Ukrainian stress

[Maria Dmytrieva]

Dan,    
I don't know how well you are familiar with Russian and / or Ukrainian folk songs, especially humorous ones, but I assume if you were you would have heard in them numerous instances of stress shifts following the rhythmic pattern.    
it is something that attracts one's attention when we are still children (I mean, Russian/Ukrainian speakers) but as adults we leave it unnoticed because it's the way poetry works.    
    
With best regards,    
Maria    
     
    
    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.    
   

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