Despite his historical and historiographic positioning as the founder of Czech music, performers and audiences in Anglophone countries tend to only know a handful of pieces by Bedřich Smetana (1824–1884). Foremost among these is his tone poem Vltava (known in German as Die Moldau, 1874), which depicts the river of the same name. This tone poem is itself one of the larger cycle of six tone poems known by the collective title Má vlast (My Homeland, 1874–1879). The relatively obscure status of the larger cycle is mirrored in the status of Smetana's eight operas. Only Prodaná nevěsta (The Bartered Bride, 1866) has attained a significant performance history outside the Czech lands (Bohemia and Moravia, today's Czechia), but even that pales in comparison to the performance history of Rusalka (1901), by Smetana's compatriot Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904). Music history curricula occasionally feature Smetana's autobiographical String Quartet No. 1 “Z mého života” (“From My Life”, 1876) as an example of programmatic music, but again, Smetana's other chamber works – in addition to his many works for solo piano, including the volume under review here, Macbeth (1859) – rarely feature on recital programmes outside of the Czech lands.

This state of affairs persists for a number of intertwined reasons. In a way, Smetana's relative obscurity may be due largely to the overwhelming success of the Czech nationalist project to which his music was (and still is) so often attached. Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, musicians, intellectuals, writers, and politicians positioned Smetana and his music as embodying and expressing Czech essence. After Czechoslovakia achieved its independence in 1918 with the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire following World War I, associating Smetana with the new republic became a widely deployed tool of cultural diplomacy.Footnote ¹ In the interwar period, however, the hyper-nationalism of Smetana reception began increasingly to be viewed as old-fashioned, especially when compared to the modernist abstractions of composers like Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg – a nationalism made all the more repugnant after the cataclysm of World War II and the post-war ethnic cleansing of Germans from the Czech lands.Footnote ² Furthermore, as Kelly St. Pierre argues in her monograph Bedřich Smetana: Myth, Music, and Propaganda, the post-1948 Czechoslovak communist government's championing of Smetana as a proletarian hero led to the composer being tied to the regime and Cold War cultural divisions.Footnote ³ This proved inescapable after 1989 and the Velvet Revolution, as Smetana research fell out of favour, and scholars, performers, and audiences redoubled their focus on less ideologically compromised Czech composers, especially Dvořák and Leoš Janáček (1854–1928).

The historiographical and ideological reasons for Smetana's neglect have tended to obscure the fact that, by the aesthetic standards of the mid-nineteenth-century New German School, Smetana was writing some of the most progressive music on the European continent.Footnote ⁴ Smetana considered himself a follower of Franz Liszt (1811–1886), and both Smetana and his supporters made sure to publicize his personal connections with the elder composer. The most intense period of the Czech composer's engagement with Liszt's music, ideas, and personal milieu occurred in the late 1850s. Smetana visited Liszt at Weimar in 1857 and again in Leipzig in 1859, when he became a member of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein, something later Czech scholars were not especially keen to point out.

The late 1850s was also the period in which Smetana – living and working in Göteburg, Sweden to escape the repressive political and cultural environment of Prague at the time – wrote his first three full-scale symphonic poems. Titled Richard III (1858), Valdštýnův tábor (Wallenstein's Camp, 1859), and Hakon Jarl (1861), they drew programmatic and musical inspiration from Liszt's contemporaneous works. In the midst of these travels and compositional undertakings, Smetana also sketched another programmatic piece: Macbeth, for solo piano. Though the piano was central to nineteenth-century music making, programme music for the instrument in the Lizstian vein was all but unheard of at the time. In terms of programmatic content, Shakespeare was a significant source for Smetana for two main reasons. One, engaging with Shakespeare was a potent political gesture for Czech artists in all genres, who by doing so signalled their intent to “assert their presence in a global conversation” and to compete on the same level as German and English audiences.Footnote ⁵ Two, Liszt also drew from Shakespeare – his Hamlet (1858) was written in the same year as Smetana's Richard III – and Macbeth also engages with the fantastical, as had Liszt's Faust Symphony (1857). The latter no doubt influenced Smetana's depiction of the witches of the piece's secondary title, Macbeth a čarodejnice (Macbeth and the Witches).Footnote ⁶ Czech music scholars of the early twentieth century, especially Ernst Rychnovsky and Otakar Zich, sparked debate over whether the piece was originally intended as a sketch for a larger orchestral composition – a stance supported by the concurrent composition of the first three symphonic poems.Footnote ⁷ However, in Smetana's own list of works, compiled in 1875, the composer listed it as a composition for solo piano, which is the stance more recent scholars have taken.

