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  • Bedřich Smetana: Myth, Music, and Propaganda by Kelly St Pierre
  • Elizabeth Legierski
Bedřich Smetana: Myth, Music, and Propaganda. By Kelly St Pierre. (Eastman Studies in Music, 139.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2017. [166 p. ISBN 978-1-58046-510-6; $90]

In the past twenty years or so, musicological research has been conspicuously silent regarding the "father of Czech music", Bedřich Smetana (Marta Ottlová, Milan Pospíšil, John Tyrrell, and Kelly St Pierre. "Smetana, Bedřich." Grove Music Online. 15 March 2019). The only English, full-length biographies of the composer were written in the 1970s (Brian Large, 1970; John Clapham 1972). While Bedřich Smetana: Myth, Music, and Propaganda does not endeavour to be a biography, it is refreshing to see modern musicology turn its critical eye towards this famous, yet enigmatic, Central European composer.

In this study, Kelly St Pierre reopens the doors of inquiry into the origins of Smetana as a national symbol and nationalist composer. By examining the often-problematic relationship between nationalism and historiography in the burgeoning Czechoslovakia of the early twentieth century, St Pierre provides a critical investigation of the source materials on which all subsequent Smetana research depends.

The book is divided into five chapters, with the first three exploring the founding and development of the Umělecká Beseda (Artistic Society) and its influence on Smetana reception in his day. The final two chapters briefly examine the effects of shifting political climes on Smetana scholarship, from the World War I era through the Velvet Revolution in 1989, and its implications for future Smetana research.

In a detailed contextual outline of the socio-political world that alternately attacked and promoted Smetana, the author dedicates one-fifth of the monograph to the origins of the Umělecká Beseda (UB) as a 'fine arts club' which quickly became a political organisation that used the arts to promote its idea of a nationalist agenda. The author situates the UB as emerging out of the Romantic nationalism of the nineteenth century, emphasising the consequential shifts in cultural identities as Bohemians, still living under Habsburg rule, began to identify as 'Czechs' in seeking a political voice, and nation, of their own. These shifts are exemplified in the evolution of the UB. The author draws from the writings of UB members to illustrate the club's neutral political beginnings. At first, they sought to "… not necessarily cultivate a specifically Czech art, but to build a Czech arts community" (p. 14). In an effort to avoid insularity, and to place themselves as players on the international stage, the UB held events such as the Shakespeare Festival of 1864.

Members of the UB began a publishing house, "Matice Hudebni" (Music Foundation), which was central to the political development of the UB. These UB publications, including the journal Dalibor, would be responsible for promoting Smetana and his music in his day, creating the bulk of the nineteenth-century source material on Smetana currently available. Readers can expect to delve into the specifics of concert programmes and UB member discussions as the author builds a case for the need to question the biases and political agendas of the first people to write about the composer, publish his letters, and either promote or neglect other composers based on "… aims [that] shifted from developing a Czech musical community during its earlier years to building a Czech tradition, promoting and prescribing specifically Czech aesthetics" (p. 19).

In the second chapter, "Smetana, Czechness and the New German School", the author investigates how some of Smetana's contemporaries were in effect excised from the Czech arts community. Using musical examples to illustrate her argument, the author compares similarities between Smetana's "Vyšehrad" (Má Vlast) to Zdeněk Fibich's symphonic poem Záboj, Slávoj and Luděk. Fibich's symphonic poem was composed prior to Smetana's, a fact that scholars [End Page 217] such as Brian Large as late as the 1970s found problematic, as it created a cognitive dissonance with what St Pierre reveals as a myth surrounding Smetana as the sole creator of a Czech music. Though of interest as a historical document, Václav Novotný's...

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