The genre of the art song is an extremely rich one among Russian composers, yet these songs remain relatively unknown outside of Russia. While music lovers are probably acquainted with Rachmaninov’s “Lilacs” or Tchaikovsky’s “None but the lonely heart,” how many people are familiar with the numerous songs by Cui, Borodin, Prokofiev, Shostakovich or Musorgsky? While the latter composer’s “Song of the flea” and “Songs and dances of death” turn up from time to time, his complete songs are extensive and have been re-issued on no less than three CDs. Russians love their art songs and they are performed regularly in their homeland. Their acceptance abroad has not yet come. Why should this situation exist?
Among the reasons given are the “alphabet (Cyrillic) problem” and the difficulty of pronouncing Russian. When confronted with singing in a new language, the recitalist often needs to hire a language coach or to take extended and expensive language lessons.
While a singer may in the long run wish to learn to read in Cyrillic, it is certainly not a prerequisite for singing in Russian. Most singers will be studying a text in transcription. Here lies the rub! In order for a singer to be understood, a transcribed text must reflect the Russian language accurately. The situation to date, however, has been disastrous. Anyone who attempts to read the transcription of a Russian opera score, libretto, the published text of a song, or the text in a booklet accompanying the typical recording will more often than not be faced with a virtually unintelligible text. There also are numerous idiosyncratic systems filled with contradictions and outright egregious errors in circulation today. Most of them are wretched, and a singer attempting to sing from one of them would utter absolutely incomprehensible sounds at the worst or be heard with an atrocious accent at best. Yet despair not, for there is light at the end of the tunnel! Help has finally arrived!
The recital singer now has available the songs of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov presented in a superb format by Prof. Laurence Richter of Indiana University. The author is a Russian scholar who specializes in Russian phonetics, and is also knowledgeable about Russian music and singing. In addition to the two volumes under review, Richter is preparing for publication the songs of Musorgsky. The two volumes currently available follow the same pattern. The songs are numbered and the first line of each appears in Cyrillic. Immediately underneath, the same text appears in transcription in a system devised by Richter. The next line is a literal word-for-word translation of the text so that the singer knows the exact meaning of each word. It is a clever device that helps the singer in deciding where to place the proper emphasis. Finally the “more poetic” translation is provided in the fourth line.
The Russian Cyrillic alphabet consists of 33 letters, two of which are silent and serve to signal how a consonant is to be pronounced. Ten letters represent vowels and the rest are consonants. Richter begins with a simple and comprehensible introduction to Russian phonetic transcription, three pages in length. He discusses separately vowels and consonants. He points out that Russian vowels differ little from vowels in Italian. A real strength of Richter’s work is that he emphasizes the fact that Russian vowels differ somewhat when sung as opposed to the way they are produced in the spoken language, and his texts reflect that reality. This fact has been routinely ignored (or perhaps was not even known) by people using other transcription systems, and the singer who has been trained to sing Russian as it is spoken will be ill received by the native speaker.
Russian is characterized by a series of “soft” and “hard” pairs of consonants. English also has such pairs, but they play a much smaller role: for example, it is the pronunciation of the “f” in the words “fool” and “fuel” and the “n” in the words “cannon” and “canyon” that determine the meaning of those words. In the first instance, the consonant is hard and in the second it is soft. (Don’t be tricked by the spelling—it is the consonant that conveys the sense to the listener in both cases.) These oppositions are a regular feature throughout the Russian sound system. Additionally, sounds such as “ch,” “sh” and “zh” are articulated differently in English and Russian. Mastering these differences should be no more difficult for the singer than learning, for example, how to pronounce French. Richter’s presentation is easily comprehensible and accessible to the non-specialist.
A singer would do well to read and absorb Richter’s introductory comments carefully. Next, it would be worthwhile to engage a language coach on an initial basis to practice the specific sounds presented in his system and then to read through the texts of the song(s) to be sung. This should obviate the necessity of hiring a tutor each time that the recitalist learns a Russian text. The information provided in Richter’s introductions can serve as a permanent reference and can easily be transferred to other Russian language texts. These two volumes are a truly novel and important contribution to the field, and one hopes that they gain widespread usage and acceptance.
