Listen, none of us made good decisions in our 20s. Among the more anodyne of my offenses was that, for about a year or so at the start of that decade, my soundtrack of choice for amorous congress was “Má vlast.” I was clinging to the last Romantic edges of my late-teenage years, and in a way, Bedřich Smetana’s 80-minute sextet of symphonic poems provided an interesting control for an informal, Kinsey-esque experiment: Most of my male partners were done long before the end of the work’s most famous movement, “Vltava.” My female partners generally held out for a few more movements. Make of that data what you will.
I Know, But: “Má Vlast”
Can Smetana’s epic work become unburdened by history?
