PT Journal
AU Devine, FP
TI Considerations of Inheritance in Zdenek Fibich's Symphonic Poems
SO Musicologica Olomucensia
PY 2021
BP 271
EP 283
VL 33
IS 1
DI 10.5507/mo.2021.016
DE Czech music; Zdenek Fibich; symphonic poem
AB Dictionary entries on the symphonic poem place the Czech Lands ahead of Russia, France, Germany and other countries. This sequence highlights the important pioneering attempts of a number of composers in Bohemia and Moravia who contributed vitally to the evolution of a form which was barely out of its infancy. Although the Czech symphony had witnessed no significant representative work for some fifty years since Jan Vaclav Vorisek's Symphony in D of 1821 - both Bedrich Smetana and Antonin Dvorak had continued in the central European symphonic tradition without any appreciable breakthrough or impact - Smetana's three "Swedish" symphonic poems of 1858-1861 achieved a certain notoriety and today stand as early landmarks in the history of the genre. Fibich would have been aware of the compositions of both Franz Liszt and Smetana when he turned to the fledgling form in 1873 with the first two of his works, Othello and Zaboj, Slavoj a Ludek [Zaboj, Slavoj and Ludek]; the other three pieces, Toman a lesni panna [Toman and the Wood Nymph], Boure [The Tempest] and Vesna [Spring], followed in the next eight years. While this makes the collection contemporary with Smetana's cycle Ma vlast, the question of inheritance is more appropriately applied to the Liszt and earlier Smetana series. The far-reaching influence of sonata form as handled by all three composers represents one of several avenues of inquiry in order to identify which aspects of the structure Fibich imitated in his music and which emerge as unconventional or original features.
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