Praga, Op. 26

Program notes

About the Work

Praga (‘Prague’) is Josef Suk’s grand symphonic tribute to the golden, hundred-spired capital of his homeland. Composed in 1904, it is a single-movement symphonic poem conceived on the largest scale: a portrait not of a story but of a city and its history, its monuments, its proud and turbulent past. Suk wrote it at a pivotal moment. Its idiom is still largely the warm, confident late Romanticism he had inherited from his teacher and father-in-law Dvořák, but Dvořák died while Suk was working on it, and the personal tragedies that followed would soon transform his music into something far darker.

The work is patriotic music in the noblest sense. Its emotional and structural climax is built on one of the most potent symbols in all Czech music: the old Hussite battle hymn ‘Ye Who Are God’s Warriors’ (Kdož jste boží bojovníci), the fifteenth-century chorale that had become, for Czechs, an emblem of national defiance and faith, the same melody Smetana had used to crown his cycle Má vlast. By weaving this chorale into Praga, Suk places his city within the long sweep of Czech history and struggle, and brings the work to a blazing, affirmative conclusion. Richly and brilliantly scored for a large orchestra, it is a splendid showcase both for the composer and for an orchestra steeped, as the Concertgebouworkest is here under a great Czech conductor, in this repertoire.

What to Listen For

This is a single continuous span, so listen for how Suk builds and releases tension across its twenty-odd minutes, conjuring the grandeur and the moods of a great city. The orchestration is lavish: expect glowing brass, sweeping strings and a real sense of monumental scale, in the warm late-Romantic manner of Dvořák and Richard Strauss.

The key thing to listen for is the gradual emergence of the Hussite chorale ‘Ye Who Are God’s Warriors.’ Suk hints at it, develops the city’s other themes around it, and saves its full, triumphant statement, pealing out in the brass, for the work’s climax, transforming the portrait of Prague into a blazing affirmation of Czech identity and faith. If you know Smetana’s Má vlast, you will recognise the same hymn and the same surge of national pride. Let the music carry you through Suk’s vision of his city, from atmospheric reverie to that final, glorious peroration.