The Bride of Messina is an opera that, especially in a fine performance such as this, triumphs over severe disadvantages. For a start, the plot (from Schiller) is gloomy and static. The quarrelling brothers Cesar and Manuel are reconciled by their mother Princess Isabella, who has meanwhile hidden their sister Beatrice in a convent; for their father once had a dream that Beatrice would cause their deaths. Manuel abducts a beautiful nun, but Cesar also falls in love with her. Before Manuel can explain that he has discovered that she is in fact Beatrice, Cesar kills him, then stabs himself in remorse. The libretto sets this out in a series of monologues, virtually without ensembles but with an important role for commenting choruses: Schiller was consciously trying to reconstruct Greek practice, as he says in his preface.
This imposes severe demands on a composer. Fibich was certainly influenced to some extent by Wagner, though this is mostly after the ceremonial fashion of Lohengrin together with a feeling for the more mature Wagner's command of musical declamation. His use of motive is very much his own; and his lyrical declamatory lines are closely derived from Czech speech-rhythms, offering splendid opportunities to the quartet of leading singers (quintet, if one includes the significant part for the servant Diego, finely sung here by Karel Hanus). Libuse Marova leads matters off with that risky operatic device, a long opening narration explaining the story so far; but she has a commanding presence and a dignified voice, and certainly on records the attention is immediately held. The brothers are well contrasted, Ivo Zidek elegant and heroic as Cesar, Vaclav Zitek pronouncing his reconciliation to his brother in their duet gravely and sombrely but with the resources in his voice for a tender declaration of love. Beatrice is beautifully sung by Gabriela Benackova, nowhere better than in her own opening soliloquy to Act 2 as she is torn between her passion for her mysterious knightly abductor and her fear and remorse at having abandoned the cloister.
Much falls, obviously, on chorus and orchestra. Fibich writes beautifully for massed voices, and the care lavished on the singing here goes a long way towards justifying the quasi-Greek device. He was also a fine orchestrator, with this opera in a style more Germanic than elsewhere or among his compatriots, but with a warmth and fluency that are well realized in the hands of Frantisek Jilek. The recording, though now elderly, does well by all concerned. Text and translations are provided though there are misprints and the English version, generally fair, occasionally slips up through misuse of the dictionary. ''Mind the ends'', the brothers are admonished, for ''Consider the consequences'' and the excited Beatrice observes of her lover, ''He stood before me in his virile handsomeness''.'