Zdenek Fibich
Encyclopedia
Zdeněk Fibich (ˈzdɛɲɛk ˈfɪbɪx, 21 December 1850 – 15 October 1900) was a Czech composer of classical music. Among his compositions are chamber works (including two string quartet
s, a piano trio
, piano quartet
and a quintet
for piano, strings and winds), symphonic poem
s, three symphonies
, at least seven opera
s (the most famous probably Šárka
and The Bride of Messina
), melodrama
s including the substantial trilogy Hippodamia
, liturgical music including a mass
- a missa brevis; and a large cycle (almost 400 pieces, from the 1890s) of piano works called Moods, Impressions, and Reminiscences. The piano cycle served as a diary of sorts of his love for a piano pupil. He was born in Všebořice (Šebořice) near Čáslav
.
That Fibich is far less known than either Antonín Dvořák
or Bedřich Smetana
can be explained by the fact that he lived during the rise of Czech nationalism within the Habsburg Empire. And while Smetana and Dvořák gave themselves over entirely to the national cause, consciously writing Czech music with which the emerging nation strongly identified, Fibich’s position was more ambivalent. That this was so was due to the background of his parents and to his education. Fibich’s father was a Czech forestry official and the composer’s early life was spent on various wooded estates of the nobleman for whom his father worked. His mother, however, was an ethnic German Viennese. Home schooled by his mother until the age of nine, he was first sent to a German speaking gymnasium in Vienna
for two years before attending a Czech speaking gymnasium in Prague where he stayed until he was 15. After this he was sent to Leipzig
where he remained for three years studying piano with Ignaz Moscheles
and composition with Salomon Jadassohn
and Ernst Richter. Then, after the better part of a year in Paris
, Fibich concluded his studies with Vinzenz Lachner
(the younger brother of Franz
and Ignaz
) in Mannheim
. Fibich spent the next few years living with his parents back in Prague where he composed his first opera Bukovina, based on a libretto of Karel Sabina, the librettist of The Bartered Bride
. At the age of 23, he married Růžena Hanušová and took up residence in the Lithuanian city of Vilnius
where he had obtained a position of choirmaster. After spending two personally unhappy years there (his wife and newly born twins both died in Vilnius), he returned to Prague in 1874 and remained there until his death in 1900. In 1875 Fibich married Růžena's sister, the operatic contralto
Betty Fibichová
(née Hanušová), but left her in 1895 for his former student and lover Anežka Schulzová. The relationship between Schulzová and Fibich was important to him artistically, since she both wrote the libretti for all his later operas including Šárka
, but also served as the inspiration for his Moods, Impressions, and Reminiscences.
Fibich was given a bi-cultural education, living, during his formative early years, in Germany, France and Austria in addition to his native Bohemia. He was fluent in German as well as Czech. In his instrumental works, Fibich generally wrote in the vein of the German romantics, first falling under the influence of Weber, Mendelssohn and Schumann and later Wagner. His early operas and close to 200 of his early songs are in German. These works along with his symphonies and chamber music won considerable praise from German critics if not from Czechs. The bulk of Fibich’s operas are in Czech, although many are based on subjects from non-Czechs such as Shakespeare, Schiller and Byron. In his chamber music, more than anywhere else, Fibich makes use of Bohemian folk melodies and dance rhythms such as the Dumka. Fibich was the first to write a Czech nationalist tone poem (Záboj, Slavoj a Luděk) which served as the inspiration for Smetana’s Má vlast
. He was also the first to use the polka in a chamber work, his quartet in A.
In the years after his return to Prague in 1874, Fibich's music encountered severely negative reactions in the Prague musical community, stemming from his (and Smetana's) adherence to Richard Wagner
's theories on opera. While Smetana's later career was plagued with problems for presenting Wagnerian-style music dramas in Czech before a conservative audience, Fibich's pugilistic music criticism, not to mention his overtly Wagnerian later operas, Hedy, Šárka
, and Pád Arkuna, exacerbated the problem in the years after Smetana's death in 1884. Together with the music aesthetician
Otakar Hostinský
he was ostracized from the musical establishment at the National Theatre
and Prague Conservatory
, and forced to rely on his private composition studio. This studio nevertheless was well respected among students, drawing such names as Emanuel Chvála, Karel Kovařovic
, Otakar Ostrčil
, and Zdeněk Nejedlý
, the notorious critic and subsequent politician. Much of the reception of Fibich's music in the early twentieth century is a result of these students' efforts after their teacher's death, especially in Nejedlý's highly polemical campaigns enacted in a series of monographs and articles that sought to redress what he considered to be past inequities. Although this served to bring Fibich's music to greater attention, subsequent scholarship has had to deal with the spectre of Nejedlý's intensely personal bias.
