The Daughter of Glory

The Daughter of Glory – Slávy dcéra in Slovak – is Marek Piaček’s setting of verses by Ján Kollár (1793–1852), a native of Mošovce, Lutheran pastor in Pest and poet of Slavic reciprocity. His Prelude to the poem Slávy dcera (1824) is written in quantitative verse, in hexameter, like the epics of Homer and Virgil – and it opens with a line that generations of schoolchildren in Slovakia and the Czech lands know by heart:

Aj, zde leží zem ta před okem mým slzy ronícím, někdy kolébka, nyní národu mého rakev.
— Ján Kollár, Předzpěv (1824)

(“Lo, here before my tearful eye lies the land, once the cradle, now the coffin of my nation.”) The Prelude laments the vanished Slavs between the Elbe, the Vistula and the Danube and is at the same time a moral appeal: he alone who is worthy of freedom knows how to value every freedom. Požoň turned it into rap. Classical long and short syllables met the regular beat of a café quartet, and Marek Piaček and Jozef Chmel rapped. The first line – Aj, zde leží zem ta… – became the refrain.

A Lecture on the Problems of the Hexameter

To make clear that the matter was scientifically grounded, the live performance at the Stoka theatre in 1998 was preceded by a Lecture on the Problems of the Hexameter, given by Jozef Pavlovič, theologian and linguist. The recording of the lecture together with the piece that follows is on Marek Piaček’s SoundCloud.

The piece was later heard in the variety show Prepad at Stoka (1999) and stayed in the ensemble’s repertoire as Slávy dcéra. It is Požoň in a nutshell: a national classic, a school duty and ancient metrics, delivered with a straight face in a genre few would associate with Kollár.