Celebrated as the father of Czech music, Bedrich Smetana did not speak proper Czech until his late 30s and wrote his most famous nationalist masterpieces while completely deaf. This episode explores how a brewer's son born in Habsburg-ruled Bohemia in 1824, raised speaking German because Czech was the language of peasants, fought on the barricades of the 1848 uprising in Prague, endured the loss of three young daughters and his wife, and left for self-imposed exile in Gothenburg, Sweden after Prague critics panned the piano trio he wrote in grief.

When a more liberal atmosphere returned in the 1860s, Smetana came home determined to build a Czech opera tradition from scratch, studying Czech grammar daily to understand the librettos he was setting. We follow the success of The Brandenburgers in Bohemia, the disastrous wartime premiere of The  ...