Tuesday Tones

Continuing our self-guided tour of classical music inspired by water, we have perhaps one of the two greatest works ever directly inspired by a river (well, maybe three, depending on how strongly we consider Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen to have been inspired by the Rhine). The other work will surely show up in this series, but for now, we’ll stick with Bedrich Smetana’s Vltava, known to English-speaking audiences as The Moldau.

The work opens with a quiet shimmering that evokes the flow of Vltava, the longest river in the Czech Republic. Written as part of a cycle of tone poems evoking Smetana’s homeland, called Ma Vlast (“My Fatherland”), Vltava is the most well-known of the group and is often performed on its own. Its main melody is one of the great tunes in all classical music, an earworm for the ages, but Smetana’s orchestration is marvelous throughout as he casts the work with sonic effects that evoke the flowing waters and the country through which it flows. Smetana himself wrote of the work:

“Two springs pour forth in the shade of the Bohemian Forest, one warm and gushing, the other cold and peaceful. The forest brook, hastening on, becomes the river Moldau. Through thick woods it flows, as the gay sounds of the hunt and the notes of the hunter’s horn are heard ever nearer. It flows through grass-grown pastures and lowlands where a wedding feast is celebrated with song and dance. At night, wood and water nymphs revel in its sparkling waves. Reflected on its surface are fortresses and castles — witnesses of bygone days of knightly splendor and the vanished glory of fighting times. At the St. John Rapids, the stream races ahead, winding through the cataracts, hewing out a path with its foaming waves through the rocky chasm into the broad riverbed — finally, flowing on in majestic peace toward Prague and welcomed by the time-honored castle Vyšehrad. Then it vanishes far beyond the poet’s gaze.”

Here is Vltava by Bedrich Smetana (in a particularly wonderful live performance).