Bedich Smetana was a Czech composer who pioneered the development of a musical style that became inextricably linked with his people's hopes for a cultural and political "revival." In his homeland, he is regarded as the "Father of Czech Music."

The two Czech Dances cycles of 1877 and 1879 were Smetana's final major piano works. The first of these had the goal, as Smetana explained to his publisher, of "idealizing the polka, as Chopin did with the mazurka in his day."

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