Jakub Hrůša on Smetana's Libuše

First performed in 1881 to mark the opening of the National Theatre in Prague, Smetana’s opera Libuše tells the tale of the eponymous princess who is called upon to settle an inheritance dispute between two brothers. Full of stirring music and patriotic fervour, it culminates in a scene at Vyšehrad castle where Libuše prophesies a glorious future for the Czech nation.

Rarely performed outside Smetana’s native country, the opera has been treated to a magnificent new recording on the Supraphon label courtesy of his compatriot Jakub Hrůša, who conducts the Czech Philharmonic and a splendid cast led by Kateřina Kněžíková and Adam Plachetka. I caught up with Jakub to talk about how Libuše fits into the composer’s overall operatic output, why it isn’t performed more abroad, and how its nationalistic spirit fed into Smetana’s best-known orchestral work, Má vlast.

Before we talk about Libuše could I ask you about how you feel Smetana's dramatic works fit into his output overall?

I think dramatic works were his main ambition: pieces like Libuše were on the wave of what he found to be the most progressive musical and cultural thinking of his time, especially people like Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner. He thought programmatic and theatre music would be his best contribution to what could delight, educate, and inspire audiences. His main ambition, like Dvořák’s actually, was to create serious operas which would address timeless topics the way Wagner's works do, and I think Libuše is the pinnacle of this effort.

Of course, he is much more known for his comic opera, The Bartered Bride, but it's important to mention that for him that was more like a relaxing side effect of his creativity. The Brandenburgers in Bohemia was his initial attempt at opera, which was relatively successful, but you do feel like it's just his first try. And then to smooth certain tensions in society about his Wagnerism, he decided to please everyone with a comic opera, which he managed marvellously with The Bartered Bride. But then having done that he immediately came back to serious topics, and Dalibor and Libuše are probably the most ambitious things he ever wrote for the theatre. 

His whole journey then started to be more like serving the expectations of local culture, but it also has to do with the deterioration of his health, where I think his ambition got to be a little bit different, as did his way of composing, which became more reflective and less daring with The Two Widows, The Kiss, The Secret, and The Devil's Wall. It’s an aspect of music history which is a little hard for me to accept because I really do think he was a great musical dramatist, but especially from The Two Widows onwards, the plots are very difficult to present abroad, maybe a bit lacking in charm for worldwide audiences, based too much on local traditions.

And is that different in the Czech Republic itself? Are they all regularly performed there?

Yes, all of them regularly, although some more than others, like The Bartered Bride. Unlike Dvořák’s oeuvre which is complicated because there are more pieces, Smetana is done in his entirety in theatres, not just in Prague or Brno but throughout the whole country. Libuše was in a way for Smetana like The Ring was for Wagner: something he took great care over and which he dedicated to very special occasions connected to national life. It has hardly ever been staged anywhere else but in Prague it’s done every year at the National Theatre.

I really do feel that all people who have performed the piece realise it's not just a compulsory kind of national monument, it's amazing music. But the whole mythology, the prophecy of the future of the Czech nation and all those things make it quite difficult to accept elsewhere. On the other hand, there is also so much of that kind of thing in a piece like Die Meistersinger and yet that has been accepted. I'm not necessarily comparing the two, but Libuše is absolutely worth listening to, and I think it contains some of the best operatic music written in that period. So there is a huge sense of injustice to me as to why it's done so little.

Even the Czech Philharmonic, with whom we made the recording, had never played the piece, so it was a huge discovery for them, and it was the same with the Prague Philharmonic Choir. I’m not a frequent conductor at Czech opera houses, and so I had a fresh look at it. I'm very convinced by the piece and I think it should at least be performed in concert more. It would be my huge wish to be able to present it to audiences abroad because I think it's that kind of piece which when done well can raise people from their seats at the end.

You’ve mentioned Wagner a couple of times; I was struck when listening to it how frequently it reminded me of Lohengrin in particular. I know that Smetana attended the Prague premiere of Lohengrin, and Dalibor especially was criticised for sounding too Wagnerian. 

Libuše was not performed until 1881, some time after it was written, and so this debate about Wagnerism was not applied to it so much, but it would have been attacked for it as well. Wagner was representative of the most progressive theatrical thinking of his time in all sorts of ways: serious connections between various stagecrafts and artistries, leitmotivic work, the important role of the orchestra, mythological concepts, and heightening the ambition of theatre to the same level as intellectually demanding abstract symphonic music. Although Smetana never met Wagner, he travelled to Munich and saw Rheingold and Walküre there, and also Meistersinger in Prague, so he was quite an admirer. Of course he knew personally Wagner’s father-in-law, Liszt, who helped him in many ways, if nothing else than by supporting his approach to thinking about music.

Smetana in his way was one of the most successful representatives of what in Western Europe was called the Neudeutsche Schule (New German School), with symphonic poems like Má vlast and even his chamber music having programmatic elements. He was absolutely one of the leading figures in this progressive thinking about what music can do. I think we have to admit that everyone was influenced by Wagner, and even those who tried their best to avoid him were influenced in a different way by deliberately trying to do the opposite, like Debussy. Smetana actually said in some correspondence with a friend that he didn't want to meet Wagner because he knew how complicated he was as a person and didn’t want to dilute his admiration for him as an artist by his personal features.

