Countless honorary titles have been bestowed upon Bedřich Smetana’s cycle of symphonic poems, Má vlast. It has been referred to as a reflection of the Czech people’s past, their present and their future and compared to the Song of Solomon as a kind of Song of Songs sung from the very soul of a national people. Regardless of how such monikers may be interpreted, they can only paraphrase the unique fascination these six poems have inspired since their premiere in 1882.

During Nazi occupation in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, programme authors were forbidden to write more than one line explaining the various symphonic poems making up Smetana’s Má vlast. Anyone brave enouvh to go into more detail aid a heavy price. One such man was Zdenĕk Nĕmec, a music critic from Prague who was so inspired by a performance of Má vlast that he afterwards wrote of victorious knights who would “arrive in the Nation’s hour of need to break the bonds of oppression and darkness.” Soon afterwards Némec was arrested by the Gestapo and “beaten to death like a mangy dog because he dared to reveal the hope which Smetana had concealed in Má vlast for every Czech to find” (Linda Maria Koldau).
A few months before Némec’s brutal murder, prisoners in the concentration camp at Mauthausen near Linz had the rare opportunity to experience this same hope while listening to a performance of Smetana’s music. The SS camp commanders allowed a commemorative celebration marking Smetana’s 120th birthday and the 60th anniversary of his death and even allowed the camp orchestra to put candles on their music stands. “Within the camp the prisoners were all just numbers and the SS could extinguish each and every one of them easier than the candles flickering on the music stands, but the splendour of this Smetana celebration left even these tormented souls speechless; tears flowed freely down their sunken faces as the orchestra, conducted by Rumbauer, played the overture to Smetana’s The Kiss, followed by a potpourri from The Bartered Bride and finally rounded off with Vltava. The celebration was more than a success; it was a manifestation of humanity and of an unbreakable love for one’s homeland” (Milan Kuna, Musik an der Grenze des Lebens).
Whenever the Czech nation has been in need of a symbol of her unity and her will to survive, she has reached out for Má vlast. Smetana’s cycle of symphonic poems gave the nation hope while under Austrian rule in World War I, throughout German occupation in World War II and during and after the Velvet Revolution of 1989/90. “During times of vicious persecution, when politicians were left unable to make any public declarations and forms of artistic expression, especially literature, were fettered and constrained, Smetana’s music was able to evade vigilant censors who considered it to be merely a piece of musical art. The poems, which thus resounded as the only genuine, free expression of the people’s sentiments, garnered broad acclaim as more than just something artistic and musical - so much so that the Austrian authorities eventually began to view Má vlast as something suspicious and treasonable” (Zdenĕk Nejedlý, 1924).
Nikolaus Harnoncourt remembers the legendary performance of Má vlast conducted by Rafael Kubelik at the opening of the Prague Spring Festival in 1990, only a few months after the fall of communism. “I know that Rafael Kubelik - really one of the nicest conductors I have ever met - conducted Má vlast just as Czechoslovakia had shed itself of the communist yoke. He returned to conduct his Czech Philharmonic in honour of this political occasion. The music of Má vlast was so much a part of him that he never even needed the score. He conducted the entire piece from memory, although he hadn’t performed it in years. He came back and conducted it as though it was something he had done every day of his life”, recalls Harnoncourt. Kubelik had previously conducted Má vlast on 12 May 1946, the anniversary of Smetana’s death, which was the first performance of the piece in Prague after the liberation from German occupation. Since then, every Prague Spring Festival commences with a performance of Smetana’s symphonic poems. Extracts of the piece are also found in Czech day-to-day life, with the Czech broadcasting company using Vyšehrad as an interval signal and the bells of the Basilica of St Peter and St Paul chiming the melody to Vltava.

