The topos of Hutsulshchyna in Yaroslav Barnych’s operetta “Hutsulka Ksenia”

Abstract

Yaroslav Barnych (1896–1967), whose name after need emigration was erased for a long time from the history of national music, is a bright figure in the Ukrainian musical culture of the middle of the 20th century, a talented composer who was called the “Ukrainian Lehár”, an excellent teacher, a gifted conductor and an active social activist-educator. Among the genre palette of the artist’s works, the operetta genre stands out. Despite the fact that the composer created only four examples of this genre, Ya. Barnych managed to implement revolutionary changes of it and gain the status of “creator of modern Ukrainian operetta”. The operetta “Hutsulka Ksenia”, which fully expresses the main features of the renewed genre, remains the most famous and brightest among his musical and stage compositions. Today, this operetta is performed with great success in many cities of Ukraine and beyond, and the musical and stage heritage of the composer is of great interest to modern musicologists-researchers. The purpose of the article is to identify the signs of the embodiment of traditional Hutsul musical culture in Barnych’s operetta “Hutsulka Ksenia”. The innovativeness of this study consists in involving into the field of domestic musicology of the work by Ya. Barnych thanks to a comprehensive analysis of this operetta carried out for the first time. The means of modernization of this genre in Ukrainian music on its example were traced; the socio-cultural and autobiographical markers were determined, and the specifics of the use of elements of the Hutsul folklore musical tradition in the work was identified. It is concluded that Barnych’s “Hutsulka Ksenia” presents the genre of modern Ukrainian operetta (which is essentially similar to Neo-Viennese operetta), contains certain autobiographical and socio-cultural markers (which allow us to understand the idea of the work), demonstrates the connection of the musical material with the traditions of Hutsul musical culture.