Less ink has been spilled over musical nationalism than blood over political nationalism – but a great deal of ink nonetheless. And arguably some blood, for the two phenomena are closely linked. Musical nationalism has supported and been supported by political nationalism: in the nineteenth century an opera performance could be the catalyst for a revolution, or a tone poem could rally the pride of a politically prostrate nation. Musical nationalism is clearly a Romantic concept – not just because modern nationalism and musical Romanticism are systems of thought that emerged contemporaneously, but because of a common idea at their nexus: ‘the folk’. It is a concept that depends on both Romanticism and nationalism to make sense, and which in return has undergirded musical nationalism. Indeed, in English, German, Russian, and other languages, ‘national music’ and ‘folk music’ began as synonyms. Over the long nineteenth century ‘national’ and ‘nationalist’ music were terms that frequently came to apply to types of art music. Yet they never separated fully from ‘folk music’. Evaluations of the ‘national’ characteristics of art composers such as Grieg or Glinka have frequently fastened on the perceived connection to folk music in their work. At other times, the connection is less direct. The iconic national status of Beethoven or Verdi, for example, has nominally been built on carrying forward traditions rather removed from folk music. And yet ‘the folk’ still lurk underneath, an indelible legacy of Romanticism.

The Nation

To unravel this knot, we should begin by tracing the history of the ideas themselves. Most historians agree that, in the form in which it has been disseminated around the world, nationalism was a phenomenon born in the eighteenth century.¹ Earlier ideas of ‘nation’, ‘liberty’, and ‘self-government’ were tied to feudal fealty and competition. It was only when the idea of divine right was rejected that those who would govern had to find new answers to the question of what united ‘a people’ under their government. If, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, government was a social contract, then who should be bound together by or excluded from such an arrangement? The answer came in appeals to (and sometimes dogged invention of) a shared culture that could become central to ‘national’ identities: languages, laws, religious customs, literature – and artistic products. ‘Cultural’ and ‘political’ nationalism have thus always been two sides of the same coin, the latter reliant on identities built up by the former. Since these identities included music, the first real assertions of ethno-national ownership of musical styles, techniques, and traditions date to the early eighteenth century.²

Such appeals to shared culture became many times stronger, however, when they could evoke ancient, mythical origins. By the second half of the eighteenth century, Europeans were increasingly encountering cultures very different from their own. More importantly, they had begun conceiving such cultures not simply as heathen outsiders of a divine order they themselves represented, but as frozen earlier stages of humanity on its fixed path away from ‘nature’ and towards modernity – stages they believed their own cultures to have passed through as well. These European ethnocentric understandings of human development were shared by so-called pro- and anti-Enlightenment thinkers, despite the fact that the former saw ‘progress’ towards the European present as positive and the latter saw it as an intangible loss. In terms of nationalism, however, it was the latter ‘Romantic’ viewpoint that most frequently shaped the discourse, because when proto-Romantic thinkers such as Rousseau began to envision modern civilisation as representing a breach with a purer, more natural human past – for which they yearned nostalgically – the idea of ‘authenticity’ emerged.³ Tracing cultural traditions backwards towards hoary natural ethnic roots could add a great essentialist force to any national claims.

The Folk and Their Music

The idea of ‘the folk’ originates from just this urge. Europeans found ‘the folk’ the moment they conceived of the natural, ‘primitive’ Other not abroad but within their own midst: as pure peasants untouched by the corrupting forces of industrialisation, urbanisation, and modernity in general. These people, seen as living preservations of any nation’s past, were first ‘discovered in plain sight’ on the geographic edge of Europe, in the Scottish Highlands. The apparent unearthing by James Macpherson of pre-Christian epics by the Celtic bard Ossian still living in oral tradition catalysed a discussion across Europe about the potential of isolated groups to create and to preserve delicate literature and music without writing. From a modern point of view, Macpherson was a fraud. He had assembled into a coherent whole his English ‘translations’ from diverse oral fragments of Gaelic poetry he had picked up, modifying them and adding the connective tissue to make them narrative epics. But these facts did not diminish the cultural earthquake caused by the Ossian publications in the 1760s. The debates they immediately spurred about non-literate creativity, collective creation versus modern reproduction, and the reliability and power of oral tradition spread across the continent, playing a prominent role in establishing modern standards of authorship and authenticity in the first place.

