Modern Russian Songs

Author : Ernest Newman
Publisher : Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN 13 : 9781722095949
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (959 download)

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Download or read book Modern Russian Songs - Volume I - Alpheraky to Moussorgsky written by Ernest Newman and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-06-28 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the introductory. THE thesaurus of Russian song is the second richest in Europe in one respect, and the first in another. Every country has, of course, an abundance of musical lyrics. But it will hardly be disputed by any one that the Germanic races have produced the largest number of art songs of the highest class; and it will probably be admitted by everyone who has given any study to the subject that the Russian treasury of song surpasses even the German in variety, if not in quantity. Vast as the German output has been, and varied as have been the minds that have expressed themselves in the song, the family likenesses overbear, on the whole, the personal differences: there is an unmistakable something that is common to Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, Jensen, Franz, Strauss, Mahler, and a hundred others. These family likenesses, it is true, will be found in the songs of every race, and it goes without saying that they exist in the Russian song. None the less true is it, I think, that the personal characteristics are more marked there than in the German song: to pass from Glinka to Borodine, from Borodine to Moussorgsky, from Moussorgsky to Rachmaninoff, from Rachmaninoff to Stravinsky, from Stravinsky to Arensky, from Arensky to Liapounoff, from Liapounoff to Medtner, from Medtner to Vassilenko, from Vassilenko to Tchaikovsky, from Tchaikovsky to Tcherepnin, and so on through a score of other names, is to see a more sharply differentiated set of physiognomies than when we pass from Schubert to Schumann, from Schumann to Mahler, from Mahler to Strauss, from Strauss to Wolf, from Wolf to Loewe. And the remarkable thing is that this unusually rich crop of song has been sown and reaped in much less than a century. There were Russian and pseudo-Russian song composers before Glinka: one pre-Glinka song, the "Nightingale" of Alabieff (1802 - 1852), is still occasionally sung. But to all intents and purposes the Russian song begins with Glinka (1804-1857). The earliest of his songs date from his teens, but the bulk of them -- and certainly the best of them -- were written after he was thirty: of the two included in the present collection, "The Star of the North" belongs to 1839, "The Journey" to 1840. ("A Life for the Czar," it will be remembered, was produced in 1836, and "Rousslan and Ludmilla" in 1842.) Schubert's "Erl King" was written in 1815, and there had been a long and honorable line of German song composers before Schubert; a masterpiece like the "Erl King," indeed, could come only as the crown of a long tradition, whereas even the best songs of Glinka are no more than a beginning.