Musicologica Olomucensia 12: Zdeněk Fibich as a Central European Composer at the End of the Nineteenth Century (review)

Stakes in Fibich scholarly investigation are on the rise. Over-promoted by Zdeněk Nejedlý and his adherents as the true successor to Smetana (Nejedlý disdained Dvořák), Fibich’s fortunes then fell together with Nejedlý’s. Not only did the grandiose Collected Edition collapse, without any of the operas appearing—full scores remain unpublished—but there also seemed to be no popular appetite for his music. Although some of the orchestral and instrumental music is recorded, only two complete operas have ever been available on commercial recordings. However, a new wind has been blowing from the small Moravian university town of Olomouc. In the 1970s Vladimír Hudec (1928–2003) began publishing non-hagiographical accounts of this prolific composer, a venture which culminated in his vast (850-page) thematic catalogue (2001). The baton was handed on to Jiří Kopecký, whose doctoral dissertation on the late operas was remodelled as a book (Opery Zdeň ka Fibicha z devadesátých let), reviewed in Music & Letters (91 (2010), 101–3). And in 2010, the 110th anniversary of the composer’s death and 160th anniversary of his birth, a conference organized by Kopecký in Olomouc resulted in a substantial publication issued as the journal of the Olomouc music department (Musicologica olomucensia), edited by Jan Vičar.

Little has been published about Fibich outside the Czech language, which is ironic considering that he was the most Western-orientated of all nineteenth-century Czech composers. The consequent lessening of his nationalist appeal to Czechs might not have mattered had Germans or other non-Czechs taken him to their hearts. But they didn’t, and the thoroughly worthy Fibich has languished on the shelf, unknown and unloved. The present volume, however, is mostly in English (and what isn’t in English is in German or French) so that a goodly amount of material about Fibich is thus suddenly available to non-Czech speakers. What is particularly remarkable is the extent of non-Czechs represented in the volume: nine out of thirty-four contributors. Does such foreign interest indicate a change in his fortunes, the point when Fibich studies become international? This certainly seems to be one of the aims of the conference, with its billing of Fibich as a‘central European composer’.

This emphasis continues in the structure of the volume itself. While two smaller sections deal respectively with Fibich and melodrama and Fibich and his contemporaries, the first section—almost half the volume—is devoted to accounts of Fibich seen within the ‘Vienna–Prague–Berlin axis’. The opening article, too long at forty-four pages to be part of the original conference in its present form, is Vlasta Reittererová and Viktor Velek’s account of the Viennese reception of Fibich. This is more of a subject than one might have imagined. Roughly a million Czech speakers lived in Vienna until the break-up of the Habsburg empire in 1918, Czech concert-giving societies flourished in Vienna and eagerly performed and promoted Fibich as the most prominent Czech composer of his day. All this is carefully documented with 145 footnotes and many new sources. Other articles in this section provide context: Marek Pechač on Wagnerianism in the Czech lands in the 1880s; Jan Gajdošíková on European and Czech salon music in the second half of the nineteenth century—both subjects relevant to Fibich’s own output. Patrick F. Devine sets Fibich’s three symphonies against Austro-German models of the time, examining cyclic procedures, tonal schemes, autobiographical content, and nationalist flavour. If his conclusion (‘the music does sound Czech at times’) is a bit lame after six laborious charts bristling with bar numbers, this cannot be said of the article by Judith Fiehler, originally a Webern scholar, but one who with many sharp observations demonstrates a comfortable knowledge both of Czech secondary literature and Fibich’s operatic output. Fibich is usually not presented as...