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Bedrich Smetana is a heroic figure in Czech culture, and even today is accorded higher public esteem in his own country than better-known composers such as Dvorák. The son of a Bohemian brewer, he is seen as the founder of a Czech national school of music; such operas as "Libuse" and "The Bartered Bride" are staples of the Czech repertoire and his cycle of symphonic poems Má Vlast (My Country) is performed annually at the Prague Spring, the great national cultural festival. But it takes away nothing of Smetana’s significance in his own country to point out that his major works, and particularly Má Vlast, are remarkable and very original achievements in their own right. Nationalism is not everything in Smetana’s music – he was brought up speaking German and is not known to have written a word of Czech before the age of 32.

 In the polyglot Austrian Empire of which the modern Czech Republic was a part until 1918, a background of this sort was perfectly consistent with a passionate Czech patriotism. Likewise, Má Vlast is an unquestionably patriotic work, but it uses the common musical language of the Central European tradition (with a particular debt to Smetana’s friend Liszt) and does so in a remarkably innovative way. The idea of composing an 80-minute suite of symphonic poems was wholly new when Smetana began Má Vlast in 1872, and the six individual works that make up the cycle all deal successfully with the problem – then one of the hottest subjects of musical controversy – of writing programmatic music with true symphonic integrity.

Vltava (1874) is the second symphonic poem in Má Vlast, and portrays the river, called the Moldau by German-speaking Czechs such as Smetana, which rises in the _umava forest and flows through the Bohemian countryside and the city of Prague before joining the River Elbe. For Smetana, the course of the river provided a ready-made musical structure; Vltava is a sort of rondo, with the flowing theme of the river recurring in different forms between colourful episodes depicting Bohemian life and folklore along the riverside. Two brooks, portrayed on two flutes, form the sources of the river; these flow into the main stream of the river itself, the surging string melody which Smetana is said to have derived from a Swedish folk-song but which now sounds quintessentially Czech. Hunting horns are heard in the forests, before the river flows past a rustic wedding celebration where the guests are dancing a polka. Smetana led the way (here and in his String Quartet "From my Life") in introducing this light-hearted dance to symphonic music. The next episode portrays moonlight shimmering on the river in magical orchestral colours, and Smetana evokes the legend of the Rusalkas, the water-nymphs who feature prominently in Slav folklore and would later form the subject of Dvorák’s best-known opera. The music accelerates and grows agitated as the river crashes over the Rapids of St. John, above Prague, and finally sweeps through the Czech capital itself. The majestic chorale-theme of Vysehrad, the great rock-fortress that is the symbol of the Czech nation, towers over the closing bars, as the Vltava flows unstoppably onwards to the Elbe.