Kelly St. Pierre has written an important book. Far from offering another biography of Bedřich Smetana, she investigates the creation of a collection of “Smetana myths,” and the manner in which the composer's career and its reception were molded by a complex set of forces. Along with other younger English-language scholars writing about the ideological settings of Czech music—including Andrew Burgard, Brian Locke, Erika Honisch, Thomas Svatos, Eva Branda and most recently Christopher Campo-Bowen—St. Pierre provides the contexts and details missing from earlier accounts. She also offers a compelling synthesis of events.

Some of the most fascinating aspects of St. Pierre's book involve the sections dealing with the attempt on the part of various interlocutors to ascribe “meaning” to specific moments of instrumental music. It is no exaggeration to say that trying to comprehend the relationship between instrumental music and the rest of the world involves some of the most hazardous thought problems we can imagine. The endeavor proceeds as a series of gritty paradoxes, whereby meaning is often assumed but can never be verified, even in the broadest details. A few examples will suffice to illustrate this. Let us imagine, for example, that we take Anton Felix Schindler's dubious claim seriously and agree that at the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth “fate knocks at the door.” What does that really give us? What then are we to make of the quasi-pastoral Eb passage which follows the opening? Does fate stop knocking at that point? Moreover, what of the other movements? Is there a counter plot at work or a single narrative? It quickly becomes obvious that the effect of determining meaning in instrumental music is endlessly deceptive: even if we find a definitive meaning for a part or parts, it only makes us aware of how little we know about all the other parts. Like Adam and Eve in Eden, our supposed knowledge only suffices to make us aware of our nakedness; our intuitive sense of the music's meaningfulness is replaced by doubt.

The problematics of trying to argue for specific meaning is seen nowhere more clearly than in a section of Chapter 4 titled “Helfert and the Rhetoric of Genius.” Here St. Pierre looks at Vladimir Helfert's attempts “to prove that Smetana deliberately intended Libuše and ‘Vyšehrad’ as apotheoses to the nation” (85). What she is able to convincingly demonstrate is that Helfert—ordinarily no one's fool—simply ties himself in knots, acting as if “objective facts” such as sketches, letters, and musical analysis are leading the charge when, in reality, it is a kind of Ouija board where Helfert himself is guiding the process throughout. The most notable problem is that this particular case involves the paradox of intention. Of all things, whether in musical composition or ethics, nothing is more difficult to ascertain. In our attempts to write history, we have documents, objects, statements, and a range of actions that are something like points in historical space. Each of these collections may be connected, and thus potentially “explained,” by an infinite number of stories, most involving the idea of agency. To call such explanations simply arbitrary fiction would be as misplaced as referring to them as incontrovertibly true. St. Pierre reveals that, in Smetana's case, the process of composing is, in some aspects, possible to approach through empirical study, and in other ways, completely opaque and inscrutable. It is the same for Smetana's intentions, and we cannot pretend that the very small part of his intentions we can access necessarily sheds light on the entire process. Even if we could imagine that Smetana is something like a painter, looking at or imagining Vyšehrad and coming up with a theme, it would be foolish to imagine that the entire composition is constructed in all its details for the purpose of enshrining that single image, or meant to make a purely political statement. Smetana has no secret key to his own intentions, which are likely to be as contradictory and elusive as our own.

Towards the end of her study, after writing both admiringly, but also critically, about my own work on “Czechness,” she writes, in an elegant summary: “But because Czechness is a mode of reception, it is also inevitable that any scholar who takes on its examination—whether Novotný, Hostinský, Nejedlý Helfert, Beckerman or myself—cannot avoid perpetuating, reinventing, and reinscribing its discourses; we ourselves become a part of the creation of Czechness, not just outside reporters” (111). Too true, and in this spirit, to return the favor, I would suggest that St. Pierre's attempt to demythologize Smetana is inevitably another mode of mythmaking. Because in the end, the focus is on Smetana, or the “superstar” critics, Hostinský, Nejedlý, Masaryk and Helfert. Thus, the attempt to undercut the notion that it is not great men alone who shape events, is itself undercut by all the attention to great men. Even though a detailed comparison between Má vlast and Fibich's tone poem Záboj, Slavoj and Luděk is an important part of the first section of the book, and beautifully argued, Fibich essentially disappears from the project, enshrining Smetana even as he is shown to be, at least in part, the creation of others.

In the relatively long gestation of this review, the thing which kept coming back to me repeatedly was the longstanding practice of mythologizing—and commodifying—celebrities and superstars. Whether in the National Basketball Association, where top athletes are referred to as simply “role players,” or the “supporting cast” of the superstar; the city of Amsterdam, where the economy is dependent, at least in part, on the marketing of the “RVs” (Rembrandt, Vermeer and Van Gogh), or in the contemporary celebrity culture which gave us the current US president, this concept of history shares a great deal with the idea of Czechness as discussed by St. Pierre. In other words, we may like it or not, and we may certainly try to resist it, but it is impossible to deny its role in the shaping of events. Dahlhaus referred to such classes of reality as “aesthetic facts,” if an audience believed them to be true. Our investigations of such phenomena as Czechness and the mythologizing of Smetana, as St. Pierre reveals, represent a final paradox: if we are not somehow seduced by such things, we cannot understand them, and if we understand them too well, it is difficult to avoid being seduced by them.

For the reasons I have tried to outline above then, St. Pierre's book is not only valuable for the way it illuminates the details, debates, and compositions that loomed so large during Smetana's life and afterward, but because it is these very issues that, still massively unresolved, represent the real challenges scholars and historians must address.