While conducting some of the world’s most renowned orchestras, Nikolaus Harnoncourt has come to realize that Má vlast played in its entirety is not a familiar piece for many. It is performed so seldom that it is in little danger of becoming kitsch.
“When I was conducting the piece in Holland, it was the first time the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra had performed it in twenty years,” he remembers. “They were completely surprised. Some former orchestra members were there and said they had played it twenty years before with Dorati. And the Vienna Philharmonic hadn’t performed the entire piece since James Levine’s day, which had been many years before - where is the kitsch in that? It is actually not a sunny piece at all but rather a veiled horror. Even From Bohemia's woods and fields is a bit horrific. It starts with a sunny atmosphere but then you start to ask yourself, ‘Is this really beautiful?' It’s always interrupted with something horrific. I suppose Vltava could probably be made kitschy but I would never even think of finding the piece itself kitschy. There is something sublime about it but that is quite natural, the sense of home it evokes. I don't know whether there is a country or a people or ethnic group anywhere in the world, be they ever so small, which does not develop a certain enthusiasm for its own uniqueness. I think that this feeling exists everywhere, from the smallest to the largest cultural groups.”
Harnoncourt goes on to remark that “as far as the tone painting is concerned, there is nothing superficial or kitschy about the piece. Ok, the scenes in Vltava with the nymphs and the dancing are quite clear and obvious. But Šárka is a complicated story. Do we really know what she is discussing with her maidens? She calls out for help and the knights arrive, and then she summons her maidens with a hunting horn and they come armed with weapons and in the end she regrets that it is too late to prevent the massacre. The men lie drunk out of their wits on the ground and are butchered, all the men of Bohemia.”
“I spent quite a lot of time researching and talking to Czech people and reading everything I could find about the piece including material on the stories surrounding Tábor and Blaník. To understand them you have to understand the Hussite chorale, the entire Hussite movement, what they stood for and what they opposed, that the Hussite knights, with their strong faith, disappeared into a mountain to await the time when they would awaken to rescue the entire world. The ‘entire world’ here being Bohemia.”

Smetana composed his six symphonic poems in just under five years. At first it seemed he would confine his piece to a tetralogy. Vyšehrad and Vltava were completed towards the end of 1874 and Šárka, and From Bohemia's woods and fields in the autumn of 1875. It was not until 1878 that Smetana resumed his work and composed Tábor and Blaník, which he completed in just a few months. These two pieces were based on the images of resistance and triumph which unfurl in the Hussite chorale. The motif found in Vyšehrad serves as the piece’s motto as it is a recurring theme throughout the entire cycle, making itself known in Vltava and at the end of Blaník.
On 5 November 1882, Má vlast was performed in Prague in its entirety for the first time and frantically celebrated as a resounding symbol of the nation. Otakar Hostinský wrote of the performance: “After Vltava, a real hurricane of excitement broke loose ... and the same storm of applause was repeated after each of the six parts of the cycle. The audience listened with growing enthusiasm up to the very last chord ... After the clashing sounds in Blaník, the listeners were beside themselves and couldn’t bring themselves to take leave of Smetana, who, though he had not been able to hear a single note of his own work, was still pleased to know that he had delighted others.” Smetana, who had been completely deaf since the completion of Vltava in 1874, was never able to listen to his most famous work in its entirety. His enthusiasm for the material he dealt with in his music, however, never waned. Bohemia was slowly breaking away from Vienna’s paternalism and starting to emerge as a confident nation and Smetana wanted to give his fellow Czechs a musical apotheosis of their most important myths and beautiful landscape.
Smetana’s musical landscape painting is also understandable for listeners outside of Czechia, which is why Vltava and From Bohemia's woods and fields have become the cycle’s most popular pieces with international audiences. The remaining four symphonic poems, however, elude listeners not familiar with Bohemia’s history. For hundreds of years, the ruins of a powerful stronghold loomed atop Vyšehrad, a steep rock towering over the Vltava river and which today makes up part of the city of Prague. It was a monument to the erstwhile greatness of medieval Czech rulers, who had been displaced by the House of Habsburg. The bloody story of Šárka belongs to the saga surrounding the Maidens’ War; the gruesome war between women warriors led by Vlasta against male knights. The city of Tábor in Southern Bohemia was founded in 1420 by a radical group of Hussites, forerunners of the protestant movement in Bohemia and who followed the teachings of Jan Hus. These men believed themselves to be holy warriors but were eventually defeated by the imperial army and the moderate Bohemians. It is this event that Smetana interprets in Tábor, which leans on the Hussite chorale Ye Who Are The Warriors Of God. He makes use of this same material once more in the incomparably ecstatic finale of Blaník, named after a mountain not far from Tábor. According to legend, Blaník is the resting place of the defeated Hussite knights, who, in the nation’s greatest hour of need, will once more ride forth to her aid.
Each of the six pieces has two official programmes. The first is a short programme which was written by Smetana himself and sent to his publisher, Urbánek, in 1879. The second, which quotes and explains short passages from the original, is more detailed. Václav Zelený published this second, poetically embellished programme in the periodical Dalibor in 1882 with the composer’s consent.