When asked to interview Semyon Bychkov about Smetana’s Má vlast and then write this piece, I was delighted. My mother’s family originated in the Czech lands – in eastern Moravia, admittedly, not Smetana’s beloved Bohemia – and this orchestral six-poem cycle is one of the most celebrated pieces of Czech music. The only problem was, to the best of my knowledge, I had never heard it in its entirety. So, in advance of our conversation, I listened to recordings, including Bychkov’s excellent new recording with the Czech Philharmonic, studied the score and read up on the background to its composition.

When I call Bychkov, I have no idea what to expect: these conversations can range from abstract philosophy to deep-dig musicology. He assures me at once he doesn’t want to adopt a ‘programme notes’ approach, of going through the poems one by one. He wants to discuss the ‘philosophical, creative side of it’. He immediately enlarges upon that thought: ‘The core subject of this piece is home and the meaning of home; everything else is the gravy. What I find very remarkable about great Czech music, and this piece in particular, is how connected composers such as Smetana, Dvořák and Janáček are with the folk culture of the Czech people, to the lives of the people, as they would express it in folk music, and to nature. Even though Czechia is a small country, its nature is diverse and contains differences, for instance between Bohemia and Moravia, between regions and dialects. Great masters of composition have a connection between their music and folk music, the foundation of all music. Humans were singing and dancing in caves before there was notation, before there were instruments. That connection is never broken’.

‘Vyšehrad’ and ‘Vltava’

I steer him towards the details of each section of the cycle. The opening tone poem, ‘Vyšehrad’, is named after the half-legendary rock that towers over the Vltava river, supposedly the original seat of the Czech princes. It opens with a slow harp solo, which leads into a broader theme for brass and wind, setting the scene perfectly for what follows, linked thematically with the much better-known second movement, ‘Vltava’, which vividly evokes the most famous river of the Czech lands, starting with its first source, then the second, a hunting foray and a wedding scene. Then comes the lake with the moon and the mermaids, reminiscent of Dvořák’s Rusalkaand all part of the Bohemian countryside. There was a very funny discussion during rehearsals with the musicians of the Czech Philharmonic, who were used to playing the wedding section at a quicker tempo than I was suggesting. The metronome indications are very specific. Knowing how composers imagining something can vary with what it becomes in reality, one cannot say those are absolute, they never are, but they do give a certain idea of how various sections combine and correspond. This, to me, suggested something a little heavier than they were used to. One of the musicians told me, “but at our weddings here, people become so raucous when they have drunk enough”. He lived it. This was in his DNA. A Russian wedding wouldn’t be the same. It will be raucous too, it will be funny, but it will sometimes end with people beating each other up’. 

So, does Bychkov regard this as programmatic music? ‘At that time, the notion of programme music was very powerful: audiences  expected to know what a piece was about, as with Wagner, Liszt, Schumann, Mahler too, but he pulled away from this and explained his music only privately. Liszt was in a way a precursor of Smetana, also writing six tone poems. In the Twentieth Century, programmatic music was totally rejected. I don’t believe this piece is programmatic. It evokes images and stories, but at no point will Smetana tell you, “here we turn right, we come to the crossroads and we turn left and this is what we see”. There are indications in the score, of a wedding, a lake, woods, but that’s it. ‘Vltava’ is very suggestive of a river, but not descriptive. Those kinds of sounds are very hard to evoke’.

‘Sárka’

I press him on this. ‘Every culture is nourished by the past, not just the present; and our legends are, more often than not, about the human struggle for survival and identity, usually victorious but always bloody’. That description is certainly apt for the third part of Má vlast, ‘Sárka’, which evokes an ancient Czech tale, of a noble maiden who, having been cheated on by her betrothed, seeks vengeance on the entire race of men. She has her fellow warrior maidens tie her to a tree, like a tethered goat, to entice the Knight Ctirad and his men, who arrive and release her. Then, when they are soundly asleep, having been served with drugged mead, the warrior maidens set about slaughtering them.

‘What I find so wonderful about great music,’ says Bychkov, ‘is that it is able to depict either an event or a setting … In the fourth section, “From Bohemia’s Fields and Groves”, we see with our ears and we hear with our eyes, but it is not descriptive as such: it is so much higher than that. It evokes, not describes … The tonal development is so often completely unpredictable. Smetana uses leitmotifs in a very Wagnerian way, placing them in different tonalities, with very different characters. This prevents the music becoming either monotonous or predictable: we are on a quest to reveal something we think we know, presented in a way that is completely different, even though, melodically, it may be exactly the same’.

‘Tábor and Blaník’

We move on to the closely-connected fifth and sixth sections, ‘Tábor’ and ‘Blaník’. ‘Tábor’ relates to the most famous era of Czech history, the Hussite Wars of the early 1400s. The motto theme is taken from the Hussite battle hymn ‘Are ye not the warriors of God?’. The sixth and final poem, ‘Blaník’, begins with the same motif that concludes ‘Tábor’. Blaník is a mythical, hollow hill to which the Hussite heroes led by St Wenceslas retired, to sleep until such time as they shall ride out again, to rescue their homeland. At the close of the piece, a section of the same Hussite hymn sounds, in combination with the opening theme of ‘Vyšehrad’, a triumphant chorale of aspiration, triumph and resurrection. ‘At the end of a performance, the artists are extremely wasted,’ says Bychkov, ‘both emotionally and physically as well … For the string players especially, it never stops. It’s relentless. It is a revelation to us, whenever we come into contact with it’.