There is a Fibich Society which has organized projects such as Hudec's Thematic Catalog below, and much else.
Fibich was the original composer of the tune for "My Moonlight Madonna" for which Paul Francis Webster
wrote the English lyrics. In 1933 the tune was popularly harmonized by William Scotti.
String quartet
A string quartet is a musical ensemble of four string players – usually two violin players, a violist and a cellist – or a piece written to be performed by such a group...
s, a piano trio
Piano trio
A piano trio is a group of piano and two other instruments, usually a violin and a cello, or a piece of music written for such a group. It is one of the most common forms found in classical chamber music...
, piano quartet
Piano quartet
In European classical music, piano quartet denotes a chamber music composition for piano and three other instruments, or a musical ensemble comprising such instruments...
and a quintet
Quintet
A quintet is a group containing five members.It is commonly associated with musical groups, such as a string quintet, or a group of five singers, but can be applied to any situation where five similar or related objects are considered a single unit....
for piano, strings and winds), symphonic poem
Symphonic poem
A symphonic poem or tone poem is a piece of orchestral music in a single continuous section in which the content of a poem, a story or novel, a painting, a landscape or another source is illustrated or evoked. The term was first applied by Hungarian composer Franz Liszt to his 13 works in this vein...
s, three symphonies
Symphony
A symphony is an extended musical composition in Western classical music, scored almost always for orchestra. A symphony usually contains at least one movement or episode composed according to the sonata principle...
, at least seven opera
Opera
Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...
s (the most famous probably Šárka
Šárka (Fibich)
Šárka is an opera in three acts, opus 51, by Zdeněk Fibich to a Czech libretto by Anežka Schulzová, his student and lover. Fibich composed the full score over the period of 8 September 1896 to 10 March 1897....
and The Bride of Messina
The Bride of Messina (opera)
The Bride of Messina is a tragic opera in three acts, op. 18, by composer Zdeněk Fibich. The Czech language libretto by Otakar Hostinský is based on Friedrich Schiller's play Die Braut von Messina...
), melodrama
Melodrama
The term melodrama refers to a dramatic work that exaggerates plot and characters in order to appeal to the emotions. It may also refer to the genre which includes such works, or to language, behavior, or events which resemble them...
s including the substantial trilogy Hippodamia
Hippodamia
Hippodamia was a daughter of King Oenomaus and wife of Pelops with whom her offspring were Thyestes, Atreus, Pittheus, Alcathous, Troezen, Hippalcimus, Copreus, Astydameia, Nicippe, Eurydice and others....
, liturgical music including a mass
Mass (music)
The Mass, a form of sacred musical composition, is a choral composition that sets the invariable portions of the Eucharistic liturgy to music...
- a missa brevis; and a large cycle (almost 400 pieces, from the 1890s) of piano works called Moods, Impressions, and Reminiscences. The piano cycle served as a diary of sorts of his love for a piano pupil. He was born in Všebořice (Šebořice) near Čáslav
Cáslav
Čáslav is a town in eastern part of Central Bohemian Region of the Czech Republic.- History :History of Čáslav begins after year 800 with founding of citadel and settlement called Hrádek. Near Hrádek, new town with huge square was founded by king Přemysl Otakar II in 1250...
.
That Fibich is far less known than either Antonín Dvořák
Antonín Dvorák
Antonín Leopold Dvořák was a Czech composer of late Romantic music, who employed the idioms of the folk music of Moravia and his native Bohemia. Dvořák’s own style is sometimes called "romantic-classicist synthesis". His works include symphonic, choral and chamber music, concerti, operas and many...
or Bedřich Smetana
Bedrich Smetana
Bedřich Smetana was a Czech composer who pioneered the development of a musical style which became closely identified with his country's aspirations to independent statehood. He is thus widely regarded in his homeland as the father of Czech music...
can be explained by the fact that he lived during the rise of Czech nationalism within the Habsburg Empire. And while Smetana and Dvořák gave themselves over entirely to the national cause, consciously writing Czech music with which the emerging nation strongly identified, Fibich’s position was more ambivalent. That this was so was due to the background of his parents and to his education. Fibich’s father was a Czech forestry official and the composer’s early life was spent on various wooded estates of the nobleman for whom his father worked. His mother, however, was an ethnic German Viennese. Home schooled by his mother until the age of nine, he was first sent to a German speaking gymnasium in Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
for two years before attending a Czech speaking gymnasium in Prague where he stayed until he was 15. After this he was sent to Leipzig
Leipzig
Leipzig Leipzig has always been a trade city, situated during the time of the Holy Roman Empire at the intersection of the Via Regia and Via Imperii, two important trade routes. At one time, Leipzig was one of the major European centres of learning and culture in fields such as music and publishing...
