Pushkin’s Garland

The chamber concert program “Pushkin’s Garland” is a historical journey over romances based on verses by the Russian literature genius. Soloists of the Primorsky Stage of the Mariinsky Theatre will perform compositions embracing the two centuries – from elegies created by contemporaries of the poet to romances written by Soviet composers.

In Pushkin’s lifetime, beginning from 1823, composers wrote over 70 romances based on Pushkin’s lyrics. Among the first composers there were Pushkin’s lyceum friend, Mikhail Yakovlev (“Winter Evening”), “the father of Russian song” Nikolai Titov (“To the Sea”), and Alexander Alyabyev (“Under the Blue Sky”) and Mikhail Glinka (“Adele”) who were well-known composers and friends of the great poet. “I loved him as a friend and esteemed him as a great poet,” Glinka wrote in one of his letters. Alexander Dargomyzhsky, who knew Alexander Pushkin personally, created an opera, a cantata and romances based on his verses.

The Mighty Five including César Cui, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Borodin and Modest Mussorgsky composed their best romances based on Pushkin’s verses as well as Anton Rubinstein and Pyotr Tchaikovsky did. Even the European mezzo-soprano, prima donna Pauline Viardot became his adorer; she composed 16 of 37 her romances based on Pushkin’s verses.

The tradition of turning to Pushkin’s lyrics was not further broken on. The subsequent generations of Russian composers (Sergei Taneyev, Anton Arensky, Alexander Glazunov, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Nikolai Medtner, Alexander Gretchaninov) and Soviet composers (Reinhold Glière, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitry Shostakovich, Georgy Sviridov, Yuri Shaporin, Sergei Slonimsky) managed to embody poetic ideas into vocal genre in their own way. Sometimes one or another romance based on a Pushkin’s verse became the best known work of a composer. So it happened to Alexander Vlasov who wrote the effective romance “To the Fountain in the Khan’s Palace”.

Natalia Rogudeeva