Ukrainian stress

[William Ryan]

Geoffrey makes a good point. In English, consider the song of the Lord 
Chancellor in his unfortunate encounter with the Fairy Queen in Gilbert 
and Sullivan's Iolanthe:

A plague on this vagary,
I'm in a nice quandary!
Of hasty tone
With dames unknown
I ought to be more chary;
It seems that she's a fairy
 From Andersen's library,
And I took her for
The proprietor
Of a Ladies' Seminary!

Six out of  ten words at the end of the lines can only be sung with 
non-standard stress. It is true that Gilbert was looking for comic 
effect, also true that he enjoyed mocking serious opera.

Will Ryan


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 For example, Dvorak's early song cycle "Cyprise", some of his most attractive songs, was withdrawn because of criticisms he'd had about the word setting of the Czech.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
>  
>  Department of Music, Royal Holloway, University of London
>  g.chew at rhul.ac.uk
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list on behalf of Ralph Cleminson
> Sent: Fri 2.5.08 12:05
> To: SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU
> Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Ukrainian stress
>
>
>
> Since the sentence is Russian, the question of stress in Ukrainian (on what would anyway, in that case, be ????), does not really arise. 
>
> What is relevant, however, is that Musorgskij, like other composers of the period, consciously drew on popular traditions, and that the metrical structure of folksong is frequently at odds with the normal spoken stress of the words (there are many examples in Russian and English as well).  This line is, moreover, very typical metrically of Ukrainian popular verse (trochaic heptameter with caesura after the fourth foot).  The music follows the notional metre rather than the stress of speech, and this is no doubt a deliberate element of "folk" colour in the opera.
>
>
>   
>>>> Dan Newton <danewton at U.WASHINGTON.EDU> 05/02/08 08:17 AM >>>
>>>>         
> Dear all,
>
> I have a question for anyone familiar with Ukrainian.
>
> In Musorgskii's opera Soroschintsyi Fair, there is this line: "Razve 
> mozhno s moei dochkoi takto obrashchat'sia?"  The musical line is 
> such that the word "moei" is stressed on the first syllable, contrary 
> to Russian speech.  I'm wondering whether this is a case of the late 
> stages of alcoholism (i.e., bad composition) or simply a 
> Ukrainianism.  Would Ukrainian stress the first syllable?
>
> Thank you in advance.
>
> Dan
>
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