9. Piano works.

As far as quantity is concerned, piano works take up a dominant position in Smetana's works of the 1840s and 50s. In his self-taught period standard dance genres predominate, above all polkas; there are also attempts at the lyrical piano piece. During his studies with Josef Proksch this field developed in parallel with his exercises and compositional studies, with Smetana's first piano cycle Bagatelles et impromptus appearing at the beginning of 1844. It points to the various ways forward taken in his future works: salon pieces as a type of poeticized study and song without works linked with the names of Mendelssohn and Henselt but also with the poetical music of Schumann. For Smetana's orientation the French titles of the compositions are themselves eloquent in this respect, and he continued to use them frequently. It was only the further cycle of Six morceaux caractéristiques which he designated as his op.1, among other reasons to add weight to the dedication to Liszt. The plan to compose a cycle of albumleaves in all 24 major and minor keys also arose during this period. But it remained incomplete and in the end Smetana grouped some of the albumleaves into his opp.2 and 3 and into the Skizzen opp.4 and 5, which he dedicated to Clara Schumann. In the continuing composition of polkas, stylistic tendencies appeared to be modelled on Chopin, a characteristic which deepened in 1848–54 in the Trois polkas de salon op.7 and the Trois polkas poétiques op.8. The culmination of this attempt at idealized dances is the Souvenir de Bohême en forme de polkas opp.12–13 (1859–60). Besides reviews and reminiscences of his contemporaries Smetana's virtuoso composition tell us about his technical abilities. He wrote most of these pieces, for instance the transcription of Schubert's song Der Neugierige from Die schöne Müllerin, or the concert étude Am Seegestade – eine Erinnerung, or the cadenzas for Mozart's and Beethoven's piano concertos, for his own use at a time when he saw this as a major part of his role as a musician coming from his career as a piano virtuoso. He initiated this line with the fantasia Böhmische Melodien and closed it with the Fantasie na české národní písně (‘Fantasia on Czech Folksongs’), which he wrote in 1862 for concerts in the aid of the National Theatre.

After his return to Bohemia Smetana's works were bound up with musical genres considered as representative of national music and he returned to piano works only after 13 years with the cycle Rêves (1875). Its various movements were dedicated to his former aristocratic women pupils who in 1874 organized a benefit concert for his trip to foreign ear specialists. The whole cycle nostalgically harks back to the famous era of the characteristic piano pieces of the 1840s and to Smetana's models, Schumann, Chopin and Liszt. Quite different aims are represented by the two series (1877 and 1879) of Czech Dances with a claim to large-scale concert forms. About the first series, polkas, he wrote to his publisher Velebín Urbánek on 2 March 1879; ‘My title “Polkas” is important, for my efforts are directed towards idealizing the polka in particular, as Chopin did in his day with the mazurka, and these four polkas are a continuation of those published years ago.’ And the aim of placing in the concert hall the stylization of further Czech Dances in the second series of the cycle Smetana formulated polemically in a letter also to Urbánek a month later: ‘I suggest publishing folkdances under the title Czech Dances. Every dance under its own name, e.g. “Furiant”, “Skočná”, “Rejdovák and Rejdovačka”, “Sousedská”, “Hulán” … etc.… Whereas Dvořák gives his pieces just a general name “Slawische Tänze” with people not knowing which they are, and whether they exist at all, we would show which dances with real names we Czechs have’.

Smetana, Bedřich