Tchaikovsky's Complete Songs: A Companion with Texts and Translations.
By Richard Sylvester. (Russian Music Studies.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. [xvi, 349 p. ISBN 0-253-34041-1. $59.95.] Discography, bibliography, indexes, compact disc.When one considers Tchaikovsky, the immediate association is with ballet and symphonic music; in truth, the composer wrote 103 songs with lyrics by both well-known and unfamiliar poets. Author Richard Sylvester has collected these songs, translated the lyrics from the original Russian, transliterated the Cyrillic characters into letters of the Latin alphabet, and provided fascinating historical background for each. A compact disc containing twenty-two songs performed by notable singers is an added bonus. The result is an unexpected, long-overdue, and welcome labor of love, imbued with intelligent scholarship.
The book is as meticulously organized as Sylvester's scholarship. A preface delineates the book's purpose and text presentation, and "Transcription from Cyrillic" offers an intriguing and detailed perspective of the challenge inherent in the task of translation and transliteration. The remainder of the book is a chronological song-by-song catalog of the poetry, enlivened by musicological and historical background (names, dates, citation of other treatments of the text, brief musical summaries); a list of recordings rounds out the commentary, for each song. An appendix presents a thorough list of singers and recordings, a treasury of biographical and discographical information in itself. The book concludes with an exhaustive bibliography and three indexes: "Song Titles in Russian," "Song Titles in English," and "Index of Names."
The reader can enjoy Tchaikovsky's Complete Songs either as a "read-through" chronology of the composer's life or as a tome of poetry to be consulted when required.
Light verses such as "My genius, my angel, my friend" by Afanasy Fet (p. 2):
You're here, aren't you, light spirit, My genius, my angel, my friend, Whispering to me in conversation As you quietly circle in flight?
contrast dramatically with weightier, more frequently set poetry such as Goethe's "Kennst du das Land?" from Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (p. 65):
Know you the land where bay and myrtle grow, Where heaven's azure vault is deep and pure, Where lemon and the golden orange bloom Like fire burning under dense green leaves? Know you that land? Know you that land?
Though not a musician by training, Sylvester reveals a sensibility, sensitivity, passion, and perception for his material worthy of a qualified musicologist. As a result, Tchaikovsky's Complete Songs is much more than a song anthology or pedantic study. The author couples a sense of humanity with historical perspective, as in the following excerpt:
When the leaders of the revolt of
December 1825 were hanged by order of
Nicholas I the following summer, two
boys, still in their early teens but already
fast friends and destined to remain
closest comrades the rest of their lives,
stood on the Sparrow Hills overlooking
Moscow and made a solemn vow. They
swore to avenge the "Decembrists"--who
had fallen in their attempt to wrest front
the Romanovs a constitution for Russia--and
to devote their lives to the struggle
for "the rights of man." One of the boys
was Alexander Herzen, who would become
one of Russia's most important
writers and thinkers; the other was his
friend and ally', the poet Nikolay Ogaryov,
author of the "prayer" that serves as text
to the present song ("Prayer At Bedtime").
When in their late teens they entered
Moscow University, it was, in
Herzen's words, with "the thought that
here our dreams would be accomplished,
that here we should sow the seeds and lay
the foundation of a league ... which
would follow in the Decembrists' footsteps,
and that we should be in it."
(Alexander Herzen, My Past and
Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alxander Herzen,
trans. Constance Garnett [Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1982], 90).
But, under the eye of Nicholas's secret
police, their dreams were not to be
accomplished, and after attending
the university, first Ogaryov and then
Herzen were arrested and banished from
Moscow--undefeated, to be sure, but
knowing that their dreams would have to
be rethought. This text is not about that,
but it comes out of that. In its final irony,
"may you have dreams, even if it means
you are deceived," there is something
characteristic of the post-Decembrist sensibility
of Ogaryov, and characteristic,
too, of the greatest poet of their generation,
Mikhail Lermontov, who also wrote
poems called "prayers" that sometimes
have the force of accusations.
Tchaikovsky knew this poem earlier, as
a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory,
when he first set it to bet sung a
capella by a mixed choir in 1863. That he
returned to it twelve years later shows
that it had a compelling power for hint.
It was not the accusatory irony that drew
him to it, but rather its compassion for a
suffering world and the somber meaning
of its final benediction (p. 79).
A minor drawback to Tchaikovsky's Complete Songs is the lack of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) usage for the Russian pronunciation. Since the book's intended audience includes singers and voice teachers who routinely employ the IPA, it would have been most helpful for the author to have adopted IPA symbols for the transcriptions. The author acknowledges this limitation but supports his decision as one of immediacy to the general readership.
Tchaikovsky's Complete Songs is a valuable and welcome addition to the literature. Happily, this volume appears to be the first of a series, as the author is preparing a similar treatment of the songs of Sergey Rachmaninoff. Scholars, performers, and devotees of Russian culture can be assured that this composer, too, is in capable hands.
ELIZABETH BLADES-ZELLER
Heidelberg College
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| Author: | Blades-Zeller, Elizabeth |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Notes |
| Date: | Sep 1, 2003 |
| Words: | 922 |
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