In 2024, the entire musical world commemorates the 200th anniversary of the birth of the Czech composer Bedřich Smetana (1824–84). It is in this year that the Bärenreiter Praha has released a new Urtext edition of the complete cycle of six symphonic poems “Má vlast” (My Country). This completes a ten-year project of successive publishing of the individual movements of Smetana´s symphonic cycle. This iconic Czech orchestral work has been reissued after almost 60 years.

Bedřich Smetana is considered the founder of Czech national music. Alongside his eight completed operas, his symphonic poems constitute a major part of his legacy and they are important contributions to symphonic music. The best known of these is the cycle of six symphonic poems “Má vlast”, inspired by the Czech landscape and themes from Czech legends and history. The cycle was composed gradually between 1874 and 1879. Smetana began work on this great project in 1874, exactly at the point when he was afflicted by deafness. Despite the considerable distress this caused him, he composed the first two symphonic poems “Vyšehrad” and “Vltava” very quickly, and the next two, “Šárka” and “Z českých luhů a hájů”(From Bohemia’s Woods and Fields” followed in 1875. Four years later, in 1879, he completed the last two installments (“Tábor” and “Blaník”). The first performance of “Má vlast” as a six-part symphonic cycle took place on 5 November 1882. With the founding of the Czech Philharmonic in 1896, this work achieved a far wider audience.

It was only after the completion of the last pair (“Tábor” and “Blaník”) in 1879 that the individual pieces began to be published by the publishing house of F. A. Urbánek, first in the composer´s own four-hand piano arrangement and subsequently in orchestral form. In the 1950s, the work would appear in Czechoslovakia in a performing edition by František Bartoš, though this did not fully correspond with the extant performance materials. With the new millennium, the time had come for a new edition that would re-evaluate the sources, take into account new philological approaches, and provide ideal support for performance of the work. Bärenreiter Praha approached the experienced editor Hugh Macdonald to undertake the task. The new edition of Smetana’s “Má vlast” was a significant challenge for him:  “…As we know from the case of Beethoven, deafness can sharpen a composer’s inner hearing, and it is clear that Smetana too felt a new intimacy with his own music in his later years… He was always a careful composer, so his manuscripts are legible and complete. If one may fault him, he applied so many marks of expression to his music that it is sometimes hard for the editor and performer to interpret the difference between the many types of staccato, marcato, tenuto (etc.) indications, often applied in combination to the same note. Almost no note in Smetana’s manuscripts is left without an expressive mark of some kind, so the editor’s task is to distinguish among them and reproduce each one, and the performer’s task is to interpret them.”

Urbánek´s 19th-century edition of the symphonic poems is valuable because the published scores and orchestral parts of some sections were corrected by Smetana himself. This first edition, however, also contains many printing errors, so editor Hugh Macdonald worked primarily with the autograph, which he scrutinized alongside the first edition and the composer's own four-hand piano version to create the new Urtext edition. In the new edition, all the discrepancies between the sources are set out in a critical report, which includes explanations of the editor’s solutions. The edition is supplemented with a detailed foreword on the genesis and reception of the work by leading Smetana scholar Olga Mojžíšová.

Eva Velická
(from [t]akte 1/2024)