March 2

KATIE HEALEY:

Hello and welcome to the Disability Daily Podcast! I’m your host, Katie, and over the past couple years, I’ve worked on a 365-day calendar that recognizes different folks and key moments in disability history each day of the year. I’m turning this into a quick daily podcast, and I’m excited to share this with you!

From well-known figures and innovative inventions to unsung heroes and landmark legislation, each episode reveals how people with disabilities have played a crucial role in our society.

Please subscribe to the podcast on Podbean, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify to learn along with me each day. To see the calendar, visit accessiblehighered.com/calendar or see this episode’s show notes for the link.

And with that, let’s dive in!

Today we celebrate Bedřich Smetana, born March 2, 1824, in Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), who was a composer, conductor, and pianist widely regarded as the father of Czech classical music. His compositions, particularly the symphonic cycle Má vlast (My Country) and the opera The Bartered Bride, played a pivotal role in shaping Czech national identity through music.

Smetana showed musical talent from an early age and pursued formal studies in Prague. He gained recognition as a pianist and composer, drawing inspiration from Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner while incorporating distinctively Czech themes into his works. His career flourished as he became the principal conductor of the Provisional Theatre in Prague, where he worked to establish a Czech national opera tradition.

In the 1870s, Smetana began experiencing severe hearing loss, eventually becoming completely deaf by 1874. Despite this, he continued composing some of his most significant works, including Má vlast, which features the famous symphonic poem Vltava, evoking the landscapes and folklore of Bohemia. His ability to compose intricate, emotionally powerful music while profoundly deaf draws comparisons to Beethoven.

His autobiographical compositions, String Quartet No. 1 in E minor and String Quartet No. 2 in D minor, reflect his experiences with hearing loss. What does this mean? He explains his String Quartet No. 1 in E minor this way:

In the opening movement, he expresses his youthful romanticism and yearning, introducing a foreboding motif that later symbolizes the high-pitched whistling in his ears—the first sign of his hearing loss. “It is that fateful whistling of the highest tones in my ear, which in 1874 was announcing my deafness. I allowed myself this little game because it was so catastrophic for me.”

The second movement, a lively quasi-Polka, recalls his youthful days as a dance composer and his experiences in aristocratic circles. The third movement is an emotional tribute to his first love and future wife. The finale, he explains, presents the “perception of the beauty of national music, and the happiness resulting from this interrupted by my ominous catastrophe – the beginning of my deafness; the view into a tragic future, a slender ray of hope for improvement, but remembrance of the first beginnings of my path still creates a painful feeling.”

Smetana’s health deteriorated in his later years, likely due to syphilis, a bacterial infection. Though now treated with antibiotics, this was 70 years before penicillin became widely available. Smetana was eventually hospitalized in a Prague asylum and died in 1884.

Thanks so much for listening today! See the episode show notes for sources to learn more and to access the episode transcript.

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Thanks!