Karol Shymanovsky's Songs for High Voices in Imitation and Against the Vocal Heritage of F. Chopin

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to trace Biedermeier's traces in the expressiveness of K. Shymanovskyi's Songs in their borderline to Chopin's heritage and in delving into the artificial pro-church declamation of symbolist vocalism – using the example of Songs for a high voice op. 2-54, which in terms of timbre-register corresponds to the lyric soprano of the author of this essay. The methodological basis is the intonation approach of the school of B. Asafiev in Ukraine, represented, among other things, by the works of O. Markova, O. Muravska, L. Horelyk, and other authors, in which the basic method of analysis is stylistic comparative, musicological holistic analysis with hermeneutic approaches, as well as the historical-biographical method from the perspective of "intellectual biography" (in the concept of V. Shulhina and O. Yakovlev, the subject of the study. The scientific novelty of the work is determined by the author's primacy of the development of the specified stylistic vision of K. Shymanovskyi's Songs according to its Biedermeier origin and involving the method of Symbolist vocals with its pro-church declamation and Eastern liturgical singing. And also innovative is the analysis of the named Songs from the perspective of the stated stylistic interpretations of the expressiveness of the works of the great Polish and Ukrainian composer of the 20th century. Conclusions. 16 analysed Songs by K. Shymanovskyi of different years of creation demonstrate Biedermeier's attribution in op. 2, 20, which varies from op. 24 on a certain borderline of psalmody and dance-genre elements (especially op. 31 "Dance"), forming the apogee of the artist's symbolic choices, indicative of the Ukrainian cultural environment of the 1910s. Songs op. 54 combine signs of symbolic psalmody and dance-genre "hints", a clear passing of the relevance to folklorism of the large-scale works of the final years of the composer's life and work in Poland. Selections of works "for a high voice" highlight these expressive indicators that "depersonalise" verbal expressions in favour of the philosophical and religious abstraction of presenting plot-event fillings of a verbal series of vocal miniatures.