Embodiment of Denys Sichynsky’s Autobiographic63gl;; Reflections in His Vocal Creative Work 63 A R S I N T E R C U L T U R A S Vol. 9 pp. 63-79 2020 ISSN 2083-1226 https://doi.org/10.34858/AIC.9.2020.335 © Copyright by Institute of Music of the Pomeranian University in Słupsk Received: 06.06.2020 Accepted: 26.11.2020 Original research paper Iryna Zinkiv ORCID № 0000-0002-0406-3370 Lviv National Music Academy named after Mykola Lysenko Lviv [email protected] Embodiment of Denys Sichynsky’s Autobiographic Reflections in His Vocal Creative Work Abstract Denys Sichynsky is one of the brightest representatives of the musical culture of Eastern Gali- cia at the turn of the twentieth century. He belongs to the so-called second generation of Gali- cian composers, successors and followers of the Przemyśl School, Mykola Lysenko, influenced by European musical romanticism, and a forerunner of modernist trends in Ukrainian vocal music. Vocal music is the main area of the​​ artist’s work. The pages of Sichynsky’s Autobiography open up a narrative that is a unique model of his own reflection on life events, as well as one of his self-realization forms in the romance genre. It makes it possible to decode a complex creative identity and compare the autobiographi- cal description of his own life history with factual material available. The “Autobiography” becomes a key to understanding the composer’s choice of vocal works and the specifics of reading literary texts of romanticists and his contemporaries, as well as their musical imple- mentation. Sichynsky’s mental constitution, viewed from the pages of his vocal works, is one of his identification forms as an artist with challenging destiny from the Austrian province of the Habsburg Empire at its decline, which coincided with the fin-de-siecle period marked by new artistic trends. D. Sichynsky’s vocal creative work, which completes the era of Romanticism and reveals the first sprouts of modernist aesthetics in Galician vocal music, was first considered through the prism of autobiographical reflections. The features of the new worldview in vocal works were self-formed uder the influence of the aesthetics of Ukrainian (Ivan Franko, Lesia Ukraiin- ka, Bohdan Lepkyi, Uliana Kravchenko) and Polish (Lucian Rydle, Marian Havalevіch) mod- ernist poets, Ukrainian and foreign romantic traditions of the solo singing genre, as well as opera art by G. Verdi, G. Puccini, and composers-verists. His vocal creative work formed a basis for the chamber and vocal music formation by the new generation of Ukrainian artists of Galicia – S. Liudkevych, V. Barvinskyi, and N. Nyzhankivskyi, who in the first decades of the twentieth century elevated the genre of Ukrainian vocal miniature to the highest level of European vocal art. 64 Iryna Zinkiv Keywords: autobiography, autobiographic reflection, Denys Sichynsky’s vocal creative work, composer’s psychological type, Habsburg Empire, fin-de-siecle period Introduction Denys Sichynsky is one of the brightest representatives of the musical culture of Eastern Galicia from the fin-de-siecle period. Stanislav Lyudkevych, an outstanding Ukrainian composer of the twentieth century, noted that D. Sichynsky was “too po- werful creative talent”, the first professional composer of Galicia in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, a person who chose music as his only profession1. Given the 110th anniversary of the artist’s death (1865–1909), the issue of understanding his creative heritage through the prism of his own autobiographical reflections seems especially relevant in Galician musical and cultural development of that time. Ukrai- nian musicologists (S. Liudkevych2, S. Pavlyshyn3, M. Zahaikevych4, V. Vytvytskyi5, L. Kyianovska6, etc.) have already done a lot to comprehend the various genres of Sichynsky’s creative heritage. Among these, the genres of the artist’s vocal creative work remain the least studied. Although D. Sichynsky’s vocal works are the subject of musicologists’ interest, these works are not contemplated in full. Therefore, this paper attempts to provide an integral contemplation of D. Sichynsky’s vocal works written by the composer within the period 1888–1908, which are considered in terms of style evolution through the prism of his biography. Prolegomena to evolving creative personality The stages of Sichynsky’s own worldview formation are inscribed in the space of his generation consciousness and cultural and intellectual moods of epoch – the time of the end of the romantic and the emergence of the first modernist tendencies that gained positions in the art of Austro-Hungarian Galicia and sub-Russian Ukraine. He was a promoter of Eastern Galicia musical and social life and a modern, talented composer, of whom composers of the younger generation left commendations. The composer has become a symbolic constituent of the generational identity, which at the same time projects onto the content of his generation’s collective phenomenon. 