St. Pierre, Kelly Bedřich Smetana: Myth, Music, and Propaganda (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 353 important to say about each of his works. Perhaps the most valuable chapter is the last one, on Puteshestvie na Chernuiu rechku and Koshkin dom, apparently not yet available in English. For me, she would have been completely justified if she had removed the question mark from her subtitle. University of Glasgow Martin Dewhirst St. Pierre, Kelly. Bedřich Smetana: Myth, Music, and Propaganda. Eastman Studies in Music. University of Rochester Press, Rochester, NY, 2017. vii + 166 pp. Music examples. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $90.00: £75.00. In writings on music these days, the acronym TMI sometimes rears its head, not meaning Too Much Information, as often it well might, but rather The Music Itself. It’s generally used disparagingly by cultural historians. For them the significance of music is to be found not in The Music Itself — in the notes or the score, as if the music were, absurdly, immune from historical contingency — but in the meanings that are constructed by third parties in its reception. Such cultural histories have become common currency in the last few decades, but in Kelly St. Pierre’s new book they represent a new departure in Englishlanguage monographs about the composer Bedřich Smetana. Indeed the only substantial contribution in English to date has been Brian Large’s Smetana (London, 1970), a very problematic book reprinted without changes in 1985, although Smetana also found a place in the late lamented Master Musicians series, in a much shorter book by John Clapham (London, 1972). These were books unashamedly dealing with TMI, expounding individual compositions by Smetana critically, and locating them within the context, relatively narrow though it was, of the composer’s life and works, for a readership of concertand opera-goers, and listeners to radio and sound recordings. By contrast, St. Pierre’s book, based closely on her Case Western Reserve University dissertation of 2012, is cultural history, and the classical-music readership is likely to be disappointed in her avoidance of any technical discussion of TMI except when its detail was of interest to partisan critics in Smetana’s time and later. Just the same, the composer has clearly been in need of political commentary, for myths began to be established around him immediately after his death in 1884, and some were set in stone as Czechoslovak government propaganda after 1948. These myths could not be adequately challenged during the Communist years, even by Western authors, although one of them was questioned in 1986 in a much-quoted article by Michael Beckerman: the idea of českost, ‘Czechness’, as an immanent quality of his music (rather than one constructed ex post facto). This supposed Czechness, exploited for a surprising variety of political purposes, has come under sustained scrutiny at least since the 1990s in journal SEER, 96, 2, APRIL 2018 354 articles — and in an important German-language monograph by Christopher P. Storck, Kulturnation und Nationalkunst (Cologne, 2001), unfortunately not drawn on by St. Pierre. There are five chapters in her book. The first aims to situate Smetana’s work within the národní obrození, the Czech National Revival of the nineteenth century, and emphasizes the part played by the Umělecká beseda, the society of artists founded in Prague in the 1860s by Smetana and others. This needed doing,andisbasedonoriginalwork,althoughthecontextseemsnarrowlyoverdependent on the work of Rita Krueger (Czech, German, and Noble, Oxford, 2009), and for the later period of the Revival on the admittedly excellent work of Gary Cohen (The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 2nd edition, West Lafayette, IN, 2006). Chapter two focuses on Smetana’s indebtedness to Liszt; and also to other Czech composers, from whom authors such as Large have usually tried to separate him in order to highlight his genius. The main focus here is on the interrelationship between two symphonic poems of the period, Smetana’s ‘Vyšehrad’fromMávlast,andZdeněkFibich’sZáboj,SlavojaLuděkop.37(1873). Both of these invoke a mythical pseudo-medieval Czech past, and they share some musical material directly; St. Pierre suggests that Brian Large deliberately falsified their chronology to preserve the myth of Smetana as unique genius and to whitewash him from any suggestion of plagiarism...