Tchaikovsky's Complete Songs: A Companion with Texts and Translations.(Book Review)

By Richard Sylvester. (Russian Music Studies.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. [xvi, 349 p. ISBN 0-253-34041-1. $59.95.] Discography, bibliography, indexes, compact disc.

When one considers Tchaikovsky, the immediate association is with ballet and symphonic music; in truth, the composer wrote 103 songs with lyrics by both well-known and unfamiliar poets. Author Richard Sylvester has collected these songs, translated the lyrics from the original Russian, transliterated the Cyrillic characters into letters of the Latin alphabet, and provided fascinating historical background for each. A compact disc containing twenty-two songs performed by notable singers is an added bonus. The result is an unexpected, long-overdue, and welcome labor of love, imbued with intelligent scholarship.

The book is as meticulously organized as Sylvester's scholarship. A preface delineates the book's purpose and text presentation, and "Transcription from Cyrillic" offers an intriguing and detailed perspective of the challenge inherent in the task of translation and transliteration. The remainder of the book is a chronological song-by-song catalog of the poetry, enlivened by musicological and historical background (names, dates, citation of other treatments of the text, brief musical summaries); a list of recordings rounds out the commentary, for each song. An appendix presents a thorough list of singers and recordings, a treasury of biographical and discographical information in itself. The book concludes with an exhaustive bibliography and three indexes: "Song Titles in Russian," "Song Titles in English," and "Index of Names."

The reader can enjoy Tchaikovsky's Complete Songs either as a "read-through" chronology of the composer's life or as a tome of poetry to be consulted when required.

Light verses such as "My genius, my angel, my friend" by Afanasy Fet (p. 2):

 
   You're here, aren't you, light spirit, 
   My genius, my angel, my friend, 
   Whispering to me in conversation 
   As you quietly circle in flight? 

contrast dramatically with weightier, more frequently set poetry such as Goethe's "Kennst du das Land?" from Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (p. 65):