Zdeněk Fibich was born on 21 December 1850 at Všebořice, the son of a Czech forestry official and an ethnic German Viennese mother, and spent his early years on the wooded estates where his father worked. His mother taught him the piano from six and schooled him at home until nine; he went to a German-speaking gymnasium in Vienna for two years, then a Czech-speaking one in Prague until fifteen, and then to Leipzig for three years, studying piano with Ignaz Moscheles and composition with Salomon Jadassohn and Ernst Richter. After most of a year in Paris he finished with Vinzenz Lachner in Mannheim. He married Růžena Hanušová at twenty-three and took a choirmaster’s post in Vilnius, where within two years both she and their newborn twins died; he returned to Prague in 1874 and stayed until his death on 15 October 1900. He married her sister, the contralto Betty Fibichová, in 1875 and left her in 1895 for his former pupil Anežka Schulzová.

He wrote three symphonies, symphonic poems, at least seven operas — Šárka and The Bride of Messina best known — chamber music including two string quartets and a piano quintet, liturgical music, and the substantial melodrama trilogy Hippodamia. The piano cycle Moods, Impressions and Reminiscences runs to 376 pieces written through the 1890s and served as a diary of his love for Schulzová, who wrote the libretti for all his late operas; one of its pieces became the Poème, the short work he is now best remembered by. He stands apart from Smetana and Dvořák in Czech esteem because his position on the national question was ambivalent, a consequence of his mixed parentage and of an education spread across Germany, France and Austria.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zden%C4%9Bk_Fibich
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117110