On the way to a changing world

From numerous studies and chronicles of Hryhorii Skovoroda’s life and work we know that he had an outstanding talent for music. His clear, resonant voice could be heard during liturgies in one of the churches in his native city of Chornukhy. In Skovoroda’s time, the early 18th century, this Cossack town had three churches: Resurrection, Holy Protection, and St. Nicholas. These Baroque wooden structures, which were similar to churches in other hetman-controlled cities and villages of Left-Bank Ukraine, beautified the picturesque town of Chornukhy, situated on a terraced landscape covered with luxurious vegetation. Unfortunately, these churches have not survived.

Each of the churches in Chornukhy had a wonderful choir. Mykhailo Kovalynsky (1757-1807), Skovoroda’s friend and his first biographer, wrote that the future philosopher began singing in the church choir when he was a child: “By the time he was seven, Hryrohii was noted for his fondness for reading the Scriptures, as well as his gift for music, desire to study, and strength of mind. He willingly went to the choir-loft in the church and sang in an excellent, charming way.”

The culture of church singing was highly developed in Ukraine, where polyphonic singing, including kanty (ancient three-part songs), irmosy (church hymns), and complicated vocal concertos began to be introduced. Ensembles, soloists, and high children’s voices that competed with low men’s voices began to appear within choirs, thus enriching the broad polyphony of Ukrainian church singing. Based on melodious folk songs with their variegated vocal strands, Ukrainian sacred music was considered the most beautiful in the entire Slavic world during the 17th and 18th centuries.

Skovoroda’s musical and aesthetic tastes were shaped by these superb examples of church singing, which was influenced by the finest achievements of Western European choral culture, primarily the Italian tradition. The Ukrainian Baroque, which started to develop in Ukrainian culture in the second half of the 17th century, was still at its peak and encompassed architecture, painting, graphic arts, and music, especially liturgical singing.

Skovoroda received a good, basic music education in Chornukhy, where he learned to read music before enrolling in the Kyiv Academy in 1734. As Skovoroda’s biographers attest, he sang in the academic choir and participated in many ceremonies that were accompanied by music and singing. His great talent for music and his wonderful voice (Skovoroda sang alto) and his penchant for playing the reed-pipe, flute, violin, and bandura brought about a tidal change in his life when Elizabeth, the daughter of Peter I, assumed the imperial throne following a court coup on the night of Nov. 25, 1741.

From her very first days as tsarina, Elizabeth began to restore the court choir with the goal of turning it into one of the best in Europe. Originally called the Court Singers Choir, it was renamed the Court Choir under Catherine II.

Elizabeth’s intention was to have her choir perform high-society concerts for the court and complex liturgical music during religious services that were almost always attended by the tsarina and the high-ranking nobility in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and in churches that were located on the premises of suburban palaces. The best composers of the time, primarily Italians, composed music for the choir’s repertoire.

The Russian imperial court had two choirs: the larger one consisted of 50 singers and the small one had 20. Researchers believe that Skovoroda sang in the small choir, which took part in everyday liturgies that were held in a church next to the tsarina’s chambers. This choir included the most gifted singers and enjoyed Elizabeth’s special favor.

As a member of the court choir, Skovoroda may also have sung in the opera Clemenza di Tito (Tito’s Mercy) by the German composer Johann Adolf Hasse. The opera enjoyed great success in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and its staging was dedicated to Elizabeth’s coronation ceremony. The libretto was written by the famous Italian librettist Pietro Metastasio.

Skovoroda’s possible involvement in this opera is supported by his references to the opera genre, which was gaining immense popularity in the 18th century. Speaking about the incomprehensibility of God’s wisdom in his work Nachalnaia dver k khristianskomu dobronraviiu (The Primary Door to Christian Humility), he gives the following advice to those who are trying to fathom it: “Act here as you would in the opera and be content with what opens up before your eyes without looking behind the curtain and the scene of the theater.”

In keeping with the tsarina’s command to recruit more singers for the new choir, Rafail Zaborovsky, the archbishop of Kyiv and Galicia, issued an edict on Aug. 10, 1742, in St. Sophia’s Cathedral in Kyiv, ordering the clergy and laymen to do everything to help the bass singer Gavriil Golovnia, who had been sent from St. Petersburg to find talented singers in Left-Bank Ukraine, mainly in the Poltava region and southeastern Ukraine.

The recruitment involved a painstaking competition-based selection of singers in Hlukhiv in September 1742 — testimony to the importance of the task that had been set by the tsarina. The famous city of Hlukhiv was the seat of the Ukrainian hetman. The world-famous Ukrainian composers Maksym Berezovsky and Dmytro Bortniansky were also born there. Hetman Danylo Apostol opened the first Ukrainian music school in the city, which offered sound knowledge and vast music education to gifted boys from many areas of Left-Bank Ukraine. This is where the majority of singers for the court choir studied.

The Hlukhiv competition was conducted by Golovnia and his assistant Pavel Silvestrovich. Fifty singers came from Cossack regiments, and Skovoroda must have traveled from Kyiv. The competition was a complicated one because the contestants were required to show their ability to sing church hymns and to perform in the Italian style, a new development in choir singing in the late 17th and early 18th century. The students of the Kyiv Academy had mastered it well. In his study Volodymyr Stadnychenko writes that the following students of the Kyiv Academy won the competition: Hryhorii Skovoroda (alto), Stepan Andriievsky, Kalenyk Danyliv, and Andrii Turmansky. Another winner was Vasyl Kalynovych, a student at the Pereiaslav Collegium. All but Skovoroda had descant voices.

After the competition, Skovoroda and the other winners were sent to Moscow, where Elizabeth’s solemn coronation took place in the Kremlin’s Dormition Cathedral in April 1742. However, owing to the importance of the event, the celebrations continued until the end of the year and featured church services, theatrical performances, music, and singing.