Since rural oral poetry, including Ossianic poetry, was generally sung, it is no surprise that the term ‘national music’ – tied to these authentic ‘natural’ roots of a culture – entered the English language in the disputes around Ossian. It meant something close to our term ‘folk music’, which is actually a later retranslation of ‘national music’ back into English. Johann Gottfried Herder, the early Romantic Prussian thinker who coined the word Volkslied, first introduced it in a 1773 essay on Ossian, as a translation of ‘national song’.⁴ Volk in German captured the mystical collective properties of nationalism perfectly – like the Slavic narod, it can be rendered in English as ‘people’, ‘folk’, or ‘nation’ in different contexts. After Herder, discourse on narodnaya song and music seeped into Slavic languages (and decades later, ‘folk song’ and ‘folk music’ seeped slowly into English). The expanding vocabulary indicated the international potential of the ideas: Herder’s foray into the Ossian debate had been motivated by his ardent belief that pure, authentic rural groups similar to the Scottish Highlanders could be found all over Europe (‘we Germans too’ had them, he gushed). He had encouraged literate Europeans to collect folk poetry and song from every nation, and a year later (1774) published the first edition of his own international collection, soon retitled Volkslieder.⁵ As if in answer to Herder’s call, other collections – such as Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano’s famous Des Knaben Wunderhorn – rapidly followed, in Germany and beyond.

The understandings of the relationships between words and music in these Ur-Romantic collections also exposed typical Romantic thought patterns. Mid-eighteenth-century thinkers – such as Condillac, Monboddo, Rousseau, and Herder – had begun to argue that ‘music’ in some form was a primal medium of communication prior to language.⁶ Versions of this theory became extremely influential (resurfacing in Darwin’s work and even modern evolutionary theory), and led to the famous Romantic cliché that music was a ‘universal’ or ‘natural’ language, which helps explain why many published collections of national song across Europe, such as those just mentioned, contained words but no music. For many editors, the lack of printed music in no way indicated its lack of import. Just the opposite: there was more effort expended on pinning down on paper specific, sanctioned versions of the words of songs because collectors assumed that the music needed less help to spread intact orally across time and space. Music could perpetuate itself naturally and primally – as a more direct and untutored expression of the soul. The same assumption guided the famous national song collectors of the period who did print both words and music (e.g., Vasily Fyodorovich Trutovsky and then Nikolay Lvov and Ivan Prach in Russia; Robert Burns and his partners in Scotland; and Johann Friedrich Reichardt and others in Germany; or later Théodore Hersart de la Villemarqué in France).⁷ In their editorial decisions and in their prefatory material they made it clear that they too considered words subject to ‘decay’ in oral transmission amongst the national populace (often because they came upon bawdy texts where they had hoped for idealised ‘national’ poetry). They assumed that the different versions of texts they found could be traced back to a single high-quality original representing the nation’s natural values. With music, however, the same collectors were prepared to accept different variants and even allow that continued changes in oral tradition could lead to equally ‘authentic’ versions. By the middle of the nineteenth century, folklorists acquiesced to a similar idea of valid variants in living tradition in other media (poetry, stories, myths, etc.);⁸ but early on, ‘national music’ had a particular cachet, worthy of the generally high status of (ineffable) music amongst the arts in Romantic ideologies.

