Christian images in chamber vocal music of Western Europe of the 19–20th centuries

Abstract

Statement of the problem. The development and popularization of vocal genres in performance practice of the 19th century was accompanied by a tendency to move liturgical singing to concert halls. Its consequence was the appearance of a new genre variety – “sacred song”. This is a chamber composition for the voice and piano with a brightly pronounced sacred meaning of the poetic base (sometimes borrowing texts from the Bible). Despite the fact, that vocal music was dominated by secular themes at that time (sometimes even demonic, as evidenced by the popularity of the image of Mephistopheles), religious spirituality remained in a place of honour and had an important mission. Carl Dalhaus explained the departure of the Church from the “mainstream” of musical history in the 19th century as follows: “...the sociopsychological roots of the ideal of church music as an escape from the world can be seen in the bourgeois tendency to separate these two spheres and drive religion into the ghetto, thus protecting it from ‘reality’ and, at the same time, not allowing it to interfere with this reality” (Dalhaus, 1989: 179). Thus, the tendency to hide religion from life into a “reserve” had a significant impact on the sacred music of the 19th century. However, composers who appealed to divine meanings in their compositions acted contrary to this tendency. The essence of romanticism required a personal experience of religious feelings passed through the “crucibles” of one’s own experience, and this is what endowed spiritual genres with a missionary role in the art of the society of that time. Objectives, methods, and novelty of the research. Elucidation of Christian meanings in the chamber vocal genre is a new and understudied musicological problem. Although the works of L. Beethoven, F. Schubert, A. Dvořák, J. Brahms, and R. Vaughan-Williams considered in the article are well-known and in the repertoire, scientific works very rarely focus specifically on the Christian content of these songs and vocal cycles. The purpose of the research is to trace Christian meanings in the chamber vocal work of prominent Western European composers of the 19th–20th centuries. The application of the historiographical method highlights the retrospective of development of the chamber-vocal music of Western Europe of the 19th–20th centuries; the genrestylistic method allows to reveal the characteristic features of the composer’s interpretation of religious images; the textological one reveals the linguistic features of the selected samples; the performance analysis defines the specific creative tasks facing the singer. Research results and conclusion. The practical result of the research should be an increase in the level of awareness of the performers regarding the substantive and stylistic components of the composer’s idea in order to create an interpretation adequate to it. Based on the analysis of selected chamber and vocal works with Christian themes, their typology is proposed, which depends mainly on the text used. The first type is songs based on Biblical texts (psalms or direct quotations of fragments of the Old and New Testaments), which imitate the style of church chants (F. Schubert’s “Evangelium Johannis”, A. Dvořák’s 10 “Biblical Songs”, J. Brahms’s “Four Serious Songs”). The second type is the lyrics of the hymn on verses glorifying God, which can be used at divine services. Songs of this type quite often contain quotations from church music (L. Beethoven’s “Bitten”, “Die Liebe des Nächsten”, “Vom Tode”, “Die Ehre aus der Natur” and “Gottes Macht und Vorsehung”, F. Schubert’s “Das grosse Halleluja”, R. Vaughan-Williams’s “Easter”, “The call” and “Antiphone”). The third type includes chamber-vocal works on lyrical texts of an intimate, reflective nature, where confession, human communication with God, and philosophical questions are present (L. Beethoven’s “Buβlied”, F. Schubert’s “Im Abendrot”, R. Vaughan-Williams’s “I Got Me Flowers” and “Love Bade Me Welcome”). The development of a typology of chamber-vocal works of Christian themes seems necessary to facilitate the creative work of vocalists-interpreters, which should meet the modern level of requirements for the general culture of musical performance.