Peculiarities of embodying the Swedish national folklore in Amanda Maier’s violin miniatures

Abstract

Statement of the problem. The work of the Swedish violinist and composer Amanda Maier-Röntgen, a talented artist of the Romantic era, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm and the Leipzig Conservatory, who was at one time a fairly recognizable artist in Europe and led an active concert activity, is practically unknown in Ukrainian musicology. In the works of foreign scientists, the composer’s achievements are also not sufficiently studied. At the same time, A. Maier composed a number of such opuses for the violin or with the participation of this instrument, which have undoubted artistic value and are now being rediscovered by contemporary performers and are gaining certain popularity. Among them are not only large-scale chamber works, but also cycles of violin miniatures – a genre that has not so often attracted the attention of composers, as, for example, the genre of piano miniatures and is also much less studied by scientists than the latter. Therefore, the study of A. Maier-Röntgen’s violin miniature samples seems promising both from the standpoint of updating the composer’s work in the modern musicological discourse, and in the context of the further enlargement of scientific ideas about the development of the violin miniature genre, as well as in regard to the problem of embodying national traditions in the music of composers of the second half of the 19th century. Recent research and publications. The creative personality of A. Maier is briefly mentioned in a number of works devoted to Swedish musical culture, in reference materials (Jönsson, 1995; Karlsson, 1994; Öhrström, 1987; Öhrström & Eriksson, 1995; Riemann, 2017; Laurence, 1978), in the studies devoted to other composers: J. Brahms, E. Grieg, J. Röntgen (Internationaler BrahmsKongress Gmunden, 2001; Hofmann & Hofmann, 2006; Grieg, 2001; Vis, 2007). The special research dedicated exactly to A. Maier is J. Martin’s dissertation (2018). However, the author, researching the life and creative path of the artist in detail, describing her performance, almost does not touch on her compositional work, limiting herself to compiling a detailed list of A. Maier’s existing and lost works. Instead, the last chapter of J. Martin’s research is also devoted to the issues of gender inequality in the second half of the 19th century musical environment. The purpose of the article is to characterize the specifics of embodying the Swedish national folklore in Amanda Maier’s violin miniatures. For the first time in Ukrainian musicology, multifaceted connections of Amanda Maier’s violin works with the Swedish national folklore tradition were revealed. The research results is based on such methods as historically stylistic and genre-stylistic, as well as comparative approaches and analytical musicological methods, which allow to reveal the originality of the interaction of national and pan-European stylistic features in A. Maier’s violin miniatures. Conclusions. A. Maier’s two cycles for violin and piano fit into the tendency of many composers of the second half of the nineteenth century to search for national identity, and it seems reasonable to consider them as two milestones on this path in the composer’s work. The first cycle – “Six Pieces” for Violin and Piano of 1879 – demonstrates not so much a pronounced national colour as orientation towards the European traditions of creating dance miniatures and an indirect connection with the Swedish folklore tradition. The latter is realised both through the use of the violin, one of the main instruments in Scandinavian folk music, and through the use of dance styles common to the Swedish folk instrumental and European professional traditions, in particular, the minuet and mazurka. The second cycle – “Swedish Melodies and Dances” – is the result of A. Maier’s conscious appeal to the national roots. In this work, the links with the Swedish folklore tradition, both song and instrumental, are rich and varied, and manifest themselves at all levels of the artistic whole: melodically intonational (through characteristic rhythmic formulas and melodic turns), modal and harmonic, and at the level of compositional structure.