where he remained for three years studying piano with Ignaz Moscheles
Ignaz Moscheles
Ignaz Moscheles was a Bohemian composer and piano virtuoso, whose career after his early years was based initially in London, and later at Leipzig, where he succeeded his friend and sometime pupil Felix Mendelssohn as head of the Conservatoire.-Sources:Much of what we know about Moscheles's life...
and composition with Salomon Jadassohn
Salomon Jadassohn
Salomon Jadassohn was a German composer and a renowned teacher of piano and composition at the Leipzig Conservatory.-Life:...
and Ernst Richter. Then, after the better part of a year in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, Fibich concluded his studies with Vinzenz Lachner
Vinzenz Lachner
Vinzenz Lachner was a significant German composer and conductor....
(the younger brother of Franz
Franz Lachner
Franz Paul Lachner was a German composer and conductor.Lachner was born in Rain am Lech to a musical family . He studied music with Simon Sechter and Maximilian, the Abbé Stadler. He conducted at the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna. In 1834, he became Kapellmeister at Mannheim...
and Ignaz
Ignaz Lachner
Ignaz Lachner , was a German composer and conductor.Ignaz Lachner was born into a musical family at Rain am Lech. He was the second of the three famous Lachner brothers. Lachner's brothers Franz and Vinzenz, were also composers...
) in Mannheim
Mannheim
Mannheim is a city in southwestern Germany. With about 315,000 inhabitants, Mannheim is the second-largest city in the Bundesland of Baden-Württemberg, following the capital city of Stuttgart....
. Fibich spent the next few years living with his parents back in Prague where he composed his first opera Bukovina, based on a libretto of Karel Sabina, the librettist of The Bartered Bride
The Bartered Bride
The Bartered Bride is a comic opera in three acts by the Czech composer Bedřich Smetana, to a libretto by Karel Sabina. The opera is considered to have made a major contribution towards the development of Czech music. It was composed during the period 1863–66, and first performed at the...
. At the age of 23, he married Růžena Hanušová and took up residence in the Lithuanian city of Vilnius
Vilnius
Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania, and its largest city, with a population of 560,190 as of 2010. It is the seat of the Vilnius city municipality and of the Vilnius district municipality. It is also the capital of Vilnius County...
where he had obtained a position of choirmaster. After spending two personally unhappy years there (his wife and newly born twins both died in Vilnius), he returned to Prague in 1874 and remained there until his death in 1900. In 1875 Fibich married Růžena's sister, the operatic contralto
Contralto
Contralto is the deepest female classical singing voice, with the lowest tessitura, falling between tenor and mezzo-soprano. It typically ranges between the F below middle C to the second G above middle C , although at the extremes some voices can reach the E below middle C or the second B above...
Betty Fibichová
Betty Fibichová
Betty Fibichová was a Czechoslovak opera singer and the wife of composer Zdeněk Fibich. The greatest Czech operatic contralto of her day, she enjoyed close artistic partnerships with both Antonín Dvořák and Bedřich Smetana in addition to collaborating frequently with her husband.-Biography:Born...
(née Hanušová), but left her in 1895 for his former student and lover Anežka Schulzová. The relationship between Schulzová and Fibich was important to him artistically, since she both wrote the libretti for all his later operas including Šárka
Šárka (Fibich)
Šárka is an opera in three acts, opus 51, by Zdeněk Fibich to a Czech libretto by Anežka Schulzová, his student and lover. Fibich composed the full score over the period of 8 September 1896 to 10 March 1897....
, but also served as the inspiration for his Moods, Impressions, and Reminiscences.
Fibich was given a bi-cultural education, living, during his formative early years, in Germany, France and Austria in addition to his native Bohemia. He was fluent in German as well as Czech. In his instrumental works, Fibich generally wrote in the vein of the German romantics, first falling under the influence of Weber, Mendelssohn and Schumann and later Wagner. His early operas and close to 200 of his early songs are in German. These works along with his symphonies and chamber music won considerable praise from German critics if not from Czechs. The bulk of Fibich’s operas are in Czech, although many are based on subjects from non-Czechs such as Shakespeare, Schiller and Byron. In his chamber music, more than anywhere else, Fibich makes use of Bohemian folk melodies and dance rhythms such as the Dumka. Fibich was the first to write a Czech nationalist tone poem (Záboj, Slavoj a Luděk) which served as the inspiration for Smetana’s Má vlast
Má vlast
Má vlast is a set of six symphonic poems composed between 1874 and 1879 by the Czech composer Bedřich Smetana. While it is often presented as a single work in six movements and – with the exception of Vltava– is almost always recorded that way, the six pieces were conceived as individual works...