National Art Music: Old Cultivated Traditions versus New National Schools

Despite these common assumptions, the national implications of music varied heavily from place to place. In the roughest terms, claims over music as national cultural capital split into two types based on the strength of local traditions of educated, cultivated music. In France as well as (the future) Italy and Germany, there were centuries-old religious and operatic training systems that had created musical styles far removed from those of the rural ‘folk’. The funding, organisation, and achievements of such well-established educational and professional traditions could themselves be staked out as national property. Indeed, German nationalists had even more: the recent explosion of prestigious instrumental music from Vienna and the North could be newly leveraged as a cultivated heritage allowing Germany to bid for musical dominance against its neighbours in specifically ‘Romantic’ terms. Champions of modern German composition increasingly framed ‘pure’ instrumental music as the most direct window into the human psyche (a twist on the idea of music’s primacy discussed in the previous paragraph).⁹ As several of the other chapters in this volume touch upon, promoters could frame this music – full of modern artistic ambition but devoid of words that might tie it directly to a particular time and place, even to a particular language – as ‘universal’. And yet, as the same writers pointed out happily, it was the Germans who had led the way.

Meanwhile, unlike the musical ‘centres’ above, most nations in the rest of Europe, and many others around the world, could not claim well-funded professional musical traditions as their cultural property. Whether through proximity to the dominant musical nations or through political subjugation, these musically ‘peripheral’ nations, to the extent that they supported elite music making, had historically sent their ‘best and brightest’ to the metropoles to be educated or had imported educators from those centres. Their trained musicians thereby found themselves in a weak position to argue that they represented autochthonous culture. Instead – as we might expect given the centrality of ‘the folk’ in nationalist discourse – bourgeois nationalists in such places directly promoted ‘national music’ in its original ‘folk’ sense. They collected and published ‘their’ rural traditional music with particular purpose and speed.

In the longer term, however, this focus proved unsatisfactory to professionally ambitious nationalist musicians. Romanticism might almost be defined through an obsession with organic metaphors, and so it was with the folk. Despite their importance, the folk were consistently framed as relics. Pure and authentic, they could stand as the organic roots of nations, but not as the blossoms and sprouts of a nation’s modern achievement on the international stage. For this reason, as Romantic nationalism spread, each musically ‘peripheral’ nation soon sought to build upon its distinctive folk-musical roots a modern, individualist, elite compositional tradition, what came to be called a national ‘school’ of music.

National schools were both figurative (educational traditions) and often literal (conservatory buildings in the urban centres of the aspirant nations). They aimed to show young musicians how to integrate their nations’ unique and ‘authentic’ folk roots with international professional standards – or vice versa depending on the emphasis. The schools were responsible for a long list of composers that come to mind when people speak of ‘nationalism in music’. Amongst the earliest areas to adopt the school approach were Eastern Europe and Scandinavia (giving us Mikhail Glinka, Niels Gade, Frédéric Chopin, Franz Liszt, Bedřich Smetana, Edvard Grieg, the Russian ‘Mighty Handful’, Jean Sibelius, etc.). By the later nineteenth century the same approach had spread through the British Isles (Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, etc.), the Iberian peninsula (Enrique Granados, Manuel de Falla, etc.) and to the United States (including, famously, Jeanette Thurber’s invitation to Dvořák to run her National Conservatory in New York – to some it seemed necessary initially to import a European ‘nationalist’ to teach Americans how to mine their own ‘folk’ material for national ‘art’ music).¹⁰ The trend reached most countries in the Americas (Antônio Carlos Gomes, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Carlos Chávez, Alberto Ginastera) and continued through the twentieth century and even beyond, carrying on the legacy of Romanticism in many modern postcolonial African and Asian nations, especially if they were multi-ethnic constructions without their own long-established ‘classical’ musical traditions from precolonial days to unify them (Fela Sowande, Lucrecia Kasilag).¹¹

Musicians from national schools seemed liberated to create fusion styles that could join a national past and present, collective folk ‘authenticity’ and individual, original artistic ‘genius’ – thus fulfilling a Romantic ideal nearly perfectly. As Carl Dahlhaus noted, art music ‘prompted to harmonic [or other stylistic] experiment by procedures or material originating in folk music was on the one hand technically progressive’, while on the other hand potentially immediate in its popular appeal; it thus ‘seemed to suspend or resolve the conflict between the avant-garde and popular taste’.¹² Composers from the national schools engrained themselves successfully in local histories, becoming heroes in many cases. The main airports in the capitals Warsaw and Budapest are still named after Chopin and Liszt respectively.