Libuše was composed in the late 1860s, half a generation after Lohengrin, but you make a good point because for me Lohengrin represents a connection to bel canto and grand opera, unlike The Ring and Parsifal, and I think Smetana also offers wonderful stuff in terms of ensembles, arias, and musical lines. It's much more “operatic” than Wagner’s most mature works. But it's very much inspired by him, especially the boldness of harmony: I think it was Liszt who looked at Libuše and said it was some of the most courageous harmonic writing he had ever seen, noting that even Wagner wouldn't have been so daring.

In my view Libuše contains two spheres: vertical, monumental, more static writing like an oratorio, but then also there are bits such as the first two scenes of Act Two, which are hot-blooded, fully emotional opera at its height. These scenes, with the whole triangle of Krasava, her father, and her lover as she admits her guilt, confesses to and then receives forgiveness from the lover who had cursed her for what he had assumed was her unfaithfulness, are very emotional and personal; really quite amazing.

It clearly means a lot to you. What were the circumstances of your 2024 performances with your cast led by Kateřina Kněžíková?

It was wonderful because we were celebrating 200 years of Smetana’s birth and 140 since his death. All his music was being played, as well as a lot of educational activities. I actually recorded an audiobook of his new biography, and there were lots of interviews and other stuff going on around the whole country. We all tried to serve Smetana not as a national symbol but as a composer who should be better known in general. As I said I rarely conduct opera in the Czech Republic, but I wanted to participate. The two most important festivals dedicated to Smetana are the Prague Spring Festival and Smetana Litomyšl (where he was born). The latter festival suggested I could perform Libuše, and I was honoured and delighted because I was thinking I would probably not have been able to do that piece easily in any theatre, so this was my opportunity to celebrate the beauty of it. And the more I studied it, the more fascinated I became.

Kateřina Kněžíková was my dream partner: neither of us was interested in the kind of plain and empty monumentality of the character, which is how it is often performed, with just a big voice and huge prima donna gestures, and without much humanity. We were going after something else, something much more deeply emotional, even vulnerable as a portrayal of a real human being. It was her debut and mine, and it meant a lot to us. It was not originally clear whether we would record it, but indeed we ended up recording the live performances at the Rudolfinum. Then as we were refreshing the piece later on for Litomyšl, we recorded those rehearsals as a sort of patching session, but the main core of what we've released is from the live performances, and I think you can hear that because it has an immediacy and shows full-blooded effort with everyone playing for their lives. Some of our cast, including Kateřina’s husband Adam Plachetka (who actually plays her fiancé and then husband in the opera), had already done it in theatres.

The Czech Philharmonic was new to it and understood it to be an extraordinary opportunity. It's interesting because there’s the prophecy at the end where the Hussite chorale was reused by Smetana in Má vlast, so they were stunned by the similarities and understood that it was almost like a preparatory step towards those tone poems. Also the Prague Philharmonic Choir was performing it for the first time, and I think that was a very beautiful aspect of the performance, that so many participants had no biases, no prejudices, no approaches like “we've always done it this way and not that way”. I also reinstated one or two cuts that are normally made in theatres, so it is entirely as Smetana wrote, including the text - it includes some archaic Czech that is often updated, but we kept it as it was and I took delight in presenting it the way it was written.

Given the patriotic fervour at the end of the opera, did that inspire him to compose Má vlast? Aside from the Hussite chorale there is of course the Vyšehrad connection in both pieces. 

Absolutely: although Libuše was originally written for the coronation of a Czech king, when later it became clear that wouldn't happen it was then presented at the opening of the National Theatre in Prague, which was very much the people's endeavour - not entirely because a lot of the aristocracy helped, but in the national myth it's a theatre built by contributions from the common people. Smetana never heard it because he was deaf by then and also mentally unstable. So Libuše was in his drawer basically and then he went to compose this cycle of symphonic poems, which indeed recalls the Vyšehrad motif. Part of the opera takes place in front of the Vyšehrad gate, so it's a literal borrowing from there. Initially he just composed the first four poems, so Vyšehrad, Vltava, Šárka, and Z českých luhů a hájů (From Bohemia's Woods and Fields). And then he waited for a few years, before thinking he would like to add the Hussite theme with two more poems, Tábor and Blaník, also creating the framing device which quotes Vyšehrad at the end of the whole cycle, which was a fantastic idea even if some people consider the added pieces too different or maybe less charming. 

Tábor, which is by far the least popular, I find a marvel of musical architecture, something akin to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony where from very small motifs he creates the building blocks of the whole piece. Almost the whole of Má vlast he composed whilst deaf, whereas Libuše was the last huge endeavour where he was in his full power: the harmonic language is very daring and I think shows where Smetana would have gone if he hadn’t gone mad and deaf. The later operas are less adventurous because he couldn’t hear what he was writing and could only rely on his memory of how harmonies and chord progressions sound, whereas with Libuše I envision him being bold at the piano and trying things out. One extraordinary moment is the sequence at the end of Act One where the trumpets reiterate the same note again and again like an ostinato and the harmony develops into extremely modern clashes of dissonance, so his harmonic thinking I find extraordinarily inspiring. 

Do you feel the audience misses something if the whole cycle isn’t performed together?

I always find it very charming and almost sentimental when Vltava is played where it belongs, and people are somewhat surprised because it's clear it was not the main statement, it was just the second movement of (originally) four. I find the most popular tend to be numbers two, three and four, especially Šárka, which is this thrilling story. At the end Smetana writes in his notes: “no morals anymore!” It’s just bloodthirsty killing and butchery, myth at its wildest. And when you perform it with the gloves off, being able to awaken its wildness, it is always extremely successful.