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Mykola Lysenko – His Life (1842-1912)
The second half of the 19th century witnessed the birth of "national music" in countries
that hitherto had exerted little or no influence on European musical traditions. The
Russian composers Modest Mussorgsky, Aleksandr Borodin, and Nikolai Rimsky-
Korsakov, the Czechs Bedrich Smetana and Antonin Dvorák, Norway's Edvard Grieg,
and, somewhat later, Finland's Jean Sibelius and Spain's Isaac Albéniz and Enrique
Granados brought a new tone to the Romantic music of their time. Using nontraditional
means of expression, some of these composers heralded the radical innovations that
music would undergo in the coming 20th century. One such composer was Ukraine's
Mykola Lysenko. Like Dvorák and Grieg, he was born in the early 1840s; like his other
European contemporaries, he embraced Johann Gottfried von Herder's ideas about
nationality and the Volksgeist; and, like them, he purposefully set out to manifest the
spirit of his people in his own music.
One can find many similarities between the lives of Mykola Lysenko and Edvard
Grieg. They both belonged to nations, which for a lengthy period of time had been
subject to foreign rule; Norway was a part of Sweden (previously of Denmark), while
Ukraine was split between the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires. Both composers
were born into wealthy and educated families, with musically gifted mothers who
taught them to play the piano. Both were alumni of the Leipzig Conservatory, at the
time considered the best musical institution in Europe (Lysenko enrolled five years
after Grieg graduated). Moreover, despite their outstanding accomplishments, both
composers remained rather critical of the rigidity of their German education. Both
subsequently returned to their native lands—Grieg to Bergen, then to Christiania
(present-day Oslo), and Lysenko to Kyiv, where they dedicated themselves entirely to
composition, teaching, and performing.
However, after returning home, the destinies of these two composers diverged quite
markedly. Although Norway did not become politically independent until 1905, it
nevertheless exercised a significant measure of autonomy. Grieg enjoyed universal
support not only in Bergen and Christiania but also in Copenhagen and Stockholm.
Moreover, he obtained regular government grants that enabled him to perform
frequently in the music capitals of Europe, promoting his "Scandinavian muse" and
maintaining contacts with the eminent musicians of the time. In contrast, Lysenko was
deprived of such privileges, as a consequence of being a Ukrainian musician living and
working in the Russian Empire. He received no state support and was forced to struggle
against the hostile prejudices of imperial officials.
The 1876 Ems Ukase was a tsarist edict that prohibited all publications in the Ukrainian
language, including the use of Ukrainian in theatrical performances and even in musical
scores. Thus, all of Lysenko's activities were curtailed. He was forced to print many
of his works abroad, and did not live to see all of them published. Public performances
of Lysenko's music had to be authorised by the imperial censor. For such permission
to be given, his vocal works had to be translated into French or Russian (even Czech).
Lysenko was under constant police surveillance, and the Russian press vilified him as
In spite of all these obstacles, Lysenko continued to organise and coordinate Ukrainian
musical life throughout Ukraine. He was a brilliant piano virtuoso and a talented
conductor, producing countless concerts that promoted both Ukrainian and western
European music. Lysenko's oeuvre includes operas and operettas (including the
world's first children's operas), a symphony, a string quartet and a trio, various works
for piano, extensive cantatas as well as choral miniatures, art songs, incidental music
for theatre, and folk song arrangements.
Similar to Grieg, Dvorák, and Mussorgsky, Lysenko sought out the national spirit
of his people primarily in folklore. However, in his profound study of folk sources
Lysenko went much further than his contemporaries. While others had the liberty of
using already existing collections of folk songs, Lysenko himself was among the first
to collect, study, and publish Ukrainian musical folklore. In this he prefigured Béla
Bartók, who would combine the occupations of composer and ethnomusicologist in the
20th century.
Although Lysenko did not too frequently quote folk songs directly in his original
compositions, the unique idioms of Ukrainian folklore did become an integral part
of his unmistakable musical style. Other important national elements in Lysenko's
musical language were sourced from the professional music of the Ukrainian Baroque,
including polyphonic a cappella concerti and three voice songs—kanty. In Ukraine,
Lysenko is often compared to the eminent Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, who
unquestionably inspired the composer and many of whose poems he set to music. As
with Shevchenko's poetry, Lysenko's music was perceived by his compatriots to be the
most authentic embodiment of the Ukrainian soul, and it had an enormous influence on
the formation of Ukrainian national identity.
Lysenko aimed to create a national Ukrainian musical style, but in fact he saw
Ukrainian society as being an organic component of a common European culture—
and this is clearly demonstrated in his music. Though he had no direct contact with his
Western European colleagues, he maintained an ongoing dialogue with them through
his music. When borrowing generic or stylistic models from composers such as Chopin
and Liszt, Mendelssohn and Schumann, Brahms and Wagner, Verdi and Bellini,
Lysenko endowed them with national characteristics together with his own inimitable,
personal style. Here again Lysenko was before his time, as stylistic dialogue became
typical only in 20th-century art. The last 20 years of his life are particularly impressive
as his creativity evolved steeply from Romanticism to embracing modernism. Although
Lysenko spent most of his life far from the epicentre of Western or even Central
European musical life, he was still acutely aware of the latest trends and schools
of thought. Italian Verismo and French Impressionism, the Viennese Secessionist
Movement and Neo Classicism (or Neo Baroque), as depicted in his later operas Aeneid
and Nocturne, pervade his art songs composed after 1900 to the poetry of the early
Ukrainian modernists.
Lysenko's originality is most apparent in his art songs. He composed over 120 art
songs, creating a veritable encyclopaedia of lyrical vocal chamber music. The range
of emotions and genres is astoundingly wide—passionate dramatic monologues and
meditative elegies, profound philosophical statements and colourful folk scenes, lyrical
serenades and ecstatic love songs, a melancholy waltz and a heroic duma, an extensive
romantic ballad and a tone poem. It is fascinating how skilfully and distinctly Lysenko
fuses Ukrainian and Western European themes. The vocal line in many of his art
songs is richly ornamented, imaginative, and non-traditional in metre and rhythm. His
musical phrasing often departs from the predictable repetition of the "symmetrical"
Western European approach. The harmonic language is based on chromaticized
romantic harmony, on the one hand, and on rediscovered folk modes, on the other, with
unexpected transitions of tonal centres—again presaging the polytonalities of the 20th
century! Lysenko's song structure is generally through-composed, individual to each
work, and faithful to the nuances of the poetic text.
Mykola Lysenko is highly esteemed and revered by Ukrainians, yet he is not well
known in the wider musical world. Thanks to this long-awaited recording, Lysenko's
art songs will finally be heard by an international audience and shall take their rightful
place in the world of classical music.
By Dr. Dagmara
Turchyn
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