Rivers, Day 4 – The Moldau by Bedrich Smetana

This week’s theme is…Rivers! Always in motion, rivers are nature’s steady, majestic channels, flowing with water day and night.  They have served as inspiration for artists and musicians in countless ways.  This week we examine some examples of this.

Rivers, Day 4 – The Moldau by Bedrich Smetana

Have you ever been to Disneyland?  For as long as I can remember I have had relatives living in Southern California, and so I have had a handful of opportunities.  I even have step grandparents who live in Anaheim, the same city as Disneyland.  I must confess that I have enjoyed my time at Disneyland – I know some people don’t like it.  I also went to Disney World once, although it was a bit more overwhelming.  Disneyland has sort of a small-town charm about it in comparison with its behemoth cousin in Orlando.  One fun story about Disney World though…

We went for a week and stayed in one of the resorts there.  Since we had a few days to kill, we ended up going to the Magic Kingdom a couple times.  One of the times we went must have been a weeknight or some other low-traffic time because there was barely any line for Thunder Mountain, that terrific train roller coaster with all the campy mining town scenery.

It’s a really fun ride and, to our delight, there was hardly any line for it that evening.  Every other experience I’ve ever had with a Disney park saw us waiting at least a half hour to board the high-demand rides, but that night we must have ridden Thunder Mountain at least 5 times.  With a wait time of barely 10 minutes, we delightedly passed a considerable amount of that evening riding Thunder Mountain again and again.

One of the things that I find so enchanting about Disneyland is the creative and ingenious mix of mechanical rides there.  If you exclude the simulators (Star Tours, Body Wars) and the child-oriented rides (teacups, carousel, flying elephants), I would say the remaining rides fall into two categories: roller coasters and dark rides.  Thunder Mountain is a roller coaster.  So are Space Mountain and the Matterhorn.  Roller coasters use a buildup of potential energy to unleash a thrilling and intense ride which affects you viscerally, at the core level.  On all roller coasters you strap yourself in and surrender to the unrelenting physical forces which you feel in your gut.  Some parks, like Great America, form their image based on roller coasters of extreme speed, height, and special features like inverting.  Disney’s roller coasters are fun, but for different reasons.  They are less intense physically (they are still very effective) and more immersive.  But they are roller coasters, and achieve their effects mostly through physical forces.

Opposed to roller coasters are dark rides.  The effect of the dark ride is achieved through carefully crafted ambiance and the development of a story line or succession of scenes.  The ride itself is tame and slow, but the enclosed scenery through which it winds is captivating.  Some of Disneyland’s most famous attractions are dark rides, including Pirates of the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion, and It’s a Small World.  

The Magic Kingdom features other enjoyable dark rides like Peter Pan, Alice In Wonderland, and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.  Universal Studios has a dark ride based on E.T. in which passengers board cars that resemble bicycles and experience E.T.’s flight across the sky.  Part of the beauty of the Disneyland experience is the very even mix of roller coasters and dark rides; in my opinion no visit to a Disney theme park is complete without plenty of both – the roller coasters for the physical thrills and the dark rides for the enchanting scenery and animatronic storytelling.

After Franz Liszt (for more about Liszt, see this post) invented the Symphonic Tone Poem, writing a dozen of them in the 1850s, many other European composers adopted the form for their own use.  In my experience, some of these composers of tone poems treated them more like roller coasters, and others treated them more like dark rides.  Those of Liszt himself are indisputably the roller coaster variety.  If you listen to Les Preludes or Mazeppa, you will find yourself reacting, almost physically, at a visceral level as the music finds its way to your core.  Liszt’s symphonic poem roller coasters rise and fall to great heights and profound depths, just like a roller coaster.  Another composer who wrote tone poems, the Frenchman Camille Saint-Saens, wrote roller coasters too.  Listen to this tone poem based on the tragic story of Phaeton and see if you don’t agree:

 

The first time I heard Saint-Saens’ Phaeton I found the climax to be simply overpowering and undeniably thrilling.

