catalogue

The composer Bedřich Smetana (1824–1884) has been loved by the Czechs as the creator of their national music, abroad he has been admired as the composer of the comic opera The Bartered Bride and the cycle of symphonic poems My Country. It is not easy to depict in short the life of an exceptional artist, one who was attacked for his modernistic views in his time, who lived through many family dramas (death of his three children, death of his first wife, discord with his second wife) and who suffered a great personal blow when he lost his hearing in 1874. During the last ten years of his life, despite his deafness, he wrote several operas, the cycle My Country, string quartets and a number of virtuoso piano pieces.

The director Martin Suchánek looks at the composer without embellishment, presenting the lights as well as the shadows of his life and giving a true picture of the time. In that sense the documentary offers a new view, it does not try to build an uncritical monument to the composer. In so doing it reveals the exceptional quality of Smetana´s music as well as the courage of his life´s struggle with fate.