Centre and Periphery as a Covert Value System

At the same time, the power structure (cultural and political) that rendered these nations musically peripheral in the first place also worked against the international reputations of their star composers in ways both obvious and more insidious. By the mid-nineteenth century the musical hegemony of Germany was complete in terms of prestige. Influential German writers and critics had relentlessly extended their claims for the ‘universal’ qualities of German instrumental music to assert that German music in general was the most universal – an argument buoyed by claims that German culture overall took the best of all others and synthesised it. Through this process, German art music took the role of the ‘unmarked norm’: even as the shared standards themselves were framed as German achievements, they provided the rules and set the aspirational goalposts and criteria against which all other music would come to be measured. Richard Taruskin has outlined a ‘double bind’ that musicians born outside these traditions accordingly faced. If they observed the dominant rules fully and wrote music that sounded German (and hence, ‘neutral’ or ‘universal’), they would be denigrated as non-German imitators of German music, unable to create their own sounds. But if they worked only with local traditions, they would be ignored on the international stage, seen merely as representatives of ‘primitive’ foreign music. The ‘school’ approach was thus their logical recourse; it played up exotic ‘folk’ elements from their respective nations that set them apart – using those features, as Dahlhaus outlined, to create a ‘modern’ hybrid with the international standard. Yet however successful this strategy was locally within the nations that used it, it nevertheless allowed the German critics who made the rules to stop short of awarding such composers the highest, ‘universal’ status given to Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven.¹³

Even the vocabulary quietly indicated the hierarchy: ‘National(ist) music’ in common parlance came to mean peripheral music. Towering figures of German musical prose as different as Robert Schumann, Eduard Hanslick, and Richard Wagner all argued in different ways that musical ‘nationalism’ itself was provincial, because music should be universal. As Wagner put it, other countries’ music (both folk and art music) was ‘national’ (i.e., local), while Germany’s was ‘purely human’.¹⁴ The irony of manifesting German nationalism by decrying musical ‘nationalism’, akin to those in privileged positions in our times decrying ‘identity politics’ on the assumption that their dominant position is not itself an identity, perpetuated itself as Germans went on to found the modern discipline of musicology and determine its foundations internationally. Until quite recently, Wagner, and to a lesser extent Verdi, because they represented central traditions, were included in ‘mainstream’ chapters of textbooks, somehow separate from the sections on ‘nationalists’. It has taken the development of new approaches for nationalism to be considered in a more balanced light.¹⁵

Complicated Realities

Wagner’s own music makes clear another issue: despite the general trend for ‘peripheral’ composers to rely more on ‘folk music’ to build their national claims and ‘central’ composers to rely more on adherence to educated national traditions, there was actually a great deal of variation in this respect from composer to composer and even within the output of single artists. The extent to which a given composer used pre-existing melodies or even folk-like melodies to evoke nationalism, and the extent to which a given composer allowed such ‘folk’ styles to alter or create a personal style, was not entirely predictably correlated to the centre–periphery opposition outlined above.

First of all, because of its centrality to broader nationalist claims, the ‘folk’ retained a kind of talismanic importance even in nations with strong traditions of cultivated music. This is certainly true of Germany. The very idea of organically integrating folk roots into individual modern art (indeed the entire Romantic obsession with organicism and organic metaphors, joining biology and the arts) was of German Romantic origin. Herder’s greatest influence in forming the modern international idea of ‘folk song’ was not creating the term (Volkslied was a translation from English after all), but rather his suggestion that Volkslied was valuable not (or not only) in its own right, but as ‘raw material’ for individual Romantic artists. As I have argued elsewhere, the Romantic idea of ‘art music’ is thus itself built on a contrast with ‘folk music’ – a binarism that was not an equal opposition but involved the organic integration of one into the other.¹⁶

