounded back in 1952, as recorded by Mercury's ahead-of-its-time recording crew:



Kubelik went on playing Má Vlast all over the Western world, and recording it: in Vienna, in Boston, in what became his longest home base (with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra), Munich. (It was from his recording of Dvořák's complete Slavonic Dances with the BRSO that we heard him, as our mystery conductor, conduct the E minor, Op. 46, No. 2, while the mystery violinist who played the Kreisler arrangement of Dvořák's "Humoresque" was his father, the legendary celebrity violinist Jan Kubelik.)

By the time Kubelik's seriously compromised health forced him to retire from conducting, in 1985, he probably imagined that the long-hoped-for return to his homeland would never happen. Then came the wave of political change that convulsed the Soviet empire, and in 1989 the Czechoslovak Communist government fell. Not even another health crisis could prevent his return home for -- what else? -- Prague Spring 1990.

For both Kubelik and his countrymen, the emotional impact of that return is almost impossible to overstate. I remember video highlights of an almost unbearably emotional outdoor concert that featured at least Vltava -- The Moldau (the river that runs through the Czech capital, Prague, as known by its respective Czech and German names), the second of the six symphonic poems that make up Má Vlast, and one of the best-known pieces ever written for orchestra.

For the opening of the Prague Spring festival, there wasn't much question what Kubelik would conduct. It was a now well-established tradition that the opening concert featured Má Vlast. An audio recording of that concert has been released,but as far as I know, not the video recording that presumably exists -- it looks as if you can piece it together on YouTube. (A CD was also releasedcoupling Dvořák's New World and Mozart's Prague Symphonies.)

I mentioned last week that we were going to be coming back to Smetana. Sunday is the day.


BONUS: KUBELIK'S COMPLETE MA VLAST

Here is the complete 1952 Kubelik-Chicago Symphony-Mercury Má Vlast.


i. Vyšehrad
ii. Vltava (The Moldau)
iii. Šárka
iv. From Bohemia's Meadows and Forests
v. Tábor
vi. Blaník

[You can move from movement to movement by hitting the fast forward or rewind button.]


SUNDAY CLASSICS POSTS

Here is the current list.

#

Sunday Classics preview (2): En route to Dvořák, we meet up with the father of Czech music, Bedřich Smetana

by Ken

As you know -- or if you don't, as you're finding out now -- we're hearing the first two movements of Dvořák's American String Quartet in tomorrow's Sunday Classics post, played by what I've said may be, all-around, my all-time favorite quartet. Last night we heard our mystery quartet deliver some of the finest Haydn playing I've heard. Tonight, as we transition toward Dvořák, we're going to hear them play music by Dvořák's elder countryman and inspiration, Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884), known as "the father of Czech music"-- though a good part of the fathering was done in Göteborg, Sweden, where he spent a good chunk of his adult life, for economic and political reasons.

Sometimes clichés turn out to be in good measure true, as with the music-appreciation one that says the second half of the 19th century (we can almost use the major uprisings of 1848 as a timeline) was an "age of nationalism," and nowhere more so than in Central and Eastern Europe, as the stirring nationalities long subjugated within the Austro-Hungarian Empire developed a new interest in their own cultures.

In LP days it was a marriage of convenience, Dvořák's American Quartet and Smetana's quartet called (for once by its composer) From My Life. Each fit neatly on one LP side and didn't have an obvious discmate. The ways in which the works are similar and also different make them complement each other beautifully.

Smetana wrote his quartet as a musical autobiography, including the chilling intrusion, in the last movement, of a depiction of the high-pitched sound in his ears that marked the onset of his deafness (which is thought to have become complete by the end of 1874; this quartet was written about 1876) and ultimately, sadly, madness. We're going to hear the two middle movements, Allegro moderato alla polka and Largo sostenuto, played once again by our mystery quartet.

2nd movement, Allegro moderato alla Polka


3rd movement, Largo sostenuto


A much-condensed version of the program of From My Life set out by the composer appears in the score:

This Quartet, written in 1876, has an autobiographical significance as explained by the composer in his letter dated April 12, 1878.

THE FIRST MOVEMENT depicts Smetana's love of Art in his youth, his search for the imaginary, and the premonition of his approaching illness.

THE SECOND MOVEMENT, "Quasi Polka," refers to the carefree days of his youth and his passionate love for dancing at the period when he composed many dances.

THE THIRD MOVEMENT, "Largo Sostenuto," portrays his idyllic love for a young girl who later became his spouse.

THE FOURTH MOVEMENT pictures the composer rejoicing over the recognition attained by Bohemian National Music and its achieved success. A sudden sustained high E indicates the noise in the composer's ears prior to his deafness. Then follows a painful recollection of his youthful days, a ray of hope against hope which gives way to resignation before the inevitable destiny.

