Musicologica Olomucensia

Cloud-Capped Towers: Tectonics in Fibich's Opera Bouře

The genre of opera has often provided a fertile context for the development of tectonics: inner structures designed to give coherence to a specific composition and to convey its content. The simplest applications of such structures in opera have consisted of clearly-defined, repetitive motivic references to characters and dramatic events. During the second half of the nineteenth century, these structures became increasingly more subtle, more comprehensive, and more responsive to compositional impulse and emotion. As musical subtexts, they intensified the theatrical immediacy of the work through evocation of mood, enhancement of text, gestures, and interrelationships. Notable examples of such subtexts can be found in Czech operas: Smetana's Dalibor, Dvořák's Rusalka, Janáček's Její pastorkyňa, as well as Bouře. Fibich's intensive professional training at the Leipzig Conservatory and his continual goal to achieve compositional excellence produced a mature style of unusual power, clarity and depth. His transition from simple motivic referentiality to a subtext of complex, expressive inner structure is especially visible in Bouře. Musical evidence indicates that operas such as these influenced the growth of tectonics in Czech music well into the twentieth century.

Keywords: Zdeněk Fibich; Czech music; opera; opera Bouře [The Tempest]