1 Stanislav Liudkevych, “Denys Sichinskyi. On the 20th anniversary of his dicease”, Stanislav Liudkevych. Research and Articles (Kyiv: Musical Ukraine, 1973),73-76. 2 Ibidem, 73–76. 3 Stefania Pavlyshyn, Denys Sichinskyi (Kyiv: Musical Ukraine, 1980). 4 Maria Zahaikevych, Musical life of Western Ukraine in the second half of the XIX century (Kyiv: Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1960). 5 Vasyl Vytvytskyi, Old Galician solo song of the XIX century (Przemysl, 2004), 95-110. 6 Liubov Kyianovska, Stylistic evolution of Galician musical culture of the XIX-XX centuries (Chernivtsi: Books – ХХІ, 2007). Embodiment of Denys Sichynsky’s Autobiographic Reflections in His Vocal Creative Work 65 The composer’s psychological type traces through the prism of autobiographical reflections. Due to Sichynsky’s own psychic system formed under the influence of social factors, his relationship with the surroundings was complex. He faced unpre- cedented indifference from the provincial community where he spent most of his life, where he was working and creating. Being a pioneer largely in the field of organizing the forms of musical life of the Ukrainians in Galicia, he devoted most of his energy to their development and stabilization, especially through the creation of musical lite- rature for chamber home, vocal, and instrumental music-making. Because the piano was the main musical instrument of the bourgeois society lifestyle of that time, it is not surprising that he wrote his best vocal and choral works accompanied by this instrument. Sichynsky’s creative passionate style was very dissonant with provincial close - mindedness, even during his periods of instructing. The composer appealed to wider contacts, to a more intense intellectual communication that he was mostly deprived of. The provincial lifestyle locality levelled the expansion of his spiritual horizons, made it impossible to embody the broader intentions of a figure of such a high level of tal- ent. Following escalation of difficult relations with the customer of his single opera, Lev Dzhulynskyi, in whose estate he wrote his last work – “Roksoliana” opera, a city of Stanislaviv, which owes him the Ukrainian musical life became the last creative shelter for composer’s lonely life. Desperate autobiographical revelations testify to his discrepancies with his own conscience. Therefore, in broader creative perspectives, Sichynsky’s communicative vector was directed towards not only the Ukrainian cultural figures of Galicia (I. Fran- ko, M. Pavlyk, Ulyana Kravchenko, O. Nyzhankivskyi, Ya. Yaroslavenko), but also of the Naddniprianshchyna region (T. Shevchenko, Lesia Ukraiinka), as well as German romanticists (H. Heine), Polish modernists, representatives of “Young Poland”, and positivistic movements in Polish literature (L. Rydle, M. Gavalevich). Summary biogram The composer’s “Autobiography” is an important source of biographical information, which reveals his complex spiritual microcosm7. Its materials were first published in 1904 and then reprinted subsequently, i.e. introduced to the scientific circulation du- ring Soviet times by V. Gadzinskyi in his article “Ukrainian Music Baudelaire”, pub- lished in the journal “Music” in 1924 (issues 3-4). The composer’s “Autobiography” has not yet become the subject of a comprehensive research of the integral life of D. Sichynsky’s. According to V. Gadzinskyi’s reprint of the artist’s “Autobiography” and its introduction to the scientific circulation by musicologist Stefania Pavlyshyn, we learn about the composer’s first vocal works that were unavailable in Ukraine during Soviet times. 7 Denys Sichynskyi, “Autobiography”, MusicAlmanac (Illustrated Music Calendar), (1904): 72-73. 66 Iryna Zinkiv Subsequently, they were partially used by other researchers (M. Zahaikevych8, L. Kyianovska9, N. Kostiuk10). D. Sichynsky’s life is in many respects a typical example of the artist’s position in the Galician society of that time at the final stage of the Habsburg Empire, which developed on the eve of the First World War. Having no other profession that could ensure his existence, the artist devoted his life entirely to the art of music. The pub- lication of Sichynsky’s “Autobiography” in Gadzinskyi’s article reveals many unk- nown collisions of the artist’s challenging creative life. There are scarce biographical data about Sichynsky’s life. He was born on 2 October 1865 in the village of Kliuvyntsi in the Husiatyn district (former Kopychynets district) of the Ternopil region, which at that time was part of the Habsburg