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Smetana and was
Bedřich Smetana (; 2 March 1824 – 12 May 1884 ) was a Czech composer who pioneered the development of a musical style which became closely identified with his country's aspirations to independent statehood.
Smetana was naturally gifted as a pianist, and gave his first public performance at the age of six.
During this period of his life Smetana was twice married ; of six daughters, three died in infancy.
Bedřich Smetana was born as Friedrich Smetana on 2 March 1824, in Litomyšl, east of Prague near the traditional border between Bohemia and Moravia, then provinces of the Habsburg Empire.
He was the third child, and first son, of František Smetana and his third wife Barbora Lynková.
The elder Smetana, although uneducated, had a natural gift for music and was a competent violinist who played in a string quartet.
There being no suitable local school, Smetana was sent to the gymnasium at Jihlava, where he was homesick and unable to study.
Finding Jungmann's school uncongenial ( he was mocked by his classmates for his country manners ), Smetana soon began missing classes.
Smetana was placed temporarily with his uncle in Nové Město, where he enjoyed a brief romance with his cousin Louisa.
Smetana was briefly a participant in the uprising.
For a brief period in 1848, Smetana was a revolutionary.
The nascent uprising was quickly crushed, but Smetana avoided the imprisonment or exile received by leaders such as Havlíček.
This encouragement was the beginning of a friendship that was of great value to Smetana in his subsequent career.
Despite Liszt's lack of financial support, Smetana was able to start a Piano Institute in late August 1848, with twelve students.
After a period of struggle the Institute began to flourish and became briefly fashionable, particularly among supporters of Czech nationalism in whose eyes Smetana was developing a reputation.
Smetana wrote his Piano Trio in G minor as a tribute to her memory ; it was performed in Prague on 3 December 1855 and, according to the composer, was received " harshly " by the critics, although Liszt praised it.
His disenchantment with Prague was growing and, perhaps influenced by Dreyschock's accounts of opportunities to be found in Sweden, Smetana decided to seek success there.
The occasion was the Karl August Goethe-Schiller Jubilee celebrations ; Smetana attended performances of Liszt's Faust Symphony and the symphonic poem Die Ideale, which invigorated and inspired him.
" After placing Žofie with Kateřina's mother, Smetana spent time with Liszt in Weimar, where he was introduced to the music of the comic opera Der Barbier von Bagdad, by Liszt's pupil Peter Cornelius.
This had gradually brought a more enlightened atmosphere to Prague, and by 1861 Smetana was seeing prospects of a better future for Czech nationalism and culture.

Smetana and entirely
And while Smetana and Dvořák gave themselves over entirely to the national cause, consciously writing Czech music with which the emerging nation strongly identified, Fibich ’ s position was more ambivalent.

Smetana and with
Czech composers also developed a thriving national opera movement of their own in the 19th century, starting with Bedřich Smetana, who wrote eight operas including the internationally popular The Bartered Bride.
Another Czech composer, Bedřich Smetana, included a significant viola part in his quartet " From My Life ": the quartet begins with an impassioned statement by the viola.
In August 1843 Smetana departed for Prague with twenty gulden, and no immediate prospects.
That autumn Smetana returned to Gothenburg, with Kateřina and their surviving daughter Žofie, but before doing so he visited Liszt in Weimar.
Back in 1866, as the composer of The Brandenburgers with its overtones of German military aggression, Smetana thought he might be targeted by the invading Prussians, so he absented himself from Prague until hostilities ceased.
In the absence of a body of suitable Czech opera, Smetana in his first season presented standard works by Weber, Mozart, Donizetti, Rossini and Glinka, with a revival of his own Bartered Bride.
But his opponents continued to attack him, comparing his conductorship unfavourably with the Maýr regime and claiming that under Smetana " Czech opera sickens to death at least once annually.
The first of these had the purpose, as Smetana explained to his publisher, of " idealising the polka, as Chopin in his day did with the mazurka.
Towards the end of his life Smetana returned to simple song-writing, with five Evening Songs ( 1879 ) to words by the poet Vítězslav Hálek.
Dissatisfied with his first large-scale orchestral work, the D major Overture of 1848, Smetana studied passages from Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Weber and Berlioz before producing his Triumphal Symphony of 1853.
From 1862 Smetana was largely occupied with opera and, apart from a few short pieces, did not return to purely orchestral music before beginning Má vlast in 1872.
In his mission to create a new canon, rather than using traditional folksong Smetana turned to the popular dance music of his youth, especially the polka, to establish his link with the vernacular.
Although a follower of Wagner's reforms of the operatic genre, which he believed would be its salvation, Smetana rejected accusations of excessive Wagnerism, claiming that he was sufficiently occupied with " Smetanism, for that is the only honest style!
" Its trademark overture, which Newmarch says " lifts us off our feet with its madcap vivacity ", was composed in a piano version before Smetana received the draft libretto.
There is broad agreement among most commentators that Smetana created a canon of Czech opera where none had previously existed, and that he developed a style of music in all his compositions that equated with the emergent Czech national spirit.
Bedřich Smetana, with whom Balakirev quarreled over the Prague production of Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar

Smetana and her
In June 1847, on resigning his position in the Thun household, Smetana recommended her as his replacement.
In her honour Smetana transcribed two songs from Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin cycle, and transformed one of his own early piano pieces into a polka entitled Vision at the Ball.
Smetana wrote that she had died " gently, without our knowing anything until the quiet drew my attention to her.
" I cannot live under the same roof as a person who hates and persecutes me ", Smetana informed her.
One of her protégés was the leading Czech musician of that time, Bedřich Smetana, whom she introduced to the music circles of Vienna and Paris.

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