THE GENRE AND STYLE DIMENSION OF THE PIANO CYCLE BY R. HAHN ”LE ROSSIGNOL ÈPERDU”

Abstract

Reynaldo Hahn (1874–1947), a French composer of the so-called Belle Époque, who for quite a long time remained little-known, or even a secondary representative of French musical art. Only a small number of researchers, mostly French, have devoted attention to his creative portrait and compositional legacy. However, in recent decades there has been a growing interest in the music of R. Hahn. And if vocal opuses could sometimes be seen on concert posters before, then piano creative work remained outside the context of ideas about French music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (both among musicologists and performers). The aim of the study is to determine the main genre and style parameters of the piano creative work of Reynaldo Hahn, embodied by the composer in his cycle of 53 piano miniatures «Le Rossignol Éperdu» («The Lost Nightingale»). The following methods are used in the study: the genre one – allows to outline the genre basis of the pieces of the cycle; the style one – to identify the main elements of styles that form the individual style of the composer; the semantic one – to investigate the figurative and thematic content of the miniatures, their internal logic and connection with the artistic world of the composer. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that the piano creative work of R. Hahn, represented by the cycle «Le Rossignol Éperdu», for the first time became the object of research attention in the Ukrainian scientific space. Conclusions. The cycle of 53 miniature-poems is a vivid example of the embodiment of program nature, united both by a common title («The Lost Nightingale») and by the titles of each of the movements (I – «Series I», II – «East», III – «Traveller’s Notebook», IV – «Versailles»). The miniatures of the cycle also have program titles, most of which are accompanied by an epigraph or dedication. The main figurative and thematic groups of the poems of the cycle are: mythological and biblical characters; references to real people; impressionistic sketches of nature; poems whose titles reflect the origins of musical genres; references to the portrait genre. Genre synthesis is implemented in the definition of the pieces of the cycle as poems, although in their essence they are piano miniatures. On the example of the selected pieces (No. 1 – «Frontispice», No. 34 – «Rêverie nocturne sur le Bosphore», No. 38 – «Le Jardin de Petrarque», No. 47 – «La Reine au Jardin»), the following stylistic and genre tendencies have been revealed: the elements of romanticism (attraction to program nature, the use of the genre of instrumental miniature); the elements of impressionism (the program of compositions where sketches of nature, depictions of psychological states are found); the elements of orientalism (most vividly embodied in the second movement called «East»); complicated melodic-harmonic structure of the musical fabric, tonal instability, a large number of chromaticisms and alterations; a significant role of the semantics of tonalities.