Information about the composers

Bedřich Smetana

Bedřich Smetana (2 March 1824, Litomyšl, Bohemia – 12 May 1884, Prague, Bohemia) was a Czech composer who pioneered the development of a musical style which became closely identified with his country's aspirations to independent statehood. He is thus widely regarded in his homeland as the father of Czech music. Internationally he is best known for his opera The Bartered Bride, for the symphonic cycle Má vlast ("My Fatherland") which portrays the history, legends and landscape of the composer's native land, and for his First String Quartet From My Life.
Smetana was naturally gifted as a pianist, and gave his first public performance at the age of six. His first nationalistic music was written during the 1848 Prague uprising, in which he briefly participated. After failing to establish his career in Prague, he left for Sweden, where he set up as a teacher and choirmaster in Gothenburg, and began to write large-scale orchestral works.
In the early 1860s, a more liberal political climate in Bohemia encouraged Smetana to return permanently to Prague. He threw himself into the musical life of the city, primarily as a champion of the new genre of Czech opera. In 1866 his first two operas, The Brandenburgers in Bohemia and The Bartered Bride, were premiered at Prague's new Provisional Theatre, the latter achieving great popularity.
By the end of 1874, Smetana had become completely deaf. He began a period of sustained composition that continued for almost the rest of his life. His contributions to Czech music were increasingly recognised and honoured.
By the winter of 1882–83 he was experiencing depression, insomnia, and hallucinations, together with giddiness, cramp and a temporary loss of speech. In 1883 he began writing a new symphonic suite, Prague Carnival, but could get no further than an Introduction and a Polonaise. He started a new opera, Viola, based on the character in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, but wrote only fragments as his mental state gradually deteriorated. In October 1883 his behaviour at a private reception in Prague disturbed his friends; by the middle of February 1884 he had ceased to be coherent, and was periodically violent. On 23 April his family, unable to nurse him any longer, removed him to the Kateřinky Lunatic Asylum in Prague, where he died on 12 May 1884. The hospital registered the cause of death as senile dementia. However, Smetana's family believed that his physical and mental decline was due to syphilis. An analysis of the autopsy report, published by the German neurologist Dr Ernst Levin in 1972, came to the same conclusion. Tests carried out by Prof. Emanuel Vlček in the late 20th century on samples of muscular tissue from Smetana's exhumed body provided further evidence of the disease. However, this research has been challenged by Czech physician Dr Jiří Ramba, who has argued that Vlček's tests do not provide a basis for a reliable conclusion, citing the age and state of the tissues and highlighting reported symptoms of Smetana's that were incompatible with syphilis.
Smetana's reputation as the founding father of Czech music has endured in his native country, where advocates have raised his status above that of his contemporaries and successors. However, relatively few of Smetana's works are in the international repertory, and most foreign commentators tend to regard Antonín Dvořák as a more significant Czech composer.

