Smetana, Piazzolla & Brahms: Nov 21–23, 2025
- cbeeson69
- 4 days ago
- 11 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Oh hi there! In more of a listening mood?
I made an audio version of my notes you can listen to here!
DIVE IN Below to read and watch stuff!
Bedřich Smetana
"Vltava" - The Moldau
First, Bedřich Smetana - A story of True Grit
Bedřich Smetana (1824-1884) was a Czech composer and pianist of the Romantic era. He was interested in music performance and composition from a very early age and although he first attempted a career teaching and as a touring performer he returned to composition where he eventually found his strongest footing and secured his legacy as the “father of Czech music".
In 1848 he joined a short lived but influential pro-democracy movement, composing music to bolster the effort. Even though the movement initially failed, this time was crucial to his early development of what would become a strong commitment to composing music that identified and celebrated independent Czech culture. It wasn’t until the early/mid 1860s that he began to enjoy real success as a composer, despite professional jealousies and politically based sidelining due to his association with left leaning artists, his participation in that pro democracy movement, and his interest in supporting an independent Czech culture. For example, his wildly popular opera “The Bartered Bride” from 1866 was panned by critics in 1871 as being “no better than that of a gifted fourteen-year-old boy” and just a few years later he barely survived an ouster from his prestigious opera director position in Prague by detractors who said that under his influence “Czech opera sickens to death at least once annually.”
He continued on, despite all of this and despite multiple health issues including increasing deafness and a constant ringing in one ear. As you might imagine, all of this stress led him to some low emotional states. In 1875 he wrote “If my disease is incurable, then I should prefer to be liberated from this life.” This statement of suffering recalls Ludwig van Beethoven’s famous Heiligenstadt Testament. (You can read more about that here.)
During the last ten years of his life, with the professional and health stresses at their peak, he composed some of his most powerful and celebrated works including Má vlast (My Fatherland), his autobiographical string quartet “From My Life” (which includes a very high E in the final movement indicating the ringing in his ear), 3 more operas, and several choral and solo piano pieces. It’s hard to imagine doing this kind of work under normal circumstances much less with worsening health conditions and income insecurity!
Just as Smetana was descending into the very worst of his health crisis, including severe mental and emotional disregulation that kept him from attending public and private events, his contributions to Czech music and culture were finally being recognized and celebrated. After his death in 1884 his contribution to a Czech national musical identity and his legacy as the “father” of Czech classical music has continued to grow. He created an environment in which his slightly younger contemporaries like Antonín Dvořák, and Leoš Janáček, and those that followed shortly thereafter like 1932 Olympic medalist Josef Suk [/watch?v=rruD198FwAU] and Bohuslav Martinů could further build a sense of Czech cultural identity and influence. (Yes, you read that right. Josef Suk won an Olympic medal for composition in 1932. BECAUSE THAT USED TO BE A REAL ACTUAL THING.)
🎉Random Fun Facts🎉
Smetana has a star on the Musikmeile "Walk of Fame" in Vienna alongside many other notable composers who spent time there, including Antonio Vivaldi - which is only relevant because he wrote The Four Seasons which eventually inspired Astor Piazzolla’s Seasons of Buenos Aires which is programmed with Smetana’s Má vlast on the Nov 22-24, 2025 Colorado Symphony performances. But what good is any of this without my usual digressions? 🤓
The asteroid 2047 Smetana was named after Bedřich Smetana by the Czech astronomer who discovered it in 1971. The Smetana asteroid has its own half kilometer sized moon orbiting around it too!
Now, some music Highlights:
Smetana composed Má vlast (My Fatherland in English) between 1874 and 1879. It is a collection of six pieces for symphony orchestra that depict scenes, legends, or the history of Bohemia in a tone poem format.
The pieces are:
Vyšehrad (The High Castle)
Vltava (The Moldau)
Šárka, (a legendary female warrior)
Z českých luhů a hájů (From Bohemia's Woods and Fields)
Tábor (a town in the South Bohemian region)
Blaník (an impressive mountain containing a legendary Czech army inside on stand-by… would that be sorta like a Czech NORAD???)
These six pieces can be performed as a set but are most often performed individually. Due to their nationalistic qualities and Smetana’s commitment to elevating an individualized Czech cultural identity, Má vlast has opened the Prague Spring International Music Festival, held on the anniversary of Smetana’s death each year since 1952.
The second of these, Vltava, The Moldau, is the most often performed of the set.
Smetana intentionally composed the music as a tone painting depiction of the flow of Vltava, or Moldau river, from its humble beginning to its majestic end. From Smetana’s own description: “The composition describes the course of the Vltava, starting from two small springs, to the unification of both streams into a single current, the course of the Vltava through woods and meadows, through landscapes where a farmer's wedding is celebrated, the round dance of the mermaids in the night's moonshine: on the nearby rocks loom proud castles, palaces and ruins aloft. The Vltava swirls into the St. John's Rapids; then it widens and flows toward Prague, and majestically vanishes into the distance, ending at the Elbe.”
