The founder of the Russian romance, the wonderful composer Alexander Alyabyev, founded the Pushkin musical, Russian chamber instrumental music, and became the harbinger of many future achievements of the national school of composers. He is best known for his vocal works, which to this day are the most beloved and often performed even in the family circle by the will of the mood. For example, "Nightingale", "Winter Road", "Evening Ringing" and many, many others.
Biography
Alexander Alyabyev was accustomed to music from childhood. There is evidence that he took piano lessons from the famous D. Field. In any case, he dedicated his first composition to him, and it was the piano "The Big Polonaise" - the first real concert work in this genre in Russia.
Alexander Alyabyev was born in Tobolsk, in the family of the governor, which gave him the opportunity to get an excellent education. He fought with Napoleon as a volunteer, in the famous detachment of the poet Denis Davydov, was seriously wounded and awarded orders for courage and bravery. And after the war ended, Alexander Alyabyev, composer, devoted himself entirely to music.
Excerpts from his operas, vaudeville, and songs were often sung in the high-profile drawing rooms, and romances were sung especially often. The biography of Alexander Alyabiev was adorned with remarkable people: he was very close friends with Griboedov, Shakhovsky, the Decembrists Bestuzhevs, Mukhanov. He shared his plans and discussed concerts with Verstovsky and the Villegorsky brothers. Lived in Moscow - theatrical life. Even "The Triumph of Muses" at the opening of the Bolshoi Theater was written by Alyabyev together with Verstovsky and Scholz.
Nothing foreshadowed
Throughout the country, music became known, composed by Alexander Alyabyev. The photo did not exist yet, but portraits were painted by well-known artists of those times - the composer was famous. His romances were sung both in Petersburg, and in Moscow, and in the most distant cities. On the stage of the Bolshoi Theater were his operas Village Philosopher, Moonlit Night, and the ballet Magic Drum.
However, in 1825, his card game partner dies. Suddenly. And Alyabyev is arrested. The murder charge has not been proven. Nevertheless, the composer is deprived of all ranks, orders and nobility. And exiled back to Tobolsk. To a very distant Siberian cold city, where his happy childhood once passed. The portrait below depicts a friend of the composer and poetry writer of Alyabyevâs best romances - Nikolai Ogaryov.
Tobolsk and the Caucasus
Alexander Alyabyev was so painfully worried about this unfair accusation that only music could keep him from the last step. Here he organized a wonderful orchestra, he acts as a pianist, arranges all kinds of concerts. And he writes music that is very different from the previous, cloudless. His best romances appear here: Winter Road, Irtysh, Two Ravens. But a nervous shock made itself felt: the biography of Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Alyabyev as a secular person who entered any house was over. The composer is seriously ill.
Seven years later, in 1832, he was allowed to leave Siberia and go to the Caucasus for treatment. His romances are written there, published by a collection entitled "Caucasian Singer". Long before the main collector of folklore M.I. Glinka, it was Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Alyabyev who recorded the songs of Caucasians, Kyrgyz, Bashkirs, harmonized them and processed them using them in his work. He participates with Maksimovich in the collection âVoices of Ukrainian Songsâ, which was so fond of N.V. Gogol. Here in the portrait is the owner of the salon, where many of Alyabyevâs works were performed for the first time, the composer's friend, the famous Alexander Griboedov.
Return
Alyabyev was "forgiven" very gradually: in 1835 they were allowed to live with relatives in the Moscow region with a complete ban on appearing in the capitals, in 1843 they were allowed to live in Moscow, but under constant police supervision. This means: not to see the public, not to be at a party, or at concerts, or in the theater. Therefore, such soulful romances with vivid civic content as "The Pauper", "Village Watchman", "Izba" completed his life and career. And the most, it must be said, are still in demand by the public, and almost all of his works from the period of exile have become academic.
None of the first writers of Russian romances took such a high place in Russian music as Alyabyev Alexander Alexandrovich. A brief biography and that impresses with the many events of his difficult life. He worked in almost all musical genres, but the center of his interest was vocal lyrics. More than 180 songs and romances composed by Alexander Alyabyev. A composer whose biography did not seem to suggest such hard work in hellish mental anguish. Moreover, he wrote romances, which are still hits, such as The Nightingale on verses by Delvig or The Pauper on verses by Beranger. Alexander Pushkin, pictured in the portrait below, was the author of verses from over twenty of Alyabyevâs best romances.
Creation
Alexander Alyabyev wrote romances to verses of the best poets: his beloved commander Davydov, Zhukovsky, Vyazemsky, Kozlov, Koltsov, Lermontov. Twenty-two romances are written on poems by Alexander Pushkin, and fifteen of them - even during the life of the poet. At the end of his life, Ogaryovâs poems inspired him more than others.
