Revolutionizing Czechness: Smetana and propaganda in the Umelecka beseda

This dissertation focuses on Czech national hero Bedrich Smetana whose life and works have long been associated with Czech nation-building and notions of idealistically Czech sounds. The purpose of my project is to examine how Smetana came to occupy this position: Who was responsible for this construction? Who gained from it? And what role did Smetana himself play? Answering these questions requires the examination of not just the composer, but the powerful organization he helped found in 1863 called the Umelecka beseda ("Artistic Society," or UB). The UB was at the center of Czech artistic and political life during the nineteenth century and still exists today. Its members used the organization's influence throughout its history to publish writings on Smetana that have profoundly shaped modern understandings of the composer. Beginning in the 1870s, UB members produced carefully curated collections of materials related to Smetana (criticism, editions of the composer's letters and diaries, and even scores), which they harnessed as tools in a series of political campaigns. During the twentieth century, UB critics selectively published Smetana studies to suit the ideologies of the Communist administration. Today, UB scholarship and the political circumstances surrounding its production make understandings of the composer inseparable from political advocacy. Here, I use UB publications along with those of the organization's critics to reveal Smetana as a figure whose biography has been appropriated for deliberately political ends since the organization's founding. Doing so opens a window onto the wider complexities of Eastern European nationhood and reveals how music, scholarship, and Smetana have shaped political ideologies through the twentieth century.