A typical performance of The Moldau lasts about 13 minutes.
Nerd alert!🤓🤓🤓
Vltava contains the tune Smetana is most famous for, even though it’s originally from somewhere else and has been used in several other settings. Ready for this? BUCKLE UP!
Smetana adapted the melody of La Mantovana, a 16th century Italian tune, which had also become popular in Renaissance Europe and been adapted as the Flemish "Ik zag Cecilia komen", the Polish "Pod Krakowem", the Romanian "Carul cu boi", the Scottish "My mistress is prettie", and the Ukrainian "Kateryna Kucheryava".
Flash forward to the 19th century where Samuel Cohen adapted the Romanian version to set the Hatikvah poem which became the Israeli national anthem, Smetana used it in Vltava, and French composer Camille Saint-Saens used it in his Rhapsode Bretonne of 1891.
But wait! There’s more!
This tune also appears in an old Czech folk song, Kočka leze dírou ("The Cat Crawls Through the Hole"); legendary saxophonist Stan Getz performed it as "Dear Old Stockholm” and pianist Horst Jankowski played a jazzy easy listening version of the tune on his 1965 hit, "A Walk in the Black Forest.”
Resources and notable (Nerdable?) tidbits:
Compare Smetana's adaptation of the big tune to these other versions!
Astor Piazzolla
"Cuatros Estaciones Porteños"
DIVE IN!
Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992 ) was an Argentine composer and bandoneón performer, primarily of the tango tradition. He was heavily influenced by multiple genres of music from early childhood including classical and jazz, and showed a nearly immediate gift for the bandoneón, a type of accordion with buttons instead of a keyboard used in tango orchestras. Carlos Gardel invited him to go on tour when he was just 13 years old and by the time he was 18 he had a spot in Anibal Troilo’s tango orchestra where he began arranging music. At 20 he was discovered by pianist Arthur Rubinstein who recommended him to study with preeminent classical composer Alberto Ginastera. It was during these studies that he developed knowledge and an ear for the works of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, and French composer Maurice Ravel among others. He began composing music in the classical genre but these genre distinctions between classical and tango were already becoming blurred for him. This began causing tension with Troilo as his arrangements were leaning away from traditional tango. Piazzolla left Troilo’s orchestra, working with other tango orchestras and eventually forming his own, but even that proved not enough for Piazzolla. His thirst for learning and absorbing the music of the classical masters into his own musical language was so great that he nearly turned his back altogether on tango. Still, he incorporated bandoneón into a major classical work “Buenos Aires Symphony in Three Movements" which landed him a grant in 1953 to study with the famed Nadia Boulanger in Paris.
Nadia Boulanger was a storied instructor and a powerful force for lifting composers’ visibility by elevating their unique voice to the world. While studying with Boulanger he attempted to keep from her that his primary instrument was bandoneón and his foundational compositional genre was tango, fearing she might judge him an inferior composer for it. Luckily this backfired in a spectacular fashion! From an interview, Piazzolla recalled:
She kept asking: “You say that you are not a pianist. What instrument do you play, then?” And I didn’t want to tell her that I was a bandoneón player, because I thought, “Then she will throw me from the fourth floor.” Finally, I confessed and she asked me to play some bars of a tango of my own. She suddenly opened her eyes, took my hand and told me: “You idiot, that’s Piazzolla!” And I took all the music I composed, ten years of my life, and sent it to hell in two seconds…
Apparently this was the permission that Piazzolla needed to go forward with a fusion style of composition that combined tango with elements of classical music he had been studying and the jazz he had been immersed in from childhood. From this, his “nuevo tango” style was born!
Fun Facts and extras:
Grace Jones (long live the QUEEN), the experimental disco performer, model, actress, and LGBTQ+ cultural icon, incorporated Piazzolla’s “Libertango” into her 1981 hit “I’ve Seen That Face Before”. Enjoy this artsy video, even though she is depicted with an accordion instead of a bandoneón. 😎🚫🪗
“I’ve Seen That Face Before - Libertango” also appears in Wes Anderson’s 2021 film The French Dispatch.
An arrangement of Punta del Este was used in the 1995 film 12 Monkeys, and most impressively, the entire soundtrack of the 1981 film Le Pont du Nord is made up of just two of Piazzolla’s pieces: Libertango and Violentango.
About the music:
Astor Piazzolla’s Cuatros Estaciones Porteños (“The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires”), is a set of four pieces composed individually between 1965 and 1970. In their original form they were composed for violin, piano, electric guitar, acoustic bass, and of course his instrument, the bandoneón. Piazzolla and his quintet performed them individually or sometimes together, but they weren’t meant to strictly be heard as a set.
Each of the pieces is named after a season and includes the word porteño, indicating a heritage link to Buenos Aires. For example, Verano Porteño translates to Buenos Aires Summer.
When Piazzolla and the quintet performed them as a set the order was Otoño Porteño (Autumn), Invierno Porteño (Winter), Primavera Porteño (Spring), and finally Verano Porteño (Summer), even though this was not the order in which Piazzolla composed them.
