Biography
Fibich's compositions at times reveal the pronounced impact of Mendelssohn, most likely conveyed through his piano and harmony instructors Moscheles and Richter, together with Bach's counterpoint as transmitted by Jadassohn. For roughly four years he gave lessons in Vilan and, starting in 1878, served as director of the National Theatre in Prague. From approximately that same year until 1881 he also acted as choirmaster of the Russian Orthodox Church in Prague. Thereafter Fibich supported himself chiefly through his own works and private instruction, ultimately completing around six hundred separate pieces. A deeply puzzling composer whose music resists straightforward classification, he was once ranked with Smetana and Dvorak among the leading Czech figures before Janacek took his place in that hierarchy, even though the forces shaping his output and his essential expressive temperament remained German. Later German influences encompassed Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, and Wagner. Fibich refined the melodrama and concentrated most of his efforts on operas. His output encompassed operas, melodramas, overtures, symphonic poems that preceded those of Dvorak, tone poems that came before Smetana's, symphonies, chamber music, and numerous sacred pieces, many of which he later destroyed himself. The trilogy "Hippodamia" illustrates his capacity to arrange and extend musical ideas through transformations and modulations so devised that the changes remain hidden. The melodramatic, heavily laden, and melancholic motifs typify both his style and those German influences. Nowhere does one encounter the comic Czech characters that usually dissipate musical and thematic pressures. One of his notable operas, "Sarka," draws on the Czech legend of the Amazon who loved the chieftain Ctirad, a device also found in Smetana's "Ma Vlast." That remains the sole trace of Czech influence in his later music.