PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Beveridge, David R.
TI  - Zdeněk Nejedlý's Adoration of Fibich as Motive for His Attacks on Dvořák
DP  - 2021 Dec 12
TA  - Musicologica Olomucensia
PG  - 60--73
VI  - 33
IP  - 1
AID - 10.5507/mo.2021.004
IS  - 27879186
AB  - During recent decades historians and musicologists have devoted major attention to the harsh judgments of Zdeněk Nejedlý regarding Antonín Dvořák, devoting even one whole book to this topic. They have engaged in speculations about the causes of these judgments in the aesthetic, social, and political context of the time. It seems, however, that one of these causes, evidently the original cause and perhaps the main cause, has not yet been identified as such. To recognize it we must be aware that although Nejedlý's best-known condemnations of Dvořák come from the time of the "Battles over Dvořák" that broke out in 1912, his positions in this matter were essentially fully developed already much earlier, at the very beginning of his career. For example, in 1903 he wrote: "Dvořák lacked the artistic intelligence to create new forms." Critical is the fact that Nejedlý denigrated Dvořák even earlier, in his book about Zdeněk Fibich published in 1901, where many passages surprise us with assertions that in harmony, in subtle rhythms, in polyphony, in melody, in "musical technique," and in orchestration, inferior to Fibich was not only Dvořák but also the composer best known as Nejedlý's hero: Smetana. Nejedlý had published part of this book in advance in instalments in a periodical, late in 1900 shortly after Fibich's death, with an introduction that makes even clearer his adoration of this composer not only as an artist (with whom he himself had studied composition) but as a human being, and his bitter conviction that Fibich had not received the recognition he deserved. Later in the book he attempts to explain Dvořák's greater career success by the assertion that his music is "much simpler" and that England, which conferred such glory on him, was an "unmusical" country. From these observations and others we may conclude that Nejedlý felt the need to criticize Dvořák as the one who had received recognition that rightly belonged to Fibich. And in part Nejedlý was correct: even if we perhaps think Dvořák was a greater composer, it is indisputable that at the end of the nineteenth century his fame unjustly left Fibich in the shadow-which today is even more the case than then.