For all its grandeur, pomp and portentousness, this closing diptych of the cycle unexpectedly contains some of the most tender music in the entire cycle, notably, in ‘Tábor’, the three, fleeting and almost identical sections for woodwind, at bars 63-67, 94-97 and, finally, a tiny Lento interlude in the principal molto vivace section, this time supported by a single, low note from the strings, at bars 134-136. Then there is the haunting melody for solo oboe from bar 70 in ‘Blaník’, picked up by the other woodwind and horns, then the strings, followed by a no less ethereal melody, led by a solo flute from bar 121, then echoed by oboes and clarinets before the piu mosso section. ‘Yes, yes,’ responds Bychkov, ‘and without having those tender moments, the music would have lost so much … the contrast between the tenderness and the drama, sometimes violence … his ability to bring them into confrontation and to resolve them somehow, that is given to so few … I’m almost amazed that you are using the word tenderness … if you heard that in my recording, that makes me happy … because we can be inhibited about expressing this, but it is indispensable. It is that aspect that touched – and touches – me so much’.

I ask him to elaborate. ‘This is the ultimate mystery of the creative process, beyond comprehension and explanation,’ he explains. ‘Music, especially the non-verbal music, without text, affects us in a way we can never fully explain: it can be amazing music, but in a performance that will not touch you, or else it might touch you deeply. That initial response is from the nervous system. Once touched and affected, then you gravitate towards it, because you want to experience it again, when you will naturally hear things you didn’t hear the first time, because one can only absorb so much. Then intellect begins to work, because you want to understand what makes it so. The first reaction, however, will always be an emotional one. The evocation in Má vlast is breathtaking: they don’t know how they do it, but the greatest composers are capable of this.

During the composition of this cycle, Smetana became profoundly deaf. ‘This, for me, is his equivalent of the Heiligenstadt Testament of Ludwig van Beethoven,’ declares Bychkov, ‘one of the most heart-breaking documents ever left by anyone … Everything after the first two tone poems in this cycle, the composer heard entirely and only within himself … There is no discernible diminution of his musical craft and the polyphonic complexity of the writing is staggering and relentless, throughout all six poems … If anything, it becomes more and more demanding of the interpreters, as it goes on … It is miraculous’. 

Nationalism and music

I now feel able to confess that it was only my preparation for this conversation that had brought me into close contact with this extraordinary cycle for the first time, my Czech heritage notwithstanding. I need not have worried. ‘I myself never specifically looked into the whole piece until I became Music Director of the Czech Philharmonic,’ explains Bychkov. ‘Then I said to myself, this is the Bible of Czech music, so it is not possible, not acceptable, for me not to conduct this work, so I got into the piece. You have to live in the piece and believe in it. Smetana and Má vlast are as holy to the Czechs as Verdi and his masterworks are to the Italians, or Tchaikovsky is to the Russians. When I started working on it, I became obsessed with it. You can be very affected by a piece, then it wears off, but not with this music. If anything, it keeps growing. Then I asked myself, why? Why am I so affected and touched by this piece? Then I stumbled upon a thought: this piece is not just about the Czech homeland of the Czech people. It is about everyone’s homeland – and everyone has one, and every homeland has its dark pages, which are part of the life and history of the nation, and everyone has to live with that. This makes the piece completely universal, not just a piece of great Czech music, but a piece that is for everyone and about everyone, about their connection to their own roots’.

Is Bychkov not concerned there’s a nationalist edge to the piece, which might offend modern, liberal sensibilities? ‘The word “nationalism” naturally provokes enormous suspicion, has a dreadful connotation, but this piece, for me, represents a positive nationalism, an affirmation of identity and pride. We must understand those who feel they’ve been dominated, but don’t want to lose their identity. This is hard to comprehend, for those who’ve never experienced domination or suppression at the hands of a more powerful nation. Patriotism will always be present and, in expressing these sentiments, Smetana aligned with practically the entire Czech intelligentsia at that time: Dvořák, Janáček, Martinů were no different’.

He clearly regards Smetana as a very major composer. ‘Absolutely’. Yet he isn’t usually part of people’s “Top Ten”? ‘Because people don’t know the music,’ is his unequivocal answer. In any case, ‘we are not in sport … in art, nothing is objective – except the effort artists make’. Bychkov is disappointed by the international reluctance to programme the full cycle, but he won’t give up. ‘Together with my colleagues in the Czech Philharmonic, I have already played this wonderful music of Smetana in Tokyo and at the Barbican Hall, and I will go on proposing it and promoting it at every opportunity. Má vlast is truly Czech, but not just about the Czechs. We all have rivers and lakes, legends and folklore. Má vlast is about all of us and all of our homelands: a universal piece, with a Czech accent’.

The new recording of Smetana's Má Vlast by the Czech Philharmonic and Semyon Bychkov is out now. Find out more at Pentatone