Jaroslav Egon Salaba-Vojan

“ A wizard, because he created the modern Bohemian music without any predecessors and put it at once on the level of the most modern music of his time. In the days he studied with Liszt at Weimar, Prague was still under the spell of Mozart whose epigon Tomášek was an absolute ruler in the musical life of Prague; later Verdi and Meyerbeer became idols of Prague musicians. Smetana found the way to connect Beethoven and Wagner with the character of the music of his nation, and so arouse his absolutely original style which is a confluence of modernism and the spirit of the Bohemian folk music. ”

“ If it be true that up to the fifties the cultivation of arts in Bohemia was far from flourishing in originality, the explanation is found in this that at the beginning of the 19th century Bohemian art found itself under the tutelage of the contemporaneous German art, dry and tasteless, narrow-minded and doctrinaire. We may study the works of men, such as were the first directors of the Prague Academy, Bergler, Waldherr and Ruben, as we would study a historical curiosity, but we cannot admire them as works of art. ”

“ Bedřich Smetana. comes. Conversation with me is impossible. I hear my own piano-forte playing only in fancy, not in reality. I cannot hear the playing of anybody else, not even the performance of a full orchestra in opera or in concert. I have no pain in the ear, and the physicians agree that my disease is perhaps a paralysis of the ear nerves and the labyrinth. And so I am wholly determined to endure my sad fate in a calm and manly way as long as I live.” Yet Smetana was destined to endure a trial worse than that which he had made up his mind to bear with patient courage. ”

“ They declared that a painter should put down on canvass the real scene, as he sees it through his own eyes and his individual temperament, that a painter should infuse his soul and his feelings into his immediate concepts. Thus impression becomes the main thing and a landscape must be expressed by fluttering tones. ”

“ At this period, sketched in such a masterly manner by Jirásek in his “Temno” (Darkness) , the nobility and clergy were the nation; the lower classes did not count, their taste approved everything that the upper classes favored, and so the luxury and pomp of the barocco were in style. The power of the sovereign, of the church and of the nobility was at its highest. A revolution was inevitable and forces preparing it were already busy, but did not yet manifest themselves. ”

“ He did not use any folk songs in his works, but he wrote his own original music so perfectly in the spirit of the folk music that his operas, symphonic poems, etc., are immensely dear to every Bohemian heart. His works are the Bohemian music par excellence. He gained his victory only after a long and tragic struggle: Smetana’s opponents asserted that the progressive ideas of the world’s music were incompatible with the national idea, but Smetana proved the contrary. ”

“ This fact alone proves what a gigantic work was done by the patriots who awakened the Czech nation to a new life. And yet the citizens of Prague were in a sense patriotic Bohemians, for all of them, Czechs and Germans, looked upon Bohemia as their fatherland and were proud of its noble history. ”

“ To the end of the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth, the leadership in all that pertained to the art was acknowledged by the musical world to be in the masterly hands of Mozart and Beethoven. ”

“ As these great events were taking place, Prague lost its bustling life, squares and streets were empty, the old world was in death throes, and the new world had not yet taken shape. The third new estate, the estate of citizens, was in the process of creation, but some decades elapsed before it was able to undertake the nurture of art. ”

“ Joseph Mánes was 17, both possessed of a soft, sensitive temperament, and they became fast frieds for life. When Bedřich later became a priest in Moravia, the Moravian seat of the Silva-Tarouca family, the castle of Čechy, was Mánes’ haven of refuge. Count Bedřich Tarouca was an enthusiastic Bohemian patriot and soon made the young artist acquainted with the aims of the national movement. It was a strange whim of chance that a young nobleman should have shown the Prague student of art the road to his people. ”

“ The folk dances are closely related to the folk songs, and their rhythms are very original. What Chopin did for the mazurka and the valse, Smetana did for the polka, a Bohemian dance dating from 1830. His “Polkas” for piano-forte are congenial to Chopin’s sublime compositions. He wrote also ten other Bohemian dances for piano and inserted a “polka”, a “furiant,” and a “skočná” in his opera “Prodaná nevěsta”, and Dvořák used the furiant even as scherzo in his symphonies. ”

“ The Jesuits looked upon the bigness and pomp of their ecclesiastical structures as eloquent evidence of their victory over the heretics; besides, barocco agreed with the easy regimen extended to all who were obedient sons of the Church. The outside alone mattered; self-denial was not demanded, and the Church put the stamp of approval upon the pleasures of life. This attitude manifests itself in painting and statuary by the noble female figures that are found in so many over-decorated churches. ”

