It’s funny how one CD, harvested in a batch of probably dozens on one of my trips to Princeton Record Exchange, can suddenly wind up taking on such significance. In 2019, I paid a dollar for it. I never even got around to listening to it. Now, since the invasion of Ukraine, it’s seldom been out of my CD player.
Mikola Lysenko was a seminal figure of the Ukrainian national school, and “Taras Bulba” is his magnum opus. Based on Nikolai Gogol’s historical novella of patriotism and personal tragedy among the Cossacks, Lysenko’s opera drew praise from no less than Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky.
Tchaikovsky, himself of Cossack descent (on his father’s side), spent his summers in Ukraine and lived there for several years. Once, Lysenko played through the entire opera for him at the piano, after which Tchaikovsky rose and embraced him. So taken with it was he that he hoped to arrange a performance of it in Moscow. But Lysenko’s insistence that the work be sung in Ukrainian was an obstacle that proved to be insurmountable.
The year after Lysenko’s death, in 1912, at the age of 69, a piano reduction was published. Unfortunately, much of the opera’s original orchestration was lost and had to be reconstructed by Lysenko’s pupil, Boris Lyatoshynsky. Lysenko himself had studied orchestration with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
The first complete performance took place in Kharkiv in 1924. A revision was then undertaken to address concerns that the completion had deviated too far from the composer’s original intentions. The present-day performing edition was given its premiere in Kyiv in 1955. So fervently has the work been embraced by the Ukrainian people that a production of “Taras Bulba” now concludes every season at the Kyiv Opera.
To discover the disc in my collection is but one of the joys of maintaining a large physical library. Who can tell what other treasures are hidden in plain sight, or the next glint that will catch my eye?
Happy birthday, Mikola Lysenko. Would that I could offer my respect under better circumstances.
Click “play all” for a sampling here:
