The Idea of Beauty in the Piano Cycle “Childhood Birds” by Konstantin Iliev

Abstract

There is beauty everywhere in nature. Sometimes even creatures, that we are used to consider unsightly, burst with it. Looking more closely, ignoring the traditional view, we find colour combinations, proportions, movements that get surprisingly beautiful as soon as we realize it. In art the depiction of beauty could take different forms as well as it could take most unexpected characters for its prototypes. Such kind of beauty reveals to us the small gallery of characters – the piano cycle “Childhood Birds” by the Bulgarian composer Konstantin Iliev. It is comprised of six plays. In this piano cycle I analyze the beauty of the characters – for example the little sweet-voiced nightingale, where the beauty lies in its skilful singing, i.e. in what it can do; unlike the rose, on which the bird is perched, where the beauty lies in its symmetry, proportionality and grace – in being what it is. The swallows are beautiful with the audacity to struggle with the fierce mighty wind. An example of the beauty of the construction is the classical regularity of the built-up musical forms; the slight diversions from which are prompted by the specific representational tasks in each play. The beauty of depiction lies in the outspoken and compelling description of all the images by means of ingeniously found and utmost concise means. The cycle as a whole is an example of yet another type of beauty – the beauty of invention, of creativeness, of discovering a wonderful in its clarity and brevity way of recreating a character so that it can be perfectly recognized, to breath life into it, to give it emotions and meaning, the beauty of an artist to “dare” to materialize through sound the elusive immateriality of a dream, the beauty to challenge the imagination of the performer and make the listener soar, the beauty of the mind.