Piazzolla first composed Verano Porteño in 1965 to be used as incidental music for the Alberto Muñoz play ‘Melenita do oro’. The following three: Invierno, Primavera, and Otoño were written primarily in 1969 and completed in 1970.
Between 1996 and 1998, composer Leonid Desyatnikov made a new arrangement of Piazzolla’s “Estaciones" in collaboration with violinist Gidon Kremer. This arrangement reflects Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in a few notable ways. Most obviously, he orchestrated it for solo violin and string orchestra, the same instrumentation Vivaldi used. Less obviously, he shaped each of Piazzolla’s pieces into a 3 part structure to reflect Vivaldi’s 3 movement structure for each of the Seasons. Desyatnikov also includes references and quotes from Vivaldi in imaginative ways in each of the four pieces. Some fun ‘easter eggs’ to listen for if you’re familiar with the Vivaldi!
Other things to listen for are special effects like swooping energetic slides, a scratching technique called ‘lija’, and tapping or snapping sounds which evoke the percussive effects found in tango groups.
A typical performance lasts about 25 minutes.
Resources:
Please note: Due to unforseen circumstances, Kerson Leong is replacing the originally scheduled violin soloist. He is amazing. You won't be disappointed!
EXTra cool nerdery!
For those of you interested in a deeper dive into tango...
Claude Sim recommends: Osvaldo Pugliese's "Instrumentales Inolvidables Vol. 3" which you can find on Spotify. Also he says "Zero Hour by Piazzolla is the Kind of Blue of tango albums." [hashtagNERD!!!🤓❤️]
An example of Astor Piazzolla's Nuevo Tango style:
Johannes Brahms
Symphony No. 2
DIVE IN!
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) was a German composer, pianist, and conductor during the Romantic stylistic era. Brahms was relentlessly committed to composition and notoriously shy. He even grew the enormous beard he’s known for in part to have something to hide behind!
Brahms leaned on more conservative harmonic language and structures than his progressive Romantic era contemporaries and drew ire from Richard Wagner for example (honestly, a pretty easy thing to do given how insecure and obnoxious he was) who couldn’t deal with Brahms’ popularity. Good thing there was no X-formerly-known-as-twitter-which-is-now-the-dumpster-fire-that’s-basically-truth-social going on back then.
What a drain, that guy. Anyway, back to business here!
Brahms studied violin, a little cello, and piano as a young person. It was during his piano studies, much to his teacher’s annoyance, that he began spending more time composing music than practicing piano. His father, a horn player, was at first concerned about this shift away from what appeared to be Johannes’ great talent for performance but eventually shifted his studies to a piano AND composition teacher. This is where Brahms obtained his foundational interest in the compositional approaches of J.S. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven among others.
It was after meeting Robert Schumann that Brahms began to gain a sort of ‘wunderkind’ reputation. Schumann wrote glowingly about Brahms saying he was "fated to give expression to the times in the highest and most ideal manner”. This kind of attention served to get Brahms his first published works, but also crippled him with anxiety that he might not fulfill this kind of promise. This was so strong that it took him 21 years (!!) to complete his first symphony. Luckily that seemed to have broken through whatever barrier was there since his Symphony No. 2 took only a few months to complete.
Brahms is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the "Three Bs" of classical music, a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow who probably wanted to be the fourth B… 🤓
Random factoid: his father’s name was Johann Jakob, John Jacob (but not, unfortunately Jingleheimer Schmidt) 🫣😂😂
About the Music:
Brahms composed Symphony No. 2 in the summer of 1877 while enjoying some fresh air at an Austrian lakeside resort town.
This might account for the overall gentle pastoral quality of the symphony, but there are periodic portents of darkness or concern - rumbling timpani moments, and layered dissonant trombone moments for example. Maybe the weather was bad that summer, or maybe Brahms was in a dark mood despite the locale but we know he was also writing a very dark and twisty piece around the same time which may have crept into the Symphony. We also know that he considered himself “a severely melancholic person” and felt that “black wings are constantly flapping above us”, even though he also had a reputation for a quick wit and a bit of prankstering.
Symphony No. 2 is in four movements:
Allegro non troppo [quick, not too much] - about 17 minutes
Adagio non troppo [slow, not too much] - about 10 minutes
Allegretto grazioso [a bit quick and light] - about 5 minutes
Allegro con spirito [quick with spirit] - about 10 minutes
The first movement contains a 'hidden in plain sight' familiar tune. Listen for an adaptation of his famous "Wiegenlied" lullaby melody as a contrasting theme to the more muscular material around it.
Symphony No. 2 features some beautiful and powerful woodwind and brass solos, but possibly the most dramatic moment comes from the cello section playing the opening melody of the second movement. Revel in the glory of the cello section as they show the incredible range of expression Brahms calls for.
Even though there are troubling gestures and a persistent capitulation between major and minor tonalities within this otherwise pastoral and contemplative work, it finishes in celebratory joy.
A typical performance of Symphony No. 2 lasts about 45 minutes.
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