This year, musicians, composers and lovers of classical music celebrate the 200th birthday of the 19th century Czech composer Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884), who achieved world fame with his six-part symphonic cycle "My Fatherland" and his opera “The Bartered Bride”. Smetana is revered in his homeland as the father of Czech music.

What impresses me, as a musician and composer (although my career has been, and still is, in evolutionary biology), is his incredible fortitude in struggling through ill-health, critical scorn, personal tragedy, poverty, madness, and (like Beethoven) deafness to create a wonderful body of music.

On March 2, 1824, the third wife of a short, music-loving Czech beer brewer in Litomyšl, east of Prague, gave birth to a long-awaited son, Bedřich (in German: Friedrich), after seven daughters from previous relationships. The Smetana family enjoyed the extraordinary musical talent of their son, who played, as a child, the piano and violin very well, and began to compose at an early age.

After several moves to different Czech cities, Bedřich went to Prague, against his father's wishes, to study music. From 1845 onwards, the young Smetana, who was only 1.60 m tall, worked as a pianist and piano teacher. He was desperately poor. In his distress, he appealed to his idol Franz Liszt (1811–1886), who found a publisher for Smetana's Opus 1 – “Six Piano Pieces”. Liszt supported the younger Czech with advice and recommendations for many years.

Smetana first married at the age of 25. His wife Kateřina died of tuberculosis about ten years later after bearing four daughters, three of whom died early. The surviving daughter, Sophie, eventually became her father’s loyal carer.  A second marriage to a headstrong, selfish lady a year later resulted in two more daughters.  

Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884)

Since creative people are often unappreciated in their home country, Smetana took a position in Sweden. After five relatively happy and successful years as a Kapellmeister (bandmaster) in Gothenburg, where the compositions of the "Little Czech" were praised and appreciated, he returned to Prague in 1861 to work, initially as a piano teacher with his own teaching institute.

From 1868, Smetana worked as a theatre conductor and bandmaster in Prague, although again under poor financial conditions. The so-called "Old Czechs" – conservative and feudal in character – fought the progressive, artistic "Young Czech" Smetana, who clearly expressed his love of his fatherland. Although his first language was German, the musician regarded himself as a Czech patriot.

Unfortunately, to add to the misery of constant conflict and sniping, Smetana became increasingly deaf. In 1874 he had to resign. The Old Czechs were petty philistines, but they occupied powerful positions and made sure that his pension was just a pittance. At the age of 50, Smetana was impoverished, disabled, and largely unemployed (he had to contribute new compositions to his former employer).

So the father of Czech music spent the last nine years of his tormented life as a guest of his daughter Sophie and her husband. Stone deaf, he still composed world-famous works, such as  his “String Quartet in D minor”. (Beethoven composed his Ninth Symphony when he was deaf.)

To add to this misery, Smetana also suffered from mental illness that was so severe that he was committed to the "Prague State Lunatic Asylum". He died on May 12, 1884, at the age of 60.