On October 26, 1881, the UB sponsored a banquet to commemorate Franz Liszt's seventieth birthday. During the event, UB member Otakar Hostinský delivered a toast in which he celebrated not only Liszt, but also Wagner and Smetana.

Hostinský's positioning of Liszt and Wagner as predecessors to Smetana in his toast along with his references to “fighting” and “victories” was not an isolated move. Instead, it reflected a longer, larger discourse that certain UB members had been formulating around notions of a “Czech” nationalistic voice since the 1870s. In 1873, Smetana's UB advocates took over management of the journal Dalibor, which they used to launch a propaganda campaign on behalf of the composer. As explored in the previous chapter, members’ appropriations of Liszt found readers receptive. Members’ attempts to yoke Smetana to Wagner, however, were much more problematic for some audiences. Whereas Liszt was a captivating celebrity, Wagner was a German radical whose political views aligned him with the Czechs’ cultural oppressors. UB members’ Wagner-specific campaigns helped initiate “musical battles” of the 1870s (as Hostinský later described them) in which some members—especially František Pivoda—actively lobbied against any appropriation of Wagner's compositional strategies and against the idea of a Wagner-inflected nationalism.

In the past, discussions of the “musical battles” in scholarship have often focused on either disparaging Smetana's opponents (including Pivoda) or rescuing him from the possibility of Wagner's influence. Here, I want to shiftfrom such perpetuation of the “battles” to an investigation of the propagandist strategies of Smetana's contemporary supporters. Exploring UB members’ music criticism reveals that, for some, Wagner's influence was not a threat to Smetana's creation of an idealistically Czech music, but critical to its construction. Smetana's “Wagnerism,” according to UB writings, did not mean that his music was being “taken over” by a “foreign entity”—as Pivoda claimed—but allowed Smetana to conquer Wagner's foreignness in the name of Czechness.