Baritone in M. Lysenko’s vocal chamber works

Abstract

Statement of the problem. Mykola Lysenko (1842–1912) as the founder of Ukrainian musical culture has a multifaceted influence on the development of most of its genres. A significant part of M. Lysenko’s creative heritage consists of vocal genres, including opera and cantata, ensembles, choirs, solo art songs, and folk arrangements. This fact is quite natural, since the composer built his creative method on the basis of a thorough study and assimilation of Ukrainian song folklore. Despite the regular coverage in the musicological literature of various aspects related to M. Lysenko’s heritage, in particular chamber vocal works (the recent monographs by R. Skorulska & M. Chueva (2015), S. Verhun, I. Koliada, & Yu. Koliada (2015), articles by H. Karas (2019), L. Bozhko (2013), B. Filts (2014), N. Kharandiuk (2013), B. Kosopud (2017), V. Mitiushkin (2020), Ye. Avramenko (2020), A. Polkanov (2021), O. Bassa (2011) and others), the issues related to the role of the baritone in the composer’s solo songs were actually not involved in scientific studies. Such a situation encourages the intensification of research in the indicated direction and determines the scientific novelty of the obtained results. The purpose of this study is to determine the peculiarities of the baritone’s role in M. Lysenko’s solo songs. The research methods that contributed to the achievement of it were the musicological, semantic and comparative analysis of selected samples of M. Lysenko’s chamber vocal work, as well as the technological analysis of the vocal timbre-role specificity. Results and conclusions. The characteristic features of Lysenko’s vocal chamber works, which relate to the selection of poetic texts, genre typology, and the choice of timbres were examined in the study. Four solo songs for baritone were chosen for analysis. The selected samples were considered taking into account the following aspects: belonging to a certain genre group, ways of form organization, harmony features, nature of the piano texture. A separate point of analysis was the use of expressive capabilities of the baritone timbre in connection with the artistic intent of the songs and some technical characteristics of the voice: the covered range, registers, use of resonators, etc. The results of the analysis allowed us to come to the conclusion that in M. Lysenko’s chamber-vocal work, baritone solo songs are mostly “monologues” of dramatic and socially significant content. In order to embody the corresponding semantic content, the composer chooses namely the baritone – because the low register of the human voice or instruments in musical art often appears as a means of creating dramatic, tragic, philosophical images. So, the baritone in M. Lysenko’s chamber and vocal creative work is mainly the bearer of the lyrical and dramatic principle supplemented by a philosophical component.