Antonín Dvořák

Antonín Dvořák (September 8, 1841 – May 1, 1904) was a Czech composer of Romantic music, who employed the idioms of the folk music of Moravia and his native Bohemia. His works include operas, symphonic, choral and chamber music. His best-known works include his New World Symphony, the Slavonic Dances, "American" String Quartet, and Cello Concerto in B minor.
Dvořák was born in the Bohemian village of Nelahozeves, near Prague, where he spent most of his life. Dvořák's years in Nelahozeves nurtured the strong Christian faith and love for his Bohemian heritage which so strongly influenced his music. From 1857 to 1859 he studied music in Prague's only organ school, and gradually developed into an accomplished player of the violin and the viola. He wrote his first String Quartet when he was twenty years old, two years after graduating.
Throughout the 1860s he played viola in the Bohemian Provisional Theater Orchestra, which from 1866 was conducted by Bedřich Smetana. By the time he was eighteen years old, Dvořák was a full-time musician.
Dvořák composed his second string quintet in 1875, the same year that his first son was born. It was during this year that he produced a multitude of works, including his 5th Symphony, String Quintet No. 2, Piano Trio No. 1 and Serenade for Strings in E.
In 1877, the critic Eduard Hanslick informed him that his music had attracted the attention of the famous Johannes Brahms, whom Dvořák admired greatly. Brahms had a huge influence over Dvořák’s work, especially as the two later became friends. Brahms contacted the musical publisher Simrock, one of the major European publishers. Published in 1878, the above mentioned works were an immediate success. Dvořák's Stabat Mater (1880) was performed abroad, and after a successful performance in London in 1883, Dvořák was invited to visit England where he appeared to great acclaim in 1884. His Symphony No. 7 was written for London; it premiered there in 1885. Dvořák visited England nine times in total, often conducting his own works there.
In 1890, influenced by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Dvořák also visited Russia, and conducted the orchestras in Moscow and in St. Petersburg. In 1891 Dvořák received an honorary degree from the University of Cambridge, and was offered a position at the Prague Conservatory as professor of composition and instrumentation. His Requiem premiered later that year in Birmingham at the Triennial Music Festival.
From 1892 to 1895, Dvořák was the director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City.
Dvořák’s main goal in America was to discover “American Music” and engage in it, much as he had utilized Czech folk idioms within his music. Shortly after his arrival in America in 1892, Dvořák wrote a series of newspaper articles reflecting on the state of American music. In the winter and spring of 1893, while in New York, Dvořák wrote Symphony No.9, "From the New World". He spent the summer of 1893 with his family in the Czech-speaking community of Spillville, Iowa, to which some of his cousins had earlier immigrated. While there he composed the String Quartet in F (the "American"), and the String Quintet in E flat, as well as a Sonatina for violin and piano. He also conducted a performance of his Eighth Symphony at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago that same year.
Over the course of three months in 1895, Dvořák wrote his Cello Concerto in B minor. However, problems with his salary, together with increasing recognition in Europe — he had been made an honorary member of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna — and a remarkable amount of homesickness made him decide to return to Bohemia. Dvořák and his wife left New York before the end of the spring term with no intention of returning.
During his final years, Dvořák concentrated on composing opera and chamber music. In 1897 his daughter married a pupil of his – the composer Josef Suk. Dvořák was appointed a member of the jury for the Viennese Artist’s Stipendium, and later was honored with a medal. Dvořák succeeded Antonín Bennewitz as director of the Conservatory in Prague in November 1901 until his death. He died from heart failure in on May 1, 1904, following five weeks of illness. He is interred in the Vyšehrad cemetery in Prague, under his bust by Czech sculptor Ladislav Šaloun.
He left many unfinished works, including the early Cello Concerto in A major.

Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler (7 July 1860 – 18 May 1911) was a late-Romantic Austrian-Bohemian composer and one of the leading conductors of his generation. As a composer, he acted as a bridge between the 19th century Austro-German tradition and the modernism of the early 20th century. While in his lifetime his status as a conductor was established beyond question, his own music gained wide popularity only after periods of relative neglect which included a ban on its performance in much of Europe during the Nazi era. After 1945 the music was discovered and championed by a new generation of listeners; Mahler then became one of the most frequently performed and recorded of all composers, a position he has sustained into the 21st century.
Born in humble circumstances, Mahler showed his musical gifts at an early age. After graduating from the Vienna Conservatory in 1878, he held a succession of conducting posts of rising importance in the opera houses of Europe, culminating in his appointment in 1897 as director of the Vienna Court Opera (Hofoper). During his ten years in Vienna, Mahler—who had converted to Catholicism from Judaism to secure the post—experienced regular opposition and hostility from the anti-Semitic press. Nevertheless, his innovative productions and insistence on the highest performance standards ensured his reputation as one of the greatest of opera conductors, particularly as an interpreter of the stage works of Wagner and Mozart. Late in his life he was briefly director of New York's Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic.
Mahler's œuvre is relatively small—for much of his life composing was a part-time activity, secondary to conducting—and is confined to the genres of symphony and song, except for one piano quartet. Most of his ten symphonies are very large-scale works, several of which employ soloists and choirs in addition to augmented orchestral forces. These works were often controversial when first performed, and were slow to receive critical and popular approval; an exception was the triumphant premiere of his Eighth Symphony in 1910. Mahler's immediate musical successors were the composers of the Second Viennese School, notably Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten are among later 20th-century composers who admired and were influenced by Mahler. The International Gustav Mahler Institute was established in 1955, to honour the composer's life and work.