Aside from the reference in Smetana's personal catalogue, the piece was otherwise unknown during the composer's lifetime and only existed in an autograph sketch. Scholars unearthed the piece after Smetana's death, and it was first published in 1912 by the Umělecká beseda (Artistic Union), which had long been a significant institution for promoting Smetana. The edition itself was edited extensively by Jindřich Kàan z Albestů (1852–1926), a virtuoso pianist, composer, and director of the Prague conservatory from 1907–1918. He added dynamics, pedal markings, slurs, and other character indications, in addition to filling out musical textures where the autograph was incomplete or abbreviated. A subsequent edition, edited in 1973 by Hana Séquardtová, attempted to engage critically with Smetana's autograph. Her version stripped out all of Kàan's expressive additions, but it did slightly modify some of Smetana's original rhythms to normalize metres and bar lengths, as well as adding octave doublings and four-part harmony in places that were deemed ‘sketchy’.Footnote ⁸

The present Bärenreiter urtext edition, edited by noted Czech musicologist Jarmila Gabrielová, presents an even more minimal musical text, in an attempt to approach Smetana's original as closely as possible while still remaining usable for modern performers. A preface presented in Czech, English, and German introduces the piece, presents its historical context, and describes its editorial history and process for the new edition. Editorial interventions are largely limited to writing out unrealized or abbreviated chordal notation, repeated bars, and correcting missing accidentals. These interventions are indicated with the use of square brackets, and the critical commentary at the close of the edition (in English) only discusses the provenance and physical condition of the autograph; the lack of other commentary is likely due to the minimal editorial changes and the dearth of competing exemplars. The absence of any kind of dynamic, expressive, or pedal markings in the present Bärenreiter edition presents both a problem and an opportunity for the prospective performer; great freedom exists in the range of expressive choices available to the pianist, but significant engagement with the piece would be required to present a unified vision of the work. The piece itself runs to 14 printed pages, and commercially available recordings (almost undoubtedly made with the Séquardtová edition) last from approximately nine to 11 minutes in length, depending on the tempo chosen, making it a compact and demanding showpiece.

Smetana was himself a virtuoso pianist and made his living in part through teaching that instrument. The extent of his prowess is evident in the severe technical demands of Macbeth, and the extremely adventurous, even outlandish harmonic character of the piece indicates the depth of Smetana's engagement with Lisztian ideas of composition. The piece opens with arpeggiated, broken runs based on diminished triads and seventh chords, dissonantly embellished with passing tones. This music almost certainly represents Shakespeare's witches, and it returns periodically in a thematic way in addition serving as a basis for motivic transformations. Tritone relations abound both on the local level and structurally; the piece is in two halves, with the first half based around the key of G minor and the second around C-sharp minor. Half-step relations also serve a thematic function, and an early march theme, perhaps representing Macbeth or the witches’ prophecy of his grandeur, has its martial B-flat major character undercut by a pedal half-step trill. A second, more harmonically stable march, potentially evoking Macbeth or, later, Macduff, nevertheless dramatically deploys chromatic alterations like Neapolitan seconds on its way back to the tonic. Overall, the piece alternates between extremely unstable embellishments of diminished chords and more stable passages to evoke the tensions between Macbeth and his supernatural tormentors.

The new Bärenreiter edition of Macbeth represents an important contribution to Smetana scholarship and knowledge of his music. Even if Richard Taruskin's assertion about the composer – ‘Smetana could be fairly described as Europe's most progressive musician as of 1859, and so he remained, one could fairly argue, virtually to the end of his career’ – might remain difficult to accept for some, a greater acceptance of this piece into the performing repertoire would go a long way toward providing a fuller view of Smetana's compositional output.Footnote ⁹ This edition will help to broaden knowledge of the breadth of Smetana's musical range among performers and audiences, and perhaps encourage further exploration in this regard. More importantly, it could also help to undermine the historiographic and ideological barriers that still keep Smetana locked behind the designation of ‘national’ composer, encouraging a fuller accounting of him and his music's place in our broader narratives of music history; such a reevaluation could also help to begin to undo the methodological nationalism that pervades the ways we continue to talk about Western music as a whole.