Smetana: Ma Vlast and The Bartered Bride
The Bottom Line Although Smetana's life ended in tragedy, his music became the foundation of Czech musical tradition. This European album highlights his best works. Bedrich Smetana, along with Antonin Dvorak, is a composer who helped put what's now known as the Czech Republic on the classical music map; before the world heard his comic opera The Bartered Bride in 1866, this small Slavic country (part of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire) was considered to be a musical backwater. Like Peter Tschaikovsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in Russia and Richard Wagner in Germany, Smetana's music was, first and foremost, a reflection of his fierce nationalism; his use of such traditional Czech dances as the polca, furiant, and dumka in his works give his compositions a distinctive regional flavor. This earned him the reputation of being the founder of Czech musical tradition, and his most nationalistic piece, the tone cycle known as Ma Vlast (My Fatherland ) is one of the best