Thus, depending on which Romantic strands a German nationalist picked up, different approaches to the folk presented themselves. Whereas Hanslick’s nationalism drew upon idealist philosophy to argue for cultivated traditions of instrumental music as the German achievement of universality (he had little time for ‘national melodies’ as ‘art’), Wagner internalised a notion of art music as dependent organically on the folk. He accordingly sought to emphasise any connection to the folk that he could find in Beethoven’s music, as a stepping stone to his own. The anchor of his argument was the ‘Ode to Joy’ in the Ninth Symphony, which he framed as an assimilation of the spirit of German folk song – a folk song by Beethoven himself. By thus defining ‘the folk’ as including any composers who organically absorbed the spirit of their people (and united words and music, as ‘the folk’ did when composing), he could make similar claims about the folk roots of his own music dramas, however far-fetched those claims usually were in terms of sonic resemblance to any German music in oral tradition.¹⁷

On the other side of the coin, there were composers born on the ‘periphery’ who were not particularly interested in ‘folk music’. Chopin, for example, was generally most concerned with furthering the cosmopolitan elite piano traditions he found in his adoptive homeland of France. He wrote some character pieces that were ‘national’ dances (the Polonaises and Mazurkas), but long-standing attempts to find direct connection between their sounds and Polish peasant music have been shown up as rather strained.¹⁸ And Grieg himself was compelled to rebut the constant search for folk music in his work, denying, in later life, that he had had in-depth knowledge of peasant music when he wrote his earlier compositions that people often claimed were folk-inspired, and instead opting for a different typical nationalist argument: that his music already sounded Norwegian simply because he was organically Norwegian.¹⁹

Another factor complicating relationships between ‘the folk’ and ‘national music’ is the presence of racial minorities within ethnically conceived nations. Notably, for example, in both Hungary and Spain, the Roma and Calé/Gitano ethnic minorities (the so-called ‘Gypsies’) over centuries contributed strongly to the styles that were picked up as essentially ‘national’ by the Romantics.²⁰ The cognitive dissonance this caused amongst nationalists was resolved in one of two ways. They could recognise Romani contributions but relegate them to the role of wild, untrained ‘natural music’ – again organic ‘roots’ that magically created something beautiful but needed the majority population to blossom into a modern national symbol. (This is how Liszt framed the ‘Gypsy’ style as Hungarian national music, and it points to how both peasants and minorities could be viewed as ‘noble savages’.) Alternatively, nationalists could use notions of (racial) purity to lead a backlash, searching to find national music roots not ‘corrupted’ by the ‘foreign’ Romani influence. These might be a different body of ‘authentic’ peasant folk music (in Hungary, this approach culminated with Bartók’s fieldwork, prose, and composition) or might be educated ‘national’ art music of the past (such as in Spain, when nationalists sought to oust Andalusian flamenco as the national musical symbol). One historiographical model, then, allowed Romani musicians to play the role of the fertile but unthinking, naïve folk inventors; the other excluded them completely. In neither is the minority population read as possessing agency and intellectual development of its own as part of the modern nation.

Questions about the music of ethnic minorities can be reframed as part of a larger thorny issue: national claims to music may be based on the (supposed) first origins of melodic material amongst an authentic folk, but they may also be based on later ‘domestic’ developments in imported, internationally shared, or minority-sourced material. Generally, nationalists have seized on whichever answer allowed the majority ethnic group to get credit. Certainly, this was true in the above cases involving Romani music. This trend was exacerbated when multi-ethnic and settler colonial nations developed their own musical nationalisms. For example, White American nationalists have historically barred the musical contributions of Black Americans from representing ‘national’ culture by calling them ‘foreign’ (African), or mere ‘developments’ of White styles (thus placing the ‘national’ at the point of supposed origins). Or just the opposite: Black music was allowed as valid American folk ‘roots’ but in need of ‘development’ into art by the White population or traditions (thus placing the ‘national’ as evolution).²¹

Reception Methods for Reading Music as National since the Romantic Era

Both the ability of influential arbiters sometimes to embrace origins and other times to embrace subsequent development as national, and the ability of audiences and scholars to posit folk music connections regardless of their tenuousness, highlight the mediated aspect of folk and national claims. Ultimately, as recent scholarship has noted, the national has always been in the eye (and ear) of the beholder.²² Aspects read as national in a piece of music vary in degree and kind at different geographical and chronological points in its existence, and for different audiences. It thus seems helpful to consider five common reception methods (often also internalised by composers) through which music has since the Romantic era been perceived or claimed as national. All may be used by insiders or by outsiders of a national culture, but that distinction may lead to very different reactions to the claims.

