Art Song of Ukraine

Masha Fokina

In considering art song traditions, German lieder, French chansons, even the Russian romansi earn frequent mention; it is time we add Ukrainian solospivy to this list. For such a long, stylistically diverse, politically contested, and artistically significant tradition, our recital can only offer a minor tribute. Even so, our short selection already speaks to the diversity of the genre. From Barvinsky's commemorative “Sonnet” for the 1933 unveiling of Ivan Franko's headstone in Lviv, to Kosenko's romantic invocation in “Speak, speak,” we encounter an array of poetic subjects, compositional approaches, and extra-musical contexts. Yet one spring sources all these pieces—the beauty of the Ukrainian language in poetic form. In every work, we hear each composer's commitment to its realization through the immediacy and confluence of a musical context. In doing so, we can understand solospivy as meeting grounds for concurrent legacies—of artistic traditions, of Ukrainian cultures, of historical moments, and of human experiences like love, sorrow, and identity.

Sorrow often takes to song, and our recital shows its many, often unexpected guises. For rarely do works on grief open in a major key. And yet, in our acquaintance with Mykola Lysenko's “Princely Moon,” the rolling barcarolle-like opening in E major warms and calms us. As we follow the protagonist's outpouring to the regal moon, the composer leads us through the poem's emotional landscape of sorrow, grief, hope, and wonder. A master of the genre, Mykola Lysenko imbued his solospivy with the modal flexibility of Ukrainian folk songs. Lysenko's collage of major and minor sonorities carries us, as if by waves, through the lyrical flow of verse and melody. From the loftiness of “Princely Moon,” the stark text for “They Stood in Silence” grounds us. But Viktor Kosenko's setting takes flight. Animating swirls of piano arpeggios in neo-Romantic character, the composer-pianist nods to Rachmaninoff's piano writing, but with a vocal chromatic twist. Kosenko's refined expressivity reveals itself in the melody's expanse, undercutting the gravity of the poem with lushness and motion.

We can see this animated motion again in the progression from Yaroslav Lopatynsky's “My Heart Burns,” to Denys Sichynsky's “Don't Sing Such a Song to Me” and “Sorrow” which narrate a mourning journey—from despair, to rage, to acceptance. The opening descending lines of Lopatynsky's “My Heart Burns,” mimicking sighs, signal to the anguish of the protagonist.

Stylizing his melody with almost declamatory rhetorical gestures, Lopatynsky elevates his musical representation. As the protagonist progresses to rage, Sichynsky punctures the melody of “Don't Sing Such a Song to Me” with enunciated rhythms, as if to curtail the singer from unbridled outburst. But the poem changes. With the character's confession of their pain, Sichynsky carries their anguish through a flowing line, deepening the setting's sensibility. “Sorrow” marks the final stage—youth is irrecoverable; the protagonist surrenders. Sichynsky sets this folk-like ballad of reflection with a strophic song, its every repetition more resolute.

The longing of sorrow shades the yearning of love, and this duality comes alive keenly in musical representation. Responding to her separation from her husband, Stefania Turkevych's

“I Yearn for You” captures a protagonist yearning for their love. Turkevych's setting embodies loss, as it metrically and tonally wanders. Adapting to the poem's mutable emotional states, Turkevych opts for impressionistic harmony and metric play that charges the song with volatile energy. We hear a similar metric agitation, but a very different approach to text setting of romantic yearning in Viktor Kosenko's “Speak, speak.” To elevate the poem's emotional trepidation, Kosenko superimposes the meaning of the text with a seemingly contradicting musical gesture. As the lover speaks of “quiet peace in this heart of mine,” Kosenko instead soars the melody to its registral and dynamic peak, hinting at the romantic fervor of our protagonist. The composer's song does not merely render, but converses with the meaning of the text.

But undoubtedly central to solospivy is the tenderness of tribute to Ukraine, personified through lament, through metaphor, and folkloric inspiration. Valentyn Sylvestrov, Yakiv Stepovyi, and Jack Szczuka present varying poetic and musical reflections on Ukraine and the country's plight for independence. Valentyn Sylvestrov enshrouds Taras Shevchenko's “Farewell, O World, Farewell, O Earth” in a hymnal lullaby. Although the lament opens with a stark melodic fifth, a tonal chasm, Sylvestrov keeps the harmonic texture illuminated with characteristic touches of modality. As the protagonist farewells “my dear Ukraine,” the strophic swaying melody feels both repetitive and infinite, seemingly rocking him to eternal rest. In direct contrast, we encounter Yakiv Stepovy's mobilizing song “Step” in which the metaphor of the “endless steppe” marks the awakening urge for national liberation of the Ukrainian people. Stepovy visualizes this through the brooding low register of the piano, and broad octaves in a marching rhythm, invoking a military topic. Approaching the folkloristic idiom, Jack Szczuka's “DUMKA” (TÜŞÜNCE - THOUGHT) for Ukrainian folk choir offers a contemporary contemplation on the Ukrainian genre dumky, a form of folk ballad that eventually entered Classical repertoire. After joining the IU Slavic Choir in Fall 2021, the composer was inspired to pay homage to Ukrainian culture. “DUMKA” sets its poetic namesake by Taras Shevchenko in the original Ukrainian and, in the second part, translated into Crimean Tatar. The juxtaposition of languages within Szczuka's folk-inspired style invites the listener to consider the symbiotic relationships between music and language, and how together they can weave paradigms of music, culture, and heritage.