Art] What Cities Make of Us: Art, Power & the Human Condition Across Europe | Bohemia: Longing, Exile, and the Music of Homesickness (13/22)

What Cities Make of Us: Art, Power & the Human Condition Across Europe | Post 13 of 22

How a small, repeatedly conquered nation maintained its identity through art — and what Dvořák, Kafka, and Smetana teach us about the politics of belonging

In 1893, Antonín Dvořák arrived in New York to take up the position of director of the National Conservatory of Music. He was fifty-two years old, the most famous Czech composer who had ever lived, and had left behind a village called Spillville in Iowa — a small Czech immigrant community where he had spent the summer, surrounded by people who spoke his language and knew his food and could make him feel, three thousand miles from home, briefly at home.

He composed his Ninth Symphony, From the New World, in New York that year. It became the most performed symphony in the world, the piece that introduced American audiences to the sound of the European symphonic tradition at its most emotionally direct. Neil Armstrong took a recording of it to the moon.

It is not, despite its title and its use of American folk idioms, really an American symphony. It is a symphony about what it feels like to be Czech in America — about longing, about the way a landscape that is not your own makes you aware of the landscape that is, about the particular emotional texture of a person who belongs somewhere they cannot currently be.

The most universally beloved symphony of the 19th century is a piece about homesickness. This tells you something important about what homesickness actually is.

The Czech Identity Problem

For three centuries before Dvořák was born, Bohemia had been part of the Habsburg Empire — governed from Vienna, administered in German, its Czech-speaking majority population relegated to the status of a subordinate culture in their own land. The Czech language itself came close to extinction as a literary medium during the 17th and 18th centuries, when German was the language of education, government, and cultural prestige.

The Czech national revival of the early 19th century was, at its core, a language project. Scholars began collecting folk songs, fairy tales, and medieval manuscripts. Linguists formalized a literary Czech that had largely ceased to be written. Poets and novelists wrote in Czech, not as a natural choice of medium but as a political act. The language was the nation — if the language survived, the nation survived, even in the absence of political independence.

This is a pattern that recurs in cultures under political subjugation. Language becomes the primary vehicle of identity precisely because it is the one dimension of collective life that an occupying power finds most difficult to suppress entirely. You can ban a flag, prohibit an assembly, replace an administration. You cannot stop people from speaking to each other in the words they learned from their parents.

But Bohemia's situation was complicated by a further layer of cultural complexity: its capital, Prague, was also one of the great Jewish cultural centers of Central Europe — a city where Kafka's German-language modernism existed alongside Czech nationalist art, where the tensions between German, Czech, and Jewish identity produced a creative ferment unlike anything in surrounding cities.

Smetana and the Sound of a Nation

Bedřich Smetana was twenty-six years old in 1850, a piano teacher in Prague who had not yet written anything of significance, when he wrote to Liszt asking for help establishing himself as a composer. He had grown up speaking German, like most educated Bohemians of his generation, but the revolution of 1848 — in which Czech nationalists had briefly seized the moment to demand autonomy — had transformed him. He became, almost overnight, a Czech nationalist composer.

What he created over the following decades essentially invented the genre of Czech national music. His cycle of symphonic poems Má vlast — My Homeland — is a set of six pieces depicting the rivers, landscapes, legends, and history of Bohemia with a specificity and emotional directness that made it the defining musical statement of Czech identity. The second poem, Vltava, follows the Vltava river from its two mountain springs through the Bohemian landscape to Prague — it is probably the most beloved orchestral piece in Czech history, performed at every major national occasion, used to express collective emotion at moments when other languages fail.

Smetana went deaf in 1874, at forty-nine — a sudden, catastrophic, total deafness that he himself compared to the deafness of Beethoven. He continued to compose. The string quartet he wrote in the year of his deafness, From My Life, is one of the most direct pieces of musical autobiography in the repertoire: in the final movement, a high, sustained note in the violin represents the tinnitus that preceded his deafness, and the music around it slowly disintegrates.

He died in a mental asylum in 1884. His last years were marked by dementia, possibly the result of late-stage syphilis. He had given the Czech nation its musical identity and received, in return, the particular combination of fame and penury that small nations tend to offer their artists.

Dvořák's Journey and What He Found

Dvořák was, in many respects, Smetana's opposite. Where Smetana was politically passionate, Dvořák was practically-minded. Where Smetana was urban and intellectual, Dvořák was rural and instinctive. He loved pigeons — kept hundreds of them throughout his life, knew every one by name, and once left a rehearsal of the New York Philharmonic because he was worried about a sick bird.

