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Zdenek Fibich (December 21, 1850 - October 15, 1900) was a Czech composer of classical music, including chamber works (including two string quartets, a piano trio, piano quartet and a quintet for piano, strings and winds), symphonic poems, three symphonies, at least seven operas, melodramas 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 among other works. The piano cycle served as a diary of sorts of his love for a piano pupil.
That Fibich is far less known than either Antonin Dvorak or Bedrich Smetana can be explained by the fact that Fibich lived during the rise of Czech nationalism within the Habsburg empire. And while Smetana and Dvorak gave themselves over entirely to the national cause consciously writing Czech music with which the emerging nation strongly identified, Fibichs position was more ambivalent. That this was so was due to the background of his parents and to his education. Fibichs 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 9, he was first sent to a German speaking gymnasium in Vienna for 2 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 subsequently leaving her in 1895 for his former student and lover Anežka Schulzová. Hence Fibich, in contrast to either Dvořák or Smetana, was the product of two cultures, German and Czech. He had been given a true bi-cultural education. And during his formative early years, he had lived in Germany, France and Austria in addition to his native Bohemia. He was perfectly fluent in German as well as Czech. There is no denying that during his first thirty years, Fibich identified more with German culture than Czech. In the years after his return to Prague in 1874, Fibich\'s music encountered severely negative reactions in the Prague musical community, stemmed 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, exacerbated the problem in the years after Smetana\'s death in 1884. Together with the music aesthetician Otakar Hostinsky he was ostracized from the musical establishment at the National Theatre and Prague Conservatory, and forced to rely on his private composition studio.
There is a Fibich Society which has organized projects such as Hudec\'s Thematic Catalog below, and much else.
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