Bedřich Smetana

Any or all of that in music is called nationalism.

Petrik Smetana was the first Czech nationalist composer.

He was also a political animal.

Smetana fought in the 1848 Czech uprising against Austria.

The uprising failed, but Smetana's music didn't.

He composed the first opera in the Czech language, and he wrote a set of six orchestra pieces called Mavlast, My Fatherland, in which he painted musical pictures of his country.

The most famous one is about the Moldau River, which flows through the Czech capital city, Prague.

If you know the Israeli national anthem Hatikvah, that tune probably sounds very familiar.

And if it's classical music, I'm absolutely in love with, ah, okay, so romantic music.

Smetana by Moldau.

Wow.

And contemporary music, I would say Arvo Part.

I think we are a really special country, because we are a very small country, but the Czech composers in all the ages are the best brand that we can promote.

From Jandis Mazelenka through Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, of course, Leoš Janáček.

And I think it's very important that the music is the language, and it's a language without borders.

It's the most international language we can imagine.

So there's Anna de Resburgo, which is an 1835 opera by a Florentine composer, Carolina Uccelli.

And then there's a Smetana opera called Tadja Mestvi in Czech and Dajanier Camille Sassin from 1911.

And they have announced all of that and they have a year to get it together to finish their casting.

And there'll be a 76th opera festival and presumably going on for many more years.

So we move on to the comedy, the one for fun.

The comedy is The Secret by Smetana.

Smetana is a famous composer, despite, uh, the Carolina Aucielli is very famous, has been done in Wexford, Wychica, uh, The Kiss, and this year we will do The Secret.

The Secret is a, a funny story about a treasure hunt.

Everybody is looking for, um, a treasure that is hidden somewhere.

New research published in Nature Communications tested whether different people imagine similar stories when listening to the same instrumental music and whether their brains showed matching activity while doing so.

That is so interesting because, I mean, presumably it just depends on the associations that you have because there's a bit of music by a composer called Smetana and every time I hear it, I imagine a boat on the open oceans because this was used in the soundtrack to an audiobook of Treasure Island that I had as a kid.

How do scientists even test that other people are going to be imagining, I don't know, the bit of music's about a river?

Well, historically, music science focused on mechanics like pitch and rhythm.

The fugues of the Well-Tempered Clavier he analyzed down to the smallest detail.

When in his melancholy late days he received a visit from the young Czech Bedrich Smetana with a plea to advise him about musical studies, the taciturn master said no more than, Study Bach.

But I have studied Bach, protested Smetana.

Study him again, replied the declining composer, and relapsed into moody silence.