1. 1) The creator(s) of a piece can be framed as a source of national pride, as representations of their countries, by simple virtue of being from there. Such creators can be ‘the folk’ as a group (Irish peasants as the original creators of Irish national music), or individuals (Beethoven the German; Verdi the Italian). This approach also allowed Romantic nationalists to claim local figures who lived before the era of nationalism too (Bach the German, Palestrina the Italian, O’Carolan the Irishman). It also encompasses debates about when minority groups, expatriates, and so forth count as ‘national’.

2. 2) The linguistic or musical materials of a piece can be seen as national heritage. This may involve the words set to music, but it may also be a question of collective claims to musical style (e.g., the pervasive use of motivic development seen as ‘German’) or musical idioms (such as the harmonies or rhythms typical of a national folk song or dance repertoire) including when these idioms are perceived in ‘art music’ that builds on folk origins (as with claims about Chopin’s mazurkas). Musical genres may also be framed as nationally representative (e.g., opéra comique as the French ‘national genre’).

3. 3) The values of a piece can be framed as representative of a nation, drawing on homologies between national cultures and their musical products (e.g., German music seen by German critics as ‘serious’, ‘masculine’, and ‘rational’ like the German people; Italian music seen by Italians as full of a gift for melody like the Italian people; French music seen by the French as showing clarity and wit like the French people; both French and Italian music seen by the Germans as ‘feminine’ and ‘bodily’).²³ Particular composers and performers may be seen as embodying those values (Beethoven as ‘manly’ for so many critics).

4. 4) The subject matter of music, such as opera plots or open or secret programmes in instrumental music, can relate to a national event, hero, myth, or landscape (e.g., Sibelius’s Finlandia; Grieg’s Peer Gynt; Wagner’s Meistersinger as German history). But note that even something as supposedly simple as topical plots were filtered through radically different perceptions. Thus many of Verdi’s early and middle operas were read retrospectively as thinly veiled Italian nationalist parables.²⁴ Chopin’s Ballade Op. 38 could be read as encoding a story of the crushing of Poland – but to radically different degrees by Polish audiences in Poland, Polish audiences in Paris, and French artists sympathetic to Poland’s plight.²⁵ That the duet ‘Sacred Love for the Fatherland’ from (the French) Auber’s opera La Muette de Portici (about Spanish rule over Naples) sparked brawls that spilled out of the opera house during a (Brussels) performance two years after the premiere, and led to the Belgian Revolution of 1830, is entirely due to the ability of audiences to filter pieces to apply topically or allegorically to themselves.

5. 5) The uses of melodies or pieces (on their initial appearance or even much later), especially by governments and institutions, can make them into important national symbols. These uses create meanings that stick to music indefinitely in many cases. Examples here include twentieth-century applications of Romantic music, such as Nazi use of Die Meistersinger in film and rallies, or the use of Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ on Remembrance Sunday in Britain. More immediately, they include the general case of national anthems, themselves a phenomenon dating from the Romantic era, due to their appeals to a people or folk.²⁶

These reception methods can support each other or be combined, of course, but they can also be pitted against each other rhetorically at different times, depending on the needs of different interlocutors.

A Case Study: The Moldau

We might instructively end with a brief case study that looks at the different variables in flux. Bedřich Smetana was, according to legend, inspired to father the ‘Czech school’ of composition by a slight from an Austrian who stated that the Czechs were good musicians but had no creative identity separate from Germanic music; Smetana cemented this role through his operas on national themes, such as Libuše (which opened the Czech national theatre in 1881), and also by his cycle of tone poems Má vlast (My Fatherland), the second of which, Vltava (The Moldau), was written at a feverish pace in late 1874.

