He is called the father of Czech music, yet he couldn’t speak proper Czech until he was an adult and composed his greatest masterpieces while completely, permanently deaf. Bedrich Smetana built a nation’s musical identity entirely from scratch, from the outside, and in total silence.

This deep dive traces the tragic and improbable life of Smetana, a prodigy raised speaking German under Habsburg rule who manned the barricades in 1848, lost three daughters and a wife, and faced a vicious smear campaign from his own countrymen. We follow how catastrophic deafness triggered his greatest creative period and how he engineered a national sound from the rhythm of the polka and the influences of Liszt and Wagner.

• The irony of a German-speaking child who later studied Czech grammar from a book to write his operas
• How the disastrous premiere of The Bartered Bride, staged on the eve of the Austro-Prussian War, became a triumph
• The accusation of Wagnerism and a petition of 86 subscribers demanding his resignation from the theater
• How he wrote his own tinnitus into a string quartet as a piercing high E harmonic
• The creation of My Fatherland, including the beloved river portrait Vltava, after he lost all hearing