But the tone poems of the Czech composer Bedrich Smetana feel much more like dark rides.  In a dark ride the passenger is able to relax, sit passively and observe the different images that come his way.  This is essentially how Smetana’s tone poems work.  The 6 symphonic poems of his epic cycle My Homeland, each of them based on some story or image from Bohemia, are gentle, and do their work largely without penetrating the listener’s viscera.  Listening to Smetana’s tone poems is much more like watching a succession of rich, beautiful, immersive images pass before and around you than being inside a thrilling adventure.  His most famous tone poem, The Moldau, about Bohemia’s greatest river (called “Vlatava” in Czech) treats the listener to a beautiful and placid ride through a series of images from the river’s story:

We start at its springs and then take in the river’s fluid shape in the flowing main theme.  We then pass through a festive peasant wedding with merry polka dancing, then nymphs playing gracefully in the moonlight, imposing fortresses which echo with the sounds of ancient battles, and finally the widening of the river into the noble metropolis of Prague.  All of these images are quite clear from the music and they do not thrill us so much as act like a series of immersive paintings, much like being inside one of Disney’s dark rides.  You could easily make a similar ride out Smetana’s Moldau.  For another of Smetana’s tone poems which works in a similar way, see this post.

Disney also has at least one ride which exhibits features of both kinds of rides, Splash Mountain.

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It is quite immersive at times, moving slowly for the most part through rich and enjoyable scenery, and then there’s that thrilling drop at the end.  If anyone wrote tone poems that were sort of a mix, I think it was Richard Strauss – his are thrilling at times, and also passive and picturesque at times.  You can read more about his tone poems here.
Walt Disney understood that roller coasters and dark rides each worked their own special kind of magic, and that a day of leisure would benefit from both kinds of experiences.  Similarly, we have both kinds of symphonic poems to enjoy, depending on our mood.  Perhaps we would like Liszt or Saint-Saens to tug on our guts, or perhaps we would like Smetana to immerse us in an ever shifting diorama of rich imagery.  Fortunately, we have the choice as all of these composers gravitated to their preferred approaches.

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Music About Trees, Day 1 – From Bohemia’s Forests and Fields by Bedrich Smetana

This week’s theme is…Music about Trees!  Trees are noble, beautiful, helpful when we need them, and otherwise on the periphery of human drama.  Still, they are always there, forming our landscape, and providing poetic inspiration for artists and musicians.

Music About Trees, Day 1 – From Bohemia’s Forests and Fields by Bedrich Smetana

I often tell music history students that composers enter our historical canon for one of two reasons: either they did something really innovative or they did something(s) really well.  Rarely do you find an artist who did both, but a few come to mind: Debussy, Wagner, Schoenberg, maybe Vivaldi.  I would say most of the composers you hear about regularly did things really well.  Bach and Mozart, for example, really did not innovate that much, but instead inherited forms and genres from their immediate ancestors and elevated them to transcendently well-executed levels.  Maybe you could say Mozart was an innovator in the field of the piano concerto, but not really anywhere else, and I can’t think of anything Bach did that was incredibly novel.  He was just regularly mind-bogglingly good!  Beethoven may be somewhere in between.  Again, he did not create anything new; all the forms in which he excelled – symphony, piano sonata, string quartet – were inherited from his predecessors, but he imbued them with unprecedented life, heroism, idealism, and scale.  It’s why many music historians consider him to be a one-man transition between the Classical and Romantic eras, and I would say that’s pretty well true.  But he was not an innovator, in that he did forge new ground on which later composers worked.

