Fibich: Šárka – Brno Janáček Opera

Zdeněk Fibich never gets his due, and that has less to do with the quality of his invention than with the accident of geography and the tyranny of anniversaries. He was a Czech composer working in the shadow of Smetana on one side and Dvořák on the other, and history only had room for two names on the marquee. Fibich wrote symphonies, tone poems, an enormous quantity of songs and piano miniatures, and a trilogy of “melodramas” after Hippodamia that remain among the strangest experiments in the union of spoken word and orchestra to come out of the nineteenth century. He also wrote Šárka, and Šárka deserves better than the dusty margins it has occupied for a hundred years.

The subject is drawn from the same well of Czech legend that gave Smetana his Vyšehrad and his Libuše — this is, in fact, a kind of sequel, picking up after Libuše’s death, when the women she’d championed rise up against Ctirad and Přemysl’s men and get put down bloodily for their trouble. Šárka lays her trap, Ctirad walks into it out of pure knightly vanity, she falls for him despite herself, and the whole thing ends the way these nationalist myths of the 1890s tended to end for women who asked for too much: she jumps off a cliff. Anežka Schulzová’s libretto is not subtle about the gender politics. Subtlety was never really the point.

What is the point is the sound Fibich makes. He absorbed Wagner more thoroughly than either Smetana or Dvořák ever cared to, but he never fell into the Bayreuth trap of mistaking length for profundity. The battle music that opens act two is full of hard-edged brass and string tremolandi that owe something to Weber’s Euryanthe filtered through a Czech sense of modal color. There’s Mendelssohn in there too — the woodland murmur of the Scottish and Italian symphonies turns up transfigured in the forest scene that opens the second disc, “Vše ticho kolem,” where Šárka, bound to her tree, sings against a hushed, shimmering orchestral backdrop that Fibich paints with real tenderness. It’s the loveliest ten minutes in the score. It comes as something of a shock after the carnage that precedes it.

This 1978 Supraphon album, made at the old Brno studio with the Janáček Opera forces under Jaroslav Tychý, has been more or less the only game in town for decades, and it’s a good one. Eva Děpoltová sings the title role with a burnished, slightly steely soprano that suits Šárka’s fanaticism. There’s not much girlish vulnerability here, but the character doesn’t really call for it until the very end, and Děpoltová finds an affecting break in the voice for the final scene. Eva Randová, as Vlasta, sings with the kind of chest-voice authority you don’t hear much anymore; she sounds like she means every word, and the microphones catch a grain in her lower register that suggests real menace rather than routine mezzo villainy.

Vilém Přibyl’s Ctirad is a genuine tenor of the old heroic Czech school. Not always the most finished production, a little raw at the top under pressure, but the ring is unmistakable, and he never resorts to bark where a real sustained line will do. Václav Zítek’s Přemysl is dignified without being dull. The smaller roles are cast from strength, which matters in an opera this dependent on ensemble texture. Jitka Pavlová and Božena Effenberková don’t get much individual space but blend beautifully in the choral writing, which Fibich — like Janáček after him — treats almost as another orchestral section.

The chorus, prepared by Josef Pančík, is the real hero of this interpretation. Fibich gives the women’s chorus extraordinary music: track 14 of the first disc, where Radka enters brandishing the severed head of the Devín garrison’s commander, is as savage a piece of choral writing as exists in Czech opera, and the Brno chorus attacks it without any polite restraint. The engineering, dated as it inevitably sounds against digital-era studio work, has enough presence and depth to let that violence register. Strings occasionally thin out under climactic pressure — this was 1978 analogue tape, not yesterday’s Pentatone session — but voices are caught with warmth, and the balance favors the stage over the pit, which for an opera this vocally driven feels correct.

Is there a rival version? Not really, not on disc, which is itself an argument for owning this one rather than waiting for something that may never come. Fibich remains a connoisseur’s composer, and Šárka remains a connoisseur’s opera: heady, uneven, occasionally over-plotted, but full of pages that no other Czech composer of the period could have written quite this way. Recommended, without hesitation, to anyone curious about the roads not taken after Smetana.