At the most obvious level, this programmatic piece focuses on reception method 4 above (subject matter) as the key to nationalism. In this case, landscape weaves together and binds various other symbols of the nation: the Vltava is the Czech national river, beginning from springs in the south of the country and eventually flowing grandly through Prague before emptying into the Labe (Elbe). This aspect (which ties the piece to the historical and geographical subjects of the other works in Má vlast) was immediately recognised as ‘national’. Smetana’s programme is labelled into the score; it traces the river from its sources, which are illustrated by trickling watery adumbrations of the main theme (Ex. 5.1) before that famous melody bursts forth (Ex. 5.2). The piece then follows a rondo form, the main ‘flowing Moldau’ theme alternating with depictions of what the river snakes past: a woodland hunt, a rustic wedding, the water nymphs of Czech mythology playing in the moonlight, and St John’s rapids. The final section, in which the river ‘flows grandly’ into Prague past the Vyšehrad, the old fortress above the banks, converts the main theme to major for its apotheosis and briefly quotes the motive of Vyšehrad, the previous tone poem in the collection.

Example 5.1 Smetana, Vltava (1874), from Má vlast, opening, bb. 1–6

Example 5.2 Smetana, Vltava, main theme, bb. 39–47

But the programme’s subject matter is tied to other ‘national’ connotations. Notably, nationalist music journalists immediately claimed a close connection to Czech folk song for the piece (reception method 2). One early reviewer called the broad main melody itself ‘a naively simple motive of Czech folk song’. Another, arguing that ‘Czech folk song’ was an ‘endlessly minable source’ that must be the basis for any Czech national [art] music, claimed that it was, admirably, the basis for the entire piece here.²⁷ In fact, it is unclear whether Smetana’s main melody was drawn directly from any existent Czech folk song (unlikely), whether it in fact became taken up as a children’s song (changed to major as ‘The Cat Crawls through the Hole’, Ex. 5.3), or whether it (like the cat song) simply mimics a whole family of very similar tunes in use in both ‘folk’ and art music across Europe – not least in Sweden where Smetana had recently been living and was probably familiar with a very similar minor version of the melody.²⁸ Nevertheless, it was clearly important to early nationalist audiences (and to many since) that the melodic materials be seen as fundamentally Czech and of folk origin – specifically or abstractly. An interesting aspect of the piece is that the riverside wedding episode, which presents a peasant dance melody, a polka (which, despite its name, is a Czech national dance, see Ex. 5.4), in fact uses stylised ‘folk music’ as landscape: it becomes part of the sounds and sights along the river – like shepherds in a rural landscape painting.

Example 5.3 ‘The Cat Crawls through the Hole’, Czech children’s song

Example 5.4 Smetana, Vltava, polka, bb. 122–30

At the same time, the piece needed to stand for Czech modernity, and here genre and artistic values came to the fore. Tone poems were specifically associated with the ‘New German’ School – and it took some contortion from Czech nationalists to reclaim the genre as appropriate for Czech art music. Smetana’s champions did so by arguing that the Czechs were uniquely capable of developing the genre, thereby demonstrating Czech presence amongst the most ‘modern’ nations (reception method 3) and Czech ‘readiness’ for increasing political independence within the Hapsburg empire.²⁹ In this context, it was particularly important to affirm Smetana’s own ‘Czechness’ (reception method 1), despite the fact that he was mainly a German speaker (hence the insistence on the Czechness of the folk-musical materials, and on Smetana’s intimate familiarity with Czech folksong). The movements of Má vlast could thus be presented and read as organically integrating ‘natural’ elements of the Czech lands – landscape and folksong – with internationally competitive modern composition techniques perfected on Czech soil, by a Czech. Such instrumental music was ideally poised (even more than Smetana’s Czech operas, which, tied to the Czech language, had their greatest impact domestically) for exhibition on the international stage.

Finally, Czech institutions have continued to use Smetana’s work as national symbolism (reception method 5). Indeed, Má vlast has served almost as a shibboleth. Public announcements in Prague’s train station are cued by the short motive of Vyšehrad, and on Czech Airlines flights The Moldau has been piped briefly over the speakers to announce arrival in Prague. In this layered history we can see how Romantic claims of an organic relationship between nineteenth-century composition techniques and a national ‘folk’ can be parlayed though the creation and reception of one composition.