Songs from the War Years

The compositions created during the hard time of the Great Patriotic War are a distinct mine in our cultural heritage. The songs, which helped to bring our soldiers through the war, and the lyrical pieces of music, which were written by poets and composers in the postwar years, have by now typified anguish of the war era.

The chamber program “Songs from the War Years” at the Primorsky Stage of the Mariinsky Theatre is a tale of one night halt of a partisan party around a fire. Each fighter has his own story which is told in the music language.

The artists sing some songs that once sounded in the field and in the lines. It may seem wonderful, but these songs were often based on dance music patterns such as a tango in “The Light”, a foxtrot in “My Little Mary” or a waltz in “The Blue Scarf”, “In the Frontline Forest” or “Accidental Waltz”. Included in the wartime repertoire as an echo from the past peaceful life, these songs reminded of such life and helped to banish sorrow. The other songs were written in wartime to be immediately performed to the accordion before soldiers. “In our lyrical songs written in wartime, we wanted to give every soldier an opportunity to “keep in touch” with his kin and speak his inner thoughts to his girl, bride or wife, who was deep in the rear, miles and miles away,” the famous composer Matvey Blanter said. That was why the nostalgic heart-to-heart songs such as “Dark Is the Night” from the feature film “Two Soldiers” (1943) were just as much popular.

During the postwar period, the creative reflection on the tragic bygone events went on. In the 1960s and 1970s, the war songs such as “Cranes” began to speak for those who lost their friends and relations in wartime. Among the authors there were war children who proved the extreme depths of poverty and felt grief and experienced horrors of war, for example, Valentin Gavrilin, who composed music for “The Two Brothers” and “Love Will Stay”. The songs, which were first performed in the feature films “Only Old Men Are Going to Battle”, “Minute’s Silence”, “The Great Patriotic”, “The Moscow Saga” and many more, were much sought after. Such songs often outlasted the very films they came from. In all war songs there are few unchangeable things: their humanistic contents, lust for life and love for the country.

Apparently, war songs have been written in blood or lifeblood. While hearing them people cannot yet hold their tears – even those who have never seen the war and know about it from textbooks or narratives of their older relations.

Natalia Rogudeeva