wikipedia has a perfectly acceptable and fairly comprehensive overview of the entire suite, and an especially fair explanation of this particular movement, so fair warning, i'm about to just copy most of it.
this tone poem, Vyšehrad (VEE-sheh-rad), is the first in a set of six that belong to the set "Ma Vlast," or "my country." smetana's vision/mission was basically to establish nationalist music for the czechs, and he accomplished this splendidly, with current czechs treating this and the moldau (the outrageously popular second poem of the six) as something like a second and third national anthem. in the course of this whole suite, we explore the Vyšehrad, a castle in Prague which was home to the earliest Czech kings; the Vltava, the river which runs the bohemian countryside; the local czech legends of a female warrior named Sarka and the army of knights which sleeps inside a mountain known as Blanik; the countryside and woods themselves, and Tabor, a city.
another interesting thing about smetana was that he went deaf in 1874 at the age of 50 (yea i bet that reminds you of someone). the Vyšehrad was composed/mostly completed almost immediately before he went deaf. which means that the rest of the cycle was composed in silence. here's an amusing take on that compositional process.
weird to call this a "movement" because they're not very commonly played as a complete cycle. think of it as a set of independently functioning pieces with a common theme, like dvorak's slavonic dances. they were all composed over a span of 5 years (1874-1879) and all premiered separately.
kubelik and the czech philharmonic. who better?
ok, so apparently *the* thing to talk about is that theme: b-flat, e-flat, d, b-flat (or any other relative setting of those pitches). there are claims that this actually represent bedrich smetana's name, because apparently "b" and "s" represent b-flat and e-flat in german notation. anyway, regardless what that is, it is definitely the most important recurring motif in the entire set of six poems, coming up again and again, from the dreamy double-harp arpeggios that nostalgically open, to the warm orchestral entrance, to the gigantic grandiose music that occurs about five minutes in (and if you think about it, the only possible visual incarnation of this music for me is some great hall with a huge court in a castle like the vysehrad...). but all this is still just overture, and the exposition or plot doesn't seem to start until almost six minutes in.
now we get some curiosity-inspiring drama. if you think of this whole piece as a sort of movie, this would be where the exposition actually starts, and according to the wiki article this is smetana taking us back and telling us the tale of the castle. a brisker tempo lends itself to a bit of distress but also streams of lush, "good-old-times" glory in the strings and fanfares in the upper brass. these are periodically interrupted by a tenser motif, the descending halfstep followed by a descending fourth. finally the tension builds until we get a gigantic descending chromatic scale at about 9:30, depicting the fall of the castle. the flutes enter again tentatively, followed by string tremolos, and a few quietly mournful wind passages. then at about 11:30, the opening harp flourishes return again, this time with string echoes pregnant with remembered glory. the big climax at this point seems to reaffirm the glory, but a shade of darkness in the strings swells out near the concluding measures, and the ending of the poem is actually quiet, seeming to say that all this is merely wonderful memories of days gone by. which, well, it is.
pretty good for sappy nationalistic music, wouldn't you say.
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