“ New York and Chicago Grand Opera are playing today works of Italian and French authors of the second and third rank, but Smetana and Dvořák are entirely forgotten. Is it not curious?
The greatest gift of Smetana to his nation was the cycle of six symphonic poems “Má Vlast” (My Country) . Here in America again only two poems of this complex are given every season by the symphonic orchestras: the first “Vyšehrad” and the second “Vltava” (In German “Moldau”) . “My Country” is a grandiose conception. ”

“ As Smetana reached by his study of the spirit of folk songs a type of Bohemian musiv which combining modern music with racial characteristics became an example of a distinctive Czech musical art, so Mánes determined in that memorable year 1849 to produce out of Bohemian soil and its spirit artistic creations that would portray the charm of Bohemian soul. By painstakingly careful ethnological study Mánes slowly collated the distinctive characteristics of the people into an artistic type of the Czechoslovak race which for many years was supreme in all Bohemian decorative art. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The presence of the foremost masters of the contemporary world of art was necessarily a tremendous encouragement to the home talent. And the art of Bohemia, while conforming to the general medieval atmosphere, soon manifested a distinct form and acquired at the same time a progressive trait advancing beyond the generally accepted norms. “Paintings enclosed in the walls of the Karlštejn castle, colored illustrations on the pages of our books, brought into the medieval art the first wave of living realism growing out of domestic concepts. ”

“ He studies not merely the costume with detail and extreme care, that has not been surpassed so far by any one, but like a true artist he studies the movement of bodies, he observes how men walk and stand, how they sit and make motions; and in all this his great pen finds rich material and happy reproduction. Many beautiful folk studies had their birth at this time; they were made use of later as illustrations to folk songs and in the cycle “Music”.
This ideal type, so happily conceived, helps Mánes to find the true expression for the prehistoric Bohemian period. ”

“ Everything in them is real life, nature and truth—nothing stiff, nothing unreal, no imitation. Two great albums of Marold’s works publishe din Prague fill the soul of the Czech student over and over again with pity that such a splendid talent should have been carried away so soon. ”

“ Otokar Hostinský, late professor at the Bohemian University of Prague, a fervent champion of Smetana, Karel Stecker, professor at the Conservatory of Music in Prague, Dr. Zdeněk Nejedlý, professor at the Bohemian University, etc.
The reproductive art reached always the highest level. Many Bohemian virtuosos and singers became world-famed. ”

“ He left the Prague Academy in 1875 with a number of fellow-students as a protest against the gross insult of the Czech people by Professor Woltmann. He rented an atelier with Frank Ženíšek, but the occupation of Bosnia put him into the military uniform and dragged him to the south. After a discharge from the army service in 1879 he went to Paris and there for the first time found himself. Up to this time he was occupied with historical paintings, never dreaming that a rare landscape artist was hidden in his soul. The modern French school of landscape painting opened his eyes. ”

“ The young, fiery statesman, bold, clever, uncompromising, who had just ignited the enthusiasm of his people and drew the attention of all Europe by his speech of January 6, 1849, on the first paragraph of the proposed constitution “All authority in the state proceeds from the people”, this man lives before us in Mánes’ drawing as a veritable tribune of the people. A noble, high forehead, large, glowing eye, the whole body with the closed first reveals a great orator. February 8, a month before the parliament was dissolved, Mánes was through with his work. ”

“ Of other Bohemian artists whose talent blossomed out through the influence of Paris the greatest are Chittussi, Hynais, Marold, Mucha and Kupka.
Antonin Chittussi is the first modern Czech landscape painter. His Italian name indicates that some ancestor of his came to Bohemia from Italy and became a Czech. Antonin was born in Ronov in 1847. After graduating from the middle school he entered the Prague Polytechnic, but in 1866 he left the Technical School and enrolled in the Painters’ Academy; later he went to Munich where he was the pupil of Anschutz, then to Vienna and back to Prague. ”

“ After the classical period which had filled imaginary vistas with antique temples and chapels bordered by beautiful trees right and left and hills and groves rolling in the background, and after the period of new romanticism which again demanded castles and ruins and picturesqueness of scenes came the modern masters who smashed tradition and fashion and forbad the painting of immaginary landscapes. ”

“ The same year on his fiftieth birthday the University of Cambridge in England gave him the title of a doctor of music and the Bohemian University in Prague the honorary title of doctor of philosophy.
In 1892 Dvořák came to America for three years as head of the National Conservatory in New York. Of ten works written in America, the first was the immortal Fifth Symphony in E minor, “Z Nového Světa” (From the New World) op. 95 (sketched from January 10 to May 25 in New York, first performance at New York Music Hall, December 16, 1893) . ”