. He was also the first to use the polka in a chamber work, his quartet in A.
In the years after his return to Prague in 1874, Fibich's music encountered severely negative reactions in the Prague musical community, stemming from his (and Smetana's) adherence to Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...
's theories on opera. While Smetana's later career was plagued with problems for presenting Wagnerian-style music dramas in Czech before a conservative audience, Fibich's pugilistic music criticism, not to mention his overtly Wagnerian later operas, Hedy, Šárka
Šárka (Fibich)
Šárka is an opera in three acts, opus 51, by Zdeněk Fibich to a Czech libretto by Anežka Schulzová, his student and lover. Fibich composed the full score over the period of 8 September 1896 to 10 March 1897....
, and Pád Arkuna, exacerbated the problem in the years after Smetana's death in 1884. Together with the music aesthetician
Aesthetics of music
Traditionally, the aesthetics of music or musical aesthetics concentrated on the quality and study of the beauty and enjoyment of music. The origin of this philosophic sub-discipline is sometimes attributed to Baumgarten in the 18th century, followed by Kant...
Otakar Hostinský
Otakar Hostinský
Otakar Hostinský was a Czech historian, musicologist, and professor of musical aesthetics...
he was ostracized from the musical establishment at the National Theatre
National Theatre (Prague)
The National Theatre in Prague is known as the Alma Mater of Czech opera, and as the national monument of Czech history and art.The National Theatre belongs to the most important Czech cultural institutions, with a rich artistic tradition which was created and maintained by the most distinguished...
and Prague Conservatory
Prague Conservatory
Prague Conservatory, sometimes also Prague Conservatoire, in Czech Pražská konzervatoř, is a Czech secondary school in Prague dedicated to teaching the arts of music and theater acting.- Instruction :...
, and forced to rely on his private composition studio. This studio nevertheless was well respected among students, drawing such names as Emanuel Chvála, Karel Kovařovic
Karel Kovarovic
Karel Kovařovic was a Czech composer and conductor.-Life:From 1873 to 1879 he studied clarinet, harp and piano at the Prague Conservatory. He began his career as a harpist...
, Otakar Ostrčil
Otakar Ostrcil
Otakar Ostrčil was a Czech composer and conductor. He is noted for symphonic works Impromptu, Suite in C Minor, and Symfonietta, and in his opera compositions Poupě and Honzovo království.-Compositional career:Ostrčil was born in Prague, where he spent his entire life, as it was the center of the...
, and Zdeněk Nejedlý
Zdenek Nejedlý
Zdeněk Nejedlý was a Czech musicologist, music critic, author, and politician whose ideas dominated the cultural life of what is now the Czech Republic for most of the twentieth century...
, the notorious critic and subsequent politician. Much of the reception of Fibich's music in the early twentieth century is a result of these students' efforts after their teacher's death, especially in Nejedlý's highly polemical campaigns enacted in a series of monographs and articles that sought to redress what he considered to be past inequities. Although this served to bring Fibich's music to greater attention, subsequent scholarship has had to deal with the spectre of Nejedlý's intensely personal bias.
There is a Fibich Society which has organized projects such as Hudec's Thematic Catalog below, and much else.
Fibich was the original composer of the tune for "My Moonlight Madonna" for which Paul Francis Webster
Paul Francis Webster
Paul Francis Webster was an American lyricist who won three Academy Awards for Best Song and was nominated sixteen times for the award.-Biography:...
wrote the English lyrics. In 1933 the tune was popularly harmonized by William Scotti.
Works
External links
- Biographical link
- Biography by Keith Johnson
- Czech necrologue of Zdeněk Fibich
- Review of Fibich's opera Šárka
- Fibich Chamber Music Sound-bites & Short bio
- Quintetto pro housle, klarinet (nebo housle II), lesní roh (nebo violu), violoncello u klavír = für Violine, Klarinetto (o. II. Violine), Horn (o. Viola), Violoncello u. Klavier : op. 42 / složil Zdenko Fibich. From Sibley Music Library Digital Scores Collection
- 4 Balladen für eine Mittel-Stimme mit Klavierbegleitung. Op. 7. From Sibley Music Library Digital Scores Collection
- Fruehlingsstrahlen. Jarní paprsky. 14 Lieder mit Klavierbegleitung. Op. 36. Heft I-II. From Sibley Music Library Digital Scores Collection