Alyabyev wrote a lot of symphonic music, both chamber and instrumental: the symphony in E minor is very good, the tragic overture in F minor, several concert overtures, many concerts for various instruments of solo and orchestra, dance suites. To this day, many chamber ensembles of Alyabyev are studied at music schools and conservatories, as well as sound in concert performance. The portrait below depicts an interesting person of the time of Alyabyev - the Decembrist Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, the author of the novel, on which the opera was staged to music by Alyabyev, and he also wrote romances to the poems of Bestuzhev-Marlinsky.
Theater, folklore, sacred music
Alyabyevâs legacy for the theater is a demonstration of excellent music in all genres known at that time: operas, ballet, and more than twenty vaudeville, which are not much different from operas, there is a cantata and music for the performances of drama theaters, and among them - and comedy, and tragedy, and drama. For the Moscow premiere of Pushkin's âThe Mermaidâ, for the Shakespearean âThe Tempestâ and âThe Windsor Pranksâ, the composer Alyabyev also wrote music.
He arranged, instrumented, composed and published a considerable number of folk songs in collections - Russian, Ukrainian, Tatar, Central Asian, Caucasian. More than a hundred works of spiritual content came out of his pen, among them the famous liturgy.
Fate of heritage
As often happens with the best of artists who have no time to work for posterity or who modestly do not see the creators of the "imperishable" in themselves, the legacy of Alyabyev is for the most part not preserved. Of the 450 works (this is an approximate figure), the majority are still in manuscripts, which over the past dashing one and a half centuries have simply been lost. Many of his works are published, but for some reason are undeservedly forgotten. But this music is excellent and can well make up both posthumous fame for itself and the composer, becoming the same hits as, for example, The Nightingale based on Delvigâs poems.
As much as fifty years after the composer's death, both his work and his biography have not undergone any serious analysis. But both of them are so multifaceted! How many wonderful and necessary nuances are already impossible to return from the dust of time! Until 1825, the name of Alyabyev practically did not go out of print, but after - only rare, literally single reviews of romances. His biography was distorted, filled with erroneous or incomplete data, so the descendants almost lost the good name and wonderful work of the composer and musical figure.
Persistence and principles
Even unbearable false accusations did not break the soul of a true creator. After all, the same desire for freedom, the motives of loneliness, compassion and suffering, longing for justice, that is, the same range of images characteristic of all creativity, we can observe in the very last of its periods.
Alexander Alyabyev, a composer as talented as he was unhappy, received some consolation from a meeting with his previously beloved woman, the one who wore the girl-name of the Rimsky-Korsakovs. Then one of the best romances of the Alabiev Pushkinian was written - "I Loved You". This woman, E. Ofrosimova, when she was widowed, became the composer's wife.
Nikolay Ogaryov and Bestuzhev-Marlinsky
Composer Alyabyev and poet Ogaryov became very close in the forties of the century before last. The best romances of Alyabyev - "Izba", "Kabak", "Village Watchman" - were created based on verses by Ogaryov. Long before the advent of the searches of Mussorgsky and Dargomyzhsky, secular romances were enriched by the theme of social inequality. The poet and the composer had much in common: arrest and exile, at least. Although Alyabyev suffered all this unjustly and as if by accident, Ogaryov was a convinced innovator and constitutionalist, for which he was prosecuted by law. Ogaryov and Herzen, âBellâ, England - all know and remember.
The last three operas of Alyabyev also sound with characteristic rebellious moods, these are Shakespeare's The Tempest and Edwin Oscar from the texts of ancient Celtic legends. But the opera Ammalat-bey deserves a special word according to the novel of the same name by Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky and the romance on his poems "Clouds Flocked Into the Caucasus." He was killed in the Caucasus in 1837, and this loss nearly struck Alyabyev: this was the third killed of his favorite poets. And thatâs all - Alexandra: Pushkin, Griboedov, Bestuzhev-Marlinsky. The rebellious Decembrist spirit never died out in the composer's works.
Memory return
The beginning of the execution of previously unknown works by Alexander Alyabyev took place only in the spring of 1947. Then a concert was organized at the Moscow Philharmonic, where over a hundred-plus years of complete oblivion, âVariations for violin and orchestraâ, âThird String Quartetâ and two orchestra overtures were performed. The success was tremendous! Such great musicians as Gilels, Oistrakh, and collectives - the Sveshnikov choir, the Beethoven State Quartet, were engaged in the propaganda of the composer's chamber work.
Since 1949, the never-published works of Alyabyev have been published, along the way, white spots of his biography are revealed. There came an understanding of the great role that he played in the entire history of Russian musical art. The most interesting thing is that in various archives his unknown works continue to be discovered. Since his wanderings continued for a long time and their geography is vast, more discoveries of a similar plan may happen.