Alexander Alyabyev: short biography, photo of Alexander Alyabyev

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

The founder of the Russian romance, the remarkable composer Alexander Alyabyev, founded musical Pushkiniana, Russian chamber instrumental music, and became a harbinger of many future achievements of the national composer school. He is best known for his vocal works, which to this day are the most beloved and are often performed even in the family circle by the will of the mood. For example, "The Nightingale", "Winter Road", "Evening Bells" and many, many others.

Biography

Alexander Alyabyev was taught music from childhood. There is evidence that he took piano lessons from the famous D. Field. In any case, he dedicated his first composition to him, and it was the pianoforte "Big Polonaise" - the first real concert work in Russia in this genre.

BornAlexander Alyabyev in Tobolsk, in the family of the governor, which gave him the opportunity to receive an excellent education. He fought with Napoleon as a volunteer, in the famous detachment of the poet Denis Davydov, was seriously wounded and awarded orders for courage and courage. And after the end of the war, Alexander Alyabyev, the composer, devoted himself entirely to music.

In high-society living rooms, excerpts from his operas, vaudevilles were very much loved and constantly performed, and romances were especially often sung. The biography of Alexander Alyabyev is decorated with wonderful people: he was very close friends with Griboyedov, Shakhovsky, the Decembrists Bestuzhevs, Mukhanov. He shared plans and discussed concerts with Verstovsky and the Vilegorsky brothers. Lived in Moscow - theatrical life. Even the "Triumph of the Muses" at the opening of the Bolshoi Theater was written by Alyabyev together with Verstovsky and Scholz.

Nothing foretold

The music composed by Alexander Alyabyev has become known all over the country. The photo did not exist then, but his portraits were painted by well-known artists in those days - the composer was famous. His romances were sung in St. Petersburg, and in Moscow, and in the most distant cities. On the stage of the Bolshoi Theater there were his operas "The Village Philosopher", "Moonlight Night", the ballet "Magic Drum".

However, in 1825, his partner in a card game dies. Suddenly. And Alyabyev was arrested. The murder charge has not been proven. Nevertheless, the composer is deprived of all ranks, orders and nobility. And exiled back to Tobolsk. In a very distant Siberiana cold city where his happy childhood had once passed. The portrait below shows a friend of the composer and the author of the poems of the best romances by Alyabyev - Nikolai Ogaryov.

Tobolsk and the Caucasus

Alexander Alyabyev took this unfair accusation so hard that only music could keep him from the last step. Here he organized a wonderful orchestra, he performs as a pianist, arranges all kinds of concerts. And he writes music that is very different from the previous one, cloudless. Here his best romances appear: "Winter Road", "Irtysh", "Two Ravens". But the nervous shock made itself felt: the biography of Alexander Alexandrovich Alyabyev as a secular person who entered any house was over. The composer falls seriously ill.

Seven years later, in 1832, he was allowed to leave Siberia and go to the Caucasus for treatment. His romances were written there, published in a collection under the title "Caucasian Singer". Long before the main collector of folklore M. I. Glinka, it was Alyabyev Alexander Alexandrovich who recorded the songs of Caucasians, Kirghiz, Bashkirs, harmonized and processed them, using them in his work. Together with Maksimovich, he participates in the collection "Voices of Ukrainian Songs", which N. V. Gogol liked so much. Here in the portrait - the owner of the salon, where many of Alyabyev's works were performed for the first time, the composer's friend, the famous Alexander Griboyedov.

Return

"Forgive" Alyabyeva verygradually: in 1835 they were allowed to live with relatives in the Moscow region with a complete ban on appearances in the capitals, in 1843 they were allowed to live in Moscow, but under constant police supervision. This means: not to see the public, not to visit, not at concerts, not at the theater. That is why such heartfelt romances with vivid civil content as "The Beggar", "The Village Watchman", "The Hut" completed his life and creative path. And the most, it must be said, in demand by the public so far, and almost all of his works of the exile period have become academic.

None of the first composers of Russian romances took such a high place in Russian music as Alyabyev Alexander Alexandrovich. A short biography and that impresses with many events of his difficult life. He worked in almost all musical genres, but the focus of his interest was vocal lyrics. More than 180 songs and romances were composed by Alexander Alyabyev. A composer whose biography, as it were, did not imply such hard work in hellish mental anguish. Moreover, he wrote romances that are still hits, such as "The Nightingale" to the verses of Delvig or "The Beggar" to the verses of Beranger. Alexander Pushkin, depicted in the portrait below, was the author of more than twenty of Alyabyev's best romances.

Creativity

Romances Alexander Alyabyev wrote to the verses of the best poets: his favorite commander Davydov, Zhukovsky, Vyazemsky, Kozlov, Koltsov, Lermontov. Twenty-two romances written in verseAlexander Pushkin, and fifteen of them - during the lifetime of the poet. At the end of his life, Ogaryov's poems inspired him more than others.