Leoš Janáček

Leoš Janáček (baptised Leo Eugen Janáček) (July 3, 1854 – August 12, 1928), was a Czech composer, musical theorist, folklorist, publicist and teacher. He was inspired by Moravian and all Slavic folk music to create an original, modern musical style. Until 1895 he devoted himself mainly to folkloristic research and his early musical output was influenced by contemporaries such as Antonín Dvořák. His later, mature works incorporate his earlier studies of national folk music in a modern, highly original synthesis, first evident in the opera Jenůfa, which was premiered in 1904 in Brno. The success of Jenůfa (often called the "Moravian national opera") at Prague in 1916 gave Janáček access to the world's great opera stages. Janáček's later works are his most celebrated. They include the symphonic poem Sinfonietta, the oratorial Glagolitic Mass, the rhapsody Taras Bulba, string quartets, other chamber works and operas. He is considered to rank with Antonín Dvořák and Bedřich Smetana, as one of the most important Czech composers.
Janáček was born in Hukvaldy in Moravia in 1854. From his education in Brno (including running the choir at the monastery) he went on to study at the Prague, Leipzig, and Vienna conservatories. In 1881 he founded a college of organists at Brno, which he directed until 1920. In Brno he established a strong foundation for musical education, with violin and singing classes, an orchestra and later piano classes. When in 1884 the Provisional Czech Theatre opening in Brno Janáček founded Hudební listy, a review-based journal, through which we can now understand and appreciate many of Janáček’s feelings about the work of his contemporaries.
It is after this time that Janáček composed his first opera, Šárka. However, despite the beauty of the score itself (it is heavily reminiscent of Dvořák and Smetana) Janáček had problems obtaining rights for the libretto (something he did after the composition of the opera). The opera remained un-performed until his 70th birthday. After the disillusionment with the failure of staging his first opera Janáček threw himself into a comprehensive study of Moravian music. It is not surprising then that both of his next completed operas are Moravian ones. Both Počátek Románu (The Beginning of a Romance) and Jenůfa are taken from works by Gabriela Preissová. Where Počátek Románu is folkdances and self-contained songs, Jenůfa was a full-length and full-blown operatic achievement. It is not surprising that this has become one of the most enduring of Janáček’s works.
However, the composition of Jenůfa was protracted, and the effects of Janáček’s maturing style can be seen in the stylistic differences between the first act and the last two. Many catalysts fed into the completion of his opera. The impact of Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades (which Janáček reviewed for Hudební listy), his increasing awareness of the power of the imitation of speech into his operatic style, and the death of his daughter, all feed into the powerful work that became, and is, Jenůfa.
In the last decade he produced Kát’a Kabanová, Příhody Lišky Bystroušky (The Cunning Little Vixen), Vĕc Makropulos and his final opera Z mrtvého domu (From the House of the Dead).
These operas, after the success of Jenůfa and the premiere of his Výlety pánĕ Broučkovy in Prague, were all premiered in Brno followed by a premiere in Prague. Through this period Janáček found time to compose his string quartets and the ever-popular works of the Glagolitic Mass and the Sinfonietta. Janáček died just after the completion of the autograph score of his final opera, Z mrtvého domu. Whilst in Hukvaldy, where he was born (where he had bought a holiday home) he had caught a chill, which developed into pneumonia. He died on the 10th August 1928 at 10am. At the large public funeral held in Brno the final scene of his Příhody Lišky Bystroušky was played, and shortly after his death his Second String Quartet was given publicly. It wasn’t until 1930 that a version of Z mrtvého domu completed by the orchestrator of the third act of Šárka and another pupil was performed.