What Dvořák understood about national identity in music was more subtle than simple political assertion. He did not believe that Czech music should simply be music that sounded Czech — that was too narrow, too parochial, too limiting for a composer of his ambitions. He believed that the universal and the particular were not in opposition — that the deepest emotional truths of human experience could be expressed through the specific musical idioms of a particular culture, and that specificity, far from limiting universality, was its prerequisite.

This is why From the New World works as well as it does. Dvořák was not imitating American folk music. He was using the emotional logic of folk music — the directness, the melodic clarity, the way folk tunes carry the emotional weight of the communities that created them — to express something that transcended any particular folk tradition. The symphony sounds universal because it is built from the specific. The melody that most people know from the slow movement is not derived from any actual folk song. It sounds as if it must be, because it has the emotional quality of something deeply remembered.

Kafka's Prague: The City as Labyrinth

Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883, the son of a prosperous German-speaking Jewish merchant. He wrote in German, lived in Prague almost his entire life, worked for most of his adult life as a civil servant in a workers' accident insurance office, and died of tuberculosis at forty in a sanatorium near Vienna.

He never finished a novel. He published almost nothing in his lifetime. He asked his friend Max Brod to burn his manuscripts after his death. Brod did not. The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika were published posthumously and became three of the most widely read and discussed novels of the 20th century.

Kafka's Prague — the city as he inhabited and described it — is a city of indefinite authority. In The Trial, Josef K. is arrested one morning for an unspecified crime, tried by a court that has no fixed location, judged by a law that is never quoted, and executed without having understood what he was accused of. The novel is not a dystopian fantasy. It is a realist description, rendered in the clearest and most precise German prose of the 20th century, of what it actually felt like to be a German-speaking Jew in an empire that was becoming daily more hostile to both characteristics.

The bureaucracy in Kafka is not an external oppressor. It is an atmosphere — a quality of social existence in which authority is simultaneously omnipresent and unlocatable, in which the rules are enforced without being explained, in which the individual's requests for clarity are met with infinite, polite deferral.

Anyone who has navigated a large institution — a government ministry, a regulatory agency, a major corporation, a hospital — has encountered some version of this atmosphere. Kafka did not exaggerate. He simply paid attention.

Mucha and the Art of National Aspiration

Alfons Mucha is the most internationally famous Czech visual artist, known primarily for his Art Nouveau poster designs from his Paris years in the 1890s — sinuous women surrounded by botanical ornament, produced for Sarah Bernhardt and the Parisian entertainment industry, which made him rich and famous.

What most people outside the Czech Republic do not know is that Mucha spent the last decades of his life in Prague, working on an enormous project that occupied him for eighteen years: The Slav Epic, a cycle of twenty monumental canvases depicting the history of the Slavic peoples from their mythological origins to the achievement of Czech independence in 1918.

The paintings are enormous — some are nearly nine meters wide — and they are almost completely unknown outside Central Europe. They represent Mucha's attempt to give his nation a founding visual mythology — the kind of historical painting that other European nations had commissioned from their artists for centuries. He funded it himself, donating the finished cycle to the city of Prague in 1928.

They are not, objectively, his best work. They are too ambitious, too programmatic, too obviously designed to serve a national purpose rather than an artistic one. But the ambition itself is moving — the attempt by a man who had become famous in Paris for making beautiful commercial images to give something back to a small nation that had not yet learned to see itself as worthy of historical grandeur.

The Question It Leaves Behind

Bohemia maintained its cultural identity through three centuries of political subjugation through an act of collective will — through the decision to keep speaking the language, playing the music, telling the stories, even when those acts had no political utility and considerable personal cost.

The Czech national revival was not inevitable. It was chosen, by enough people, over enough time, to eventually become real. The choice was made in small acts — a song collected, a grammar written, a poem published in a language that was supposed to be dying — that accumulated into something larger than any individual had planned.

What small acts of preservation or cultivation in your own life — the practices, the conversations, the commitments — might be more consequential than they currently appear?

One artwork to sit with: Bedřich Smetana, Vltava (The Moldau), from Má vlast (1874) — begin with the two flutes playing the two springs of the river, then follow the theme as it grows and travels through the landscape of Bohemia, past a peasant wedding, through moonlit water where nymphs dance, over the St. John's Rapids, and finally into Prague, where the theme transforms into the majestic Vyšehrad motif. It takes twelve minutes. It tells you more about what a nation sounds like from the inside than any history book. Then consider that the man who composed it was going deaf as he wrote it — that he was creating the sound of a landscape he would never hear again.

Next: Post 14 — Madrid & Barcelona: Goya, Picasso, and the Art of Bearing Witness