Alyabyev also wrote a lot of symphonic music, both chamber and instrumental: the symphony in E minor is very good, the tragic overture in F minor, several concert overtures, many concertos for various solo instruments with orchestra, dance suites. Until now, many of Alyabyev's chamber ensembles are studied at music schools and conservatories, and also sound in concert performance. The portrait below depicts the most interesting person of Alyabyev's time - the Decembrist Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, the author of the story, according to which the opera was staged to the music of Alyabyev, and he also wrote romances to Bestuzhev-Marlinsky's verses.

Theater, folklore, sacred music

Alyabyev's legacy for the theater is a demonstration of excellent music in all genres known at that time: these are operas, and ballet, and more than twenty vaudevilles, which are not much different from operas, there is a cantata, and music for performances of drama theaters, and among them - and comedies, and tragedies, and dramas. Alyabyev also wrote music for the Moscow premiere of Pushkin's Mermaid, Shakespeare's The Tempest and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Arranged, instrumented, compiled and published a considerable number of folk songs in collections - Russian, Ukrainian, Tatar, Central Asian, Caucasian. More than a hundred works of spiritual content came out from under his pen, among which is the famous liturgy.

The fate of heritage

As it often happens with the best of artists who have no time to work for posterity or who modestly do not see themselves as the creators of the "incorruptible", Alyabyev's legacy has not been preserved for the most part. Of the 450 works (this is an approximate figure), most are still in manuscripts, which have simply been lost over the past dashing century and a half. Many of his works have been published, but for some reason undeservedly forgotten. And this music is excellent and may well make both itself and the composer posthumous fame, having become the same hits as, for example, "The Nightingale" to the verses of Delvig.

For fifty years after the death of the composer, both his work and his biography were not subjected to any serious analysis. But both are so versatile! How many wonderful and such necessary nuances can no longer be returned from the dust of time! Until 1825, the name of Alyabyev practically did not go out of print, but after that - only rare, literally single reviews of romances. His biography was distorted, filled with erroneous or incomplete data, so the descendants almost lost their good name and the wonderful work of the composer and musical figure.

Fortitude and Principles

Even unbearable false accusations did not break the soul of a real creator. After all, the same desire for freedom, the motives of loneliness, compassion and suffering, longing for justice, that is, the same circle of images characteristic of all creativity, we can observe in the very last of its periods.

AlexanderAlyabyev, a composer as talented as he was unfortunate, received some consolation from a meeting with a woman he had loved before, the one who bore the loud surname of Rimsky-Korsakov in her girlhood. Then one of the best romances of the Alyabyevskaya Pushkiniana was written - "I loved you." This woman, E. Ofrosimova, when she became a widow, became the composer's wife.

Nikolai Ogaryov and Bestuzhev-Marlinsky

Composer Alyabyev and poet Ogaryov became very close in the forties of the century before last. The best romances by Alyabyev - "The Hut", "The Tavern", "The Village Watchman" - were created on Ogaryov's poems. Long before the search for Mussorgsky and Dargomyzhsky appeared, secular romances were enriched with the theme of social inequality. The poet and the composer had a lot in common: arrest and exile, at least. Although Alyabyev endured all this unfairly and as if by accident, Ogaryov was a staunch innovator and constitutionalist, for which he was prosecuted by law. Ogaryov and Herzen, Kolokol, England - everyone knows and remembers this.

Alyabyev's last three operas also sound with characteristic rebellious moods, these are Shakespeare's "The Tempest" and "Edwin Oscar" based on the texts of ancient Celtic legends. But the opera "Ammalat-bek" based on the story of the same name by Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky and the romance based on his own poems "Clouds have gathered in the Caucasus" deserve a special word. He was killed in the Caucasus in 1837, and this loss nearly overwhelmed Alyabyev: it was already the third person he loved to be killed.poets. And all - Alexandra: Pushkin, Griboyedov, Bestuzhev-Marlinsky. The rebellious Decembrist spirit never died out in the composer's works.

Return of memory

The beginning of the performance of previously unknown works by Alexander Alyabyev took place only in the spring of 1947. Then a concert was organized at the Moscow Philharmonic, where, after more than a hundred years of complete oblivion, "Variations for Violin and Orchestra", "Third String Quartet" and two orchestral overtures were performed. The success was great! Such great musicians as Gilels, Oistrakh, and groups - the Sveshnikov Choir, the Beethoven State Quartet - were promoting the composer's chamber work.

Since 1949, Alyabyev's never-published works have been published, along with the white spots of his biography being revealed. There came an understanding of the great role that he played in the entire history of the musical art of Russia. The most interesting thing is that his unknown works continue to be found in various archives. Since his wanderings continued for a long time and their geography is extensive, more discoveries of a similar plan may happen.