2024-05-27 16:40:26
Even within the 2 hundredth anniversary of the start of the composer Bedřich Smetana, phrases that appear to have fallen out of the revival dictionary are sometimes heard: the founding father of Czech nationwide music, the good of our opera, and so forth. Smetana’s new biography, which has simply been printed by Pavel Kosatík, is outstanding not solely as a result of it reveals how these constructs had been created, but in addition to what extent the artist himself formed them.
The impetus to put in writing the ebook got here from musicologist Aleš Březina, who felt the necessity for an additional biography of Smetana. The final bigger ones come from Václav Holzknecht or Zdenek Mahler from the Nineteen Eighties, when the musicians’ legacy was nonetheless ideologically coloured by the communist regime.
Two publications had been printed within the jubilee 12 months. Along with Kosatík, Milena Štráfeldová additionally tells about Bedřich Smetana in a ebook – with an applicable quantity of fiction. Each are linked by the absence of a musicological schooling, which in itself wouldn’t assure an excellent outcome.
Pavel Kosatík divided his at first look conventional biography entitled Bedřich Smetana – Biography, printed by the Universum publishing home, chronologically. It intertwines the destiny of the composer along with his work, i.e. life with the work, which he dietary supplements with documentary illustrations. Nonetheless, the novel departs with an essayistic tone and a pervasive emphasis on the context, be it cultural, political or social.
The favored author of Czech mental historical past and the writer of books about Ferdinand Peroutek and Pavlo Tigrid, for instance, convincingly sheds mild on the hovering romantic tone of the composer’s love letters, which he explains by the particular up to date tradition of affection and wooing. Smetana’s interpretive and compositional actions are positioned in European contexts. In lots of locations, he examines his ambiguous relationship with the institution – for instance, the native of Litomyšl created a symphony in honor of the marriage of Emperor Francis Joseph I with Elisabeth of Bavaria. The ebook interprets it rationally: it doesn’t attempt to retroactively right the actions of the flawless “grasp of Czech music”, as perceived by the nationalist discourse.
Nowhere Inedible
Within the pursuit of an comprehensible interpretation of historical past, Kosatík generally seems to be for analogies to the current. Sadly, it does not at all times work: occasional references to Beatles albums or phrases like “straightforward listening” appear a bit humorous and testify to the writer’s generational horizon of data fairly than Smetana’s time.
Pavel Kosatík primarily based his work on numerous sources and secondary literature. He doesn’t settle for this as a truth, quite the opposite, he typically makes it the topic of criticism. And he does effectively. Particularly with Smetana, the development of a posthumous picture of a character is a matter of everlasting negotiation of political and different pursuits. Simply writing about him would make a thick monograph. Kosatík touches on this challenge solely in applicable locations to be able to keep a clean narrative.
The supply of sources might be seen within the construction of the ebook – initially the psychological viewpoint prevails, steadily its function is taken over by cultural and historic ones.
We’ve at our disposal diaries from the interval of Smetana’s youth, which current an image of the artist’s interior life, the primary quantity of which, masking the years 1840 to 1847, was printed the 12 months earlier than final by the Bedřich Smetana Museum. Correspondence covers a wider time-frame – the primary three newly edited volumes date again to 1879, i.e. 5 years earlier than the composer’s loss of life.
From the sources, the early interval is the perfect researched: in spite of everything, eight admirable books had been devoted to him in the course of the First Republic by the later Communist Minister of Training Zdeněk Nejedlý, who willingly launched into titanic initiatives with out hope of finishing them.
Kosatík doesn’t rightly reject him, quite the opposite, he follows up on the richly contextualized writing of this controversial character. Not like Nejedlý, nevertheless, he doesn’t overwhelm the information with pointless particulars, quite the opposite, he selects the essential. It assumes a sure degree of pre-understanding, it does not rush to clarify each truth – and when it does, it is often for the nice of the trigger.
It clearly tries to clarify the motivations of all of the characters in query for every little thing they did and in what kind they left it behind. Kosatík interprets their actions bearing in mind a broad data of literature and context, though generally he makes claims which might be more durable to substantiate. For instance, within the interpretation of Smetana’s love life or libido, he embarks on psychoanalysis; in lots of different locations too, this psychologizing was not at all times essential.
Bedřich Smetana along with his second spouse Bettina Smetana round 1860. | Picture: Profimedia.cz
Hasty ending
Pavel Kosatík is used to working with phrases and textual content. Right here he additionally discusses the music, principally fairly briefly, however succinctly and for the needs of the publication in a totally ample manner. An enormous contribution of his ebook is the emphasis on the themes and librettos of Smetana’s operas. Musicologists, of their all-embracing preoccupation with music, historically perceived as the very best type of artwork, are inclined to neglect the libretto just a little. Kosatík doesn’t endure from this distortion and describes operas as works arising from the world of verbally handed down tales, myths and pictures.
The Satan’s Wall serves him as a deep dive into the darkish areas of the soul of each the work itself and its composer. In flip, he reveals Brandenburg in Bohemia and Dalibor as shockingly subversive works within the political context of the time. In such locations, a biography, which additionally contains up to date reception, has a particularly refreshing impact.
Sadly, within the second half and particularly the final chapters, it appears as if the writer ran out of breath and the accountable editor ran out of time or consideration. Important works of the late interval, corresponding to Mou vlast, the ebook takes a beating, whereas errors and inaccuracies multiply. The renaming of the character Hedvika from the Satan’s Wall to Milena might be essentially the most putting, however even misguided phrases corresponding to “violin quartet” as a substitute of string quartet mustn’t seem in a consultant jubilee biography.
If the objective was to make the reader like Smetana and his music higher than it says on the quilt, it most likely succeeded. Kosatík’s Smetana is a person with whom, even from right now’s perspective, one can considerably determine and generally sympathize, perceive his not at all times clear-cut habits.
The ebook presents the music from essentially the most engaging elements, displaying its particular qualities and Europeanness with out going into technical particulars which might be incomprehensible to the lay public.
In his readable biography, Pavlo Kosatík principally managed to fill the considerably empty picture of the “nice Czech composer” with a vivid and charming portrait of a multi-layered, non-black and white character of huge expertise. Bedřich Smetana emerges from the ebook as a composer of genius and on the identical time austere self-discipline, an artist consciously working with ideology and his public picture, and on the identical time a naive, overly idealistic particular person. However what’s the predominant factor: it’s not only a monument.
Pavel Kosatík: Bedřich Smetana – Biography
Publishing home Universum 2024, 408 pages, 449 crowns.