On 6 March 2022 the 86-year-old composer Valentin Silvestrov (1937), together with his daughter, granddaughter and a suitcase full of manuscripts, fled from Kyiv, the city where he had lived for more than half a century, to Berlin. Like many others, he left his native Ukraine facing an uncertain future. Although he had never been involved in politics, in 2014 he responded to the bloody protests in Kyiv with the song cycle Maidan. As a musical protest against the violence. The louder the war bells rang, the softer the music he composed; although at that time he could not have imagined how topical his music would still sound ten years later.
For a long time, the cycle was seldom performed outside Ukraine, but since the Russian invasion in the spring of 2022, the work of Ukrainian composers has been played more than ever. The large-scale Sacred Concertos by Dmitry Bortnyansky (1751–1825) have been part of the choral repertoire for several decades, but composers such as Mykola Lysenko (1842–1912), Miroslav Skoryk (1938–2020) and Alexander Shchetynsky (1960) are not at all familiar to us. Nevertheless, they play an important role in the history of Ukrainian music. For example, Lysenko is considered the father of contemporary music and Skoryk’s A Melody was proclaimed Ukraine’s spiritual anthem.
Symphonic choral music
The oeuvre of Dmitry Bortnyansky was unknown for a long time. With its Early Romantic impact, it was no longer part of the classical period, and for a long time Bortnyansky’s music was considered too Italian-sounding by the 19th-century nationalists. Even during the Soviet era, when all religious music was banned, his music was forgotten. But Bortnyansky is hard to ignore: with his large-scale Sacred Concertos, he westernised the Slavic music tradition. This had much to do with his training with the Italian composer Baldassare Galuppi (1706–1785), who, at the invitation of the Russian Empress Catherine II, worked as Kapellmeister and court composer in St Petersburg between 1765 and 1768. When Galuppi returned to his hometown in Venice, Bortnyansky followed. He stayed there until 1779, and in those years composed three operas, instrumental music and a number of liturgical works based on Latin texts.
Upon his return to Russia, Bortnyansky was able to work successively as Kapellmeister and director of Tsar PauI’s court chapel. There he expanded the choir, with whom he performed not only his music and that of his compatriots, but also compositions by Western composers – from Handel’s Messiah to Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. In his own works, Bortnyansky reaped the benefits of his training with Galuppi and used all possible means to make the strictly a cappella compositions sound as symphonic as possible – the Orthodox liturgy did not allow for any instrumental accompaniment. With evocative melodies, flexible grouping of the voices and alternating use of tutti and solo passages, he provided a hitherto unprecedented approach to choral music. In total he composed about 45 Sacred Concertos, of which 35 are for four-part mixed choir and ten for double choruses.
The choral concerts soon became one of the attractions of St Petersburg and also influenced its successors, including Rachmaninov and Stravinsky. Even the French composer Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) was a fan: after hearing one of the concerti during a trip to Russia in 1840, he praised Bortnyansky for the ‘incredibly free combination of voices and textures’ and played some of his concerti in Paris. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) was less fond of his music, but did hugely admire Sacred Concerto No. 32, O Lord, make me to know mine end. It is a very contemplative work, ending with a long and poignant fugue in which Bortnyansky expresses both the resistance to and final acceptance of death.
Echoes from the past
Valentin Silvestrov was born in Kyiv in 1937, when Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union. During his studies he eagerly absorbed all styles from twentieth-century modernism and the post-war avant-garde. As a result, his earliest compositions are an expression of all these influences, something that the Union of Soviet Composers frowned upon, regarding his work as undesirable modernism. The continuous opposition caused a radical change in Silvestrov’s compositional style in the course of the 1970s, resulting in silent and spiritual compositions. He explained the about-turn as follows: ‘The most important lesson of the avant-garde was to be free from all preconceived ideas – especially those of the avant-garde.’ He henceforth referred to his style as ‘meta-music’, an echo of what already exists.
