PT Journal
AU Fiehler, J
TI Cloud-Capped Towers: Tectonics in Fibich's Opera Boure
SO Musicologica Olomucensia
PY 2021
BP 95
EP 113
VL 33
IS 1
DI 10.5507/mo.2021.007
DE Zdenek Fibich; Czech music; opera; opera Boure [The Tempest]
AB 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, Dvorak's Rusalka, Janacek's Jeji pastorkyna, as well as Boure.  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 Boure. Musical evidence indicates that operas such as these influenced the growth of tectonics in Czech music well into the twentieth century.
ER