Ukrainian stress

[Dan Newton]

What's particularly interesting in this case is that it's such an  
about-face from Musorgskii's own approach in his other unfinished  
Gogol opera, Zhenit'ba, in which the musical line is subordinated to  
text to an almost unperformable degree.  Richard Taruskin has pointed  
to the particular stress issue I'm questioning as evidence of  
Mussorgskii's eschewal of kuchkist values.  The influence of folksong  
practice that Ralph Cleminson and Olga Meerson mention is undoubtedly  
on the money, and I'm grateful for it.  In _general_, however, I  
would like to point out that failure to match up a stressed syllable  
in the text with an accent in the melodic line is the hallmark of bad  
songwriting, the equivalent of a poetic line that doesn't scan --  
which is why this particular phrase is such a curiosity, from a  
composer of such famous songwriting genius.
Dan

On May 2, 2008, at 8:02 AM, Chew G wrote:

> I'd broaden that out.  The prejudice that sung language should  
> precisely match spoken language in stress (regardless of whether a  
> folk tone is being evoked) is a product of specific 18th-century  
> views about the relationship of music and language (cf. Rousseau).  
> Composers took a while to take the idea on board, let alone to  
> think that it was a measure of "composing well".  Schubert doesn't  
> care too much; by the time of Wolf, later in the 19th century, some  
> rather careful attention is at last being paid by some people.
>
> So it was a real pity when composers did feel they had to take this  
> prejudice seriously. For example, Dvorak's early song cycle  
> "Cyprise", some of his most attractive songs, was withdrawn because  
> of criticisms he'd had about the word setting of the Czech.  The  
> cycle has still never been published in its original form.
>
> Geoff
>
>  Geoffrey Chew
>  Institute of Musicology, Masaryk University, Brno
>  chewg at seznam.cz
>

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