The Largo seems to me an exceptionally beautiful piece, but tell me honestly, does it sound like the recollection of the happiness of first love? It's possible that the memory is colored by the reality that by this time not only his first but his second wife had died, and three daughters had died in infancy. (Three survived.) Or it may be that Smetana's life experiences inclined him to a gloomyish disposition. On the bright side, he did in fact recover from the depression embodied in this quartet and despite his deafness had a quite productive decade of composition ahead of him before the even gloomier turn that still lay in store for him.

Before we go, I thought it might be fun to hear these same movements of the Smetana From My Life Quartet in an orchestral version arranged by the estimable conductor George Szell, who was of course a great exponent of the music of his Czech countrymen. Szell's own 1949 recording of his arrangement is included in a terrific Sony two-CD reissueof his classic Epic-label recordings of the Dvořák Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Symphonies (and even some more goodies) with the Cleveland Orchestra, which I keep meaning to buy. The fact that Szell never rerecorded his orchestral rendering of the Smetana quartet makes me wonder whether he had complete faith in it. I wish we had a better performance than this rather shapeless oneby Geoffrey Simon and the London Symphony, but we have to work with what we've got:

2nd movement (orchestral version)


3rd movement (orchestral version)



SUNDAY CLASSICS POSTS

Here is the current list.

#

Sunday Classics: Let's get ready to . . . polka!

Carlos Kleiber conducts a rousing performance of Johann Strauss II's Amid Thunder and Lightning (Tokyo, May 1986), the very model of a polka. (For an interestingly more moderate performance, here's Herbert von Karajan from the 1987 Vienna New Year's Concert.)

by Ken

You may remember that I wrote recently about a project some years back where I wound up creating little 15-20 minute suites of wonderful short piece joined by some sort of theme. You've already heard my "lark" group, comprising the first movement of Haydn't Lark Quartet, Fenton's aria "Horch', die Lerche singt im Hain" from Otto Nicolai's opera The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Ralph Vaughan Williams' romance for violin and orchestra The Lark Ascending. This week it's Polka Time!

No, we're not going to start with The Beer-Barrel Polka -- you know, "Roll out the barrel, we'll have a barrel of fun"-- but you can hear it here played by "Canada's Polka Master," Walter Ostanek. No, we've started in more primly proper classical polka terms with the most-performed of the wonderful polkas of Johann "The Waltz King" Strauss (1825-1899), Unter Donner und Blitz. And already, if you compare the Kleiber and Karajan performances, you can feel two distinctly different ways of feeling the rhythm of a polka, even in this same piece. (You may recall that we talked about Vienna's Strauss family and the Vienna New Year's Concert awhile back.)

We might contrast that even further by tossing in what must be the best-known piece composed by Johann II's younger brother Eduard Strauss (1835-1916), Bahn frei! (Clear Track, in the sense of a railroad track, 1869 -- conducted here with a wonderful blend of flair and poise by Willi Boskovsky, whose name is almost synonymous with the Vienna of the Strauss dynasty), which will be familiar to any fan of the late great radio monologist Jean Shepherd or to any fan of one of Jean Shepherd's great fans, Keith Olbermann, who uses it to introduce the "Oddball" segment of Countdown.

We move now to the polka with which the great Czech nationalist composer Bedrich Smetana (1824-1884) brought the first act of his comic treasure The Bartered Bride (1863-70) to a close. It's one of a series of dances Smetana sprinkled through the opera, which go a long way toward defining its spirit. In the opera, in fact, the final iteration of the polka is sung, in potentially roof-raising fashion, by Smetana's villagers. It would be fun to hear the Bartered Bride Polka as it's heard in the opera, but here's a fairly lively rendition of the polka on its own:



Finally our Polka Tour brings us to Soviet Russia and the simultaneously hilarious and intoxicating Polka from the 1929-30 ballet The Golden Age (L'Age d'or) by Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), in the composer's own wicked arrangement for string quartet (the second of his Two Pieces for String Quartet, unpublished in his lifetime), performed by the Aurelia Quartet (warning -- the Internet connection where I am this weekend is spitting out clips in two-second bursts, so I can't even tell whether the performance is any good):



For the brazen orchestral original of the Golden Age Polka, the best I can offer is a more poker-faced than polka-paced performance by Bernard Haitink and the London Philharmonic. And while we're cavorting with the youthfully rambunctious Shostakovich, I can't help but urge on you his unbearably delicious 1927 orchestral arrangement he made, supposedly in 45 minutes, from memory, on a bet, of a ditty known to Russians as Tahiti Trot -- which I assure you you'll recognize under a much more familiar name.

SUNDAY CLASSICS POSTS

The updated list is here.

#