Most of the composers who did this, that is innovated, are distinctive more for their ideas than for their music, which tends to be not all that extraordinary.  For example, the Florentine Camerata, who essentially invented the opera around 1600, produced these intriguing little experiments which feature solo vocalists singing with only orchestral accompaniment, or even less, which was a novel idea of musical texture and form.  But you would probably find the very first operas rather boring, and it was up to much better composers like Monteverdi, Handel, Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, and others to take those novel ideas and make them presentable in ways that are inspiring and fascinating.   You could somewhat see a similar pattern in Haydn and Beethoven, in that Haydn was largely solidifying the forms of the symphony and string quartet which Beethoven would later make amazingly good.  It’s not quite like the opera example, because plenty of people, myself included, find quite a bit to like in Haydn’s examples of both.  But most would tend to admit that Haydn was more of an innovator and Beethoven a perfecter in that sense.  Like any historical theory, it’s not without its weaknesses, but I think it’s apt enough.  Music history textbooks are packed with minor names, whose music we do not tend to find all that interesting, but whose ideas and innovations were essential in laying the groundwork for music written by the composers that we do.

Nineteenth century Bohemia can be said, I think, to furnish us with another such pairing.  The composer who has come to represent all that is great about musical Bohemia is Antonin Dvorak.  Through a brilliant and meticulous melding of his native Czech flavoring within the German symphonic tradition, he created a body of work that is still admired and frequently performed today, more than a century after his death.  Dvorak represented a Bohemian who, although completely nationalistic and heavily colored by his heritage, truly managed to transcend that heritage and become a bona-fide contender on the great stage of world ideals.  This was recognized by Johannes Brahms, himself a consistent advocate and aspirant for idealized art, who championed Dvorak as long as he lived because of this quality which he observed.  Had Dvorak not transcended his time and place in Brahms’ worthy estimation, this would not have been so (read more about Dvorak and Brahms in this post).

But, had Dvorak not been the beneficiary of the work of a pioneer who had blazed a trail in the service of creating a distinctive Bohemian voice in European art music a few decades earlier, Dvorak probably would not have developed as he did.  The pioneer is Bedrich Smetana, often called the father of Bohemian Art music, and recorded in history as the first notable Bohemian composer to create in a manner which convincingly, and even impressively at times, places Czech idioms and flavors within European forms and genres.  Without Smetana having taken his first steps about 20 years prior to Dvorak’s activity, Dvorak probably would have lacked the orientation, inspiration, and just plain comfort that he exhibited to move the process further ahead as he did.

Smetana’s most notable music is, in many ways, an artifact of a political agenda, an agenda that guided the course of his life, goals, and musical style.  Growing up in the Austrian Empire, a checkered conglomeration of diverse ethnic groups tenuously held together within a unified political border, he experienced the national furor which fueled the 1848 uprisings of many of these groups, including the Bohemians, motivated by the desire to have their own state.  This would only happen after the turbulence of the First World War concluded with the Treaty of Versailles, creating Czechoslovakia among other infant states, but Smetana became wrapped up in the uprisings, and was exiled to Sweden for a decade before he felt the time was right to return to Prague.  After this he redoubled and strengthened his revolutionary efforts, using art music of a distinctly Bohemian character to channel his nationalistic zeal, crafting notable operas and tone poems which somehow breathe the landscape and feeling of his land, in spite of never quoting the native folk song or dance explicitly.

If you hear music from Smetana today, chances are it will be one of the six symphonic poems that make up the noble cycle that he called My Homeland.  Each of the six formidable orchestral essays explores programmatically some element of Smetana’s prized Bohemian heritage from the River Moldau, to the great castle Vyserhad, rich with history, to the mythology of Sarka.  Smetana used the format of the single-movement symphonic poem pioneered by Mendelssohn as the concert overture (see this post), and later brought to maturity by his friend Liszt (see this post).  The symphonic poem would reach new heights of opulence under Richard Strauss in the coming decades, and Smetana saw that is was the ideal vehicle to illustrate the rich images and textures of his native Bohemia.  Smetana’s symphonic poems are truly poetic, and not weighted down by the heaviness to which the German orchestral tradition is sometimes prone; they float along like a vapor of transparent orchestral color that is lighter than air, moving gracefully from one theme to the next.  See if you don’t agree when you listen to his evocation of Bohemia’s majestic forests in From Bohemia’s Woods and Fields:

 

 

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