Until very recently different dates were given for the time when Skovoroda joined the choir. In 1972 Leonid Makhnovets published a detailed biography of the philosopher, claiming that he became a member of the choir in November or December 1741. His main evidence was a reference to Skovoroda’s biography written by his first biographer, Kovalynsky. Makhnovets did not provide any documented evidence, as it may not have been available at the time he was writing his book.

Makhnovets also notes that Skovoroda’s involvement in the court choir is a blank spot in the scholarly literature on his life: “The few lines left by Kovalynsky are but a mere written reference to Skovoroda’s unusual role in an unusual place. Some of Kovalynsky’s other comments are all we know about Skovoroda as a court singer.”

Researchers have failed to find his name on the lists of court choir singers for November and December 1741. It should be noted that Kovalynsky compiled Skovoroda’s biography 50 years after his involvement with the choir and merely indicated that this took place when “Empress Elizabeth assumed the throne.” The enthronement, as we know, was prolonged for nearly a year and was accompanied by grand coronation celebrations, which were still going on when Skovoroda arrived from Hlukhiv in November 1742.

The physician Mykola Borodii managed to throw some light on the little-known facts about Skovoroda’s activity in the court choir, in particular when and how he joined the choir. In his study of the history of medicine, this inquisitive researcher came across some unique sources. Fascinated by his research, which he continued for many years in the archives of Kyiv, Moscow, and Leningrad (St. Petersburg), he discovered 10 documents that allowed him to fill the gaps in Skovoroda’s biography and learn more about how he had joined the court choir after his sojourn in Hlukhiv. Borodii’s manuscript Bili pliamy v biohrafii H. Skovorody (Blank Spots in Hryhorii Skovoroda’s Biography) is located in the Skovoroda Literary-Memorial Museum in Chornukhy.

Studying the second part of the file entitled “On the Order and Expenditures on the Round-Trip of Empress Elizabeth from St. Petersburg to Moscow” (Central State Archives of Ancient Acts in Moscow), Borodii discovered the first of ten documents referring to Skovoroda. The list of unmarried singers in Elizabeth’s cortege included the name of “Hryhorii Saveliev,” meaning the son of Sava or Savelii, as the scribe might have written at the time, i.e., Hryhorii Skovoroda.

According to Elizabeth’s second edict, the singers who were selected in Hlukhiv enlarged the choir. According to the documents, the instructions to depart for the northern capital were received on Dec. 17, 1742. After traveling on sleds to St. Petersburg, Skovoroda and the other singers moved into the old Winter Palace built by Peter I on the banks of the Neva River in 1721. The construction was completed precisely at the time when, after Russia signed the Treaty of Nystad with Sweden and the end of the Northern War, St. Petersburg became the capital of the Russian empire. This is where the Russian tsar died in 1725. The palace was remodeled and refurbished many times, and by the time Skovoroda arrived, it looked as it was pictured in one of Gustav Georg Endner’s mid-17th-century engravings.

Occupying four rooms in the palace, the choir singers wore fine court clothing and were well fed. They received a generous salary of 25 rubles per year. The regimen of daily life and singing was fairly strict. Exhausting rehearsals were held for nearly 10 hours a day, and the singers were punished for the slightest infraction. Enforcing the regimen, the supervisors of the choir made sure that the singers did not engage in heavy drinking or leave the palace at night.

Stadnychenko assumes that when Skovoroda arrived in St. Petersburg, his relative H. Poltavtsev (Poltavets) from Chornukhy might have met him there. As the chamber governor of the imperial court, Poltavtsev’s duties included enforcing the internal regimen and fitting out the Winter Palace in order to host the court servants. Makhnovets notes that Poltavtsev may have played a role in getting Skovoroda into the court choir. However, Borodii’s new archival discoveries indicate that it is more likely that the philosopher was accepted as one of the winners of the Hlukhiv competition.

The singers spent their days singing during church liturgies, performing on bishops’ name days, solemn services on the occasion of military victories, and concerts for high society, and taking part in theatrical performances.

Elizabeth also ordered her noblemen to select singers for opera performances that were staged by visiting foreign composers and conductors. An instruction prepared by the choir’s administrator M. Poltoratsky, an ethnic Ukrainian and the grandfather of Alexander Pushkin’s well-known contemporary Anna Kern, obliged the singers to study Italian and French when they were not engaged in singing and rehearsals. With his excellent knowledge of Latin and aptitude for languages, Skovoroda found this task easy. On Jan. 21, 1744, Elizabeth again went to Moscow with her entourage, including her choir and Skovoroda, to celebrate the second anniversary of her enthronement.

Elizabeth was also planning to implement certain new measures related to the throne. She was looking for a wife for Petr Fedorovich, the future successor to the throne. Makhnovets describes these events in his book: “On Feb. 9, 1744, on Elizabeth’s invitation, Princess Sofia Augusta Frederica of Anhalt-Zerbst, who was known as Fike, arrived in Moscow with her mother, a spy in the service of the Prussian Emperor Friedrich II. She came from an impoverished family and arrived as a ragamuffin without as much as bedclothes. She was supposed to marry Petr Fedorovich, her second cousin. She was a German Lutheran and in order to get married she had to be rechristened as an Orthodox Russian. Archimandrite Symon Todorsky was again summoned to Moscow. For some three months he made Fike learn the Symbol of Faith in Russian, which she smoothly recited on June 28, 1744 in the palace church and became ‘Ekaterina Alekseevna.’”

On June 29 Fike became engaged to Petr Fedorovich in the Dormition Cathedral on his name day. Later, in 1762, she staged a court coup and ordered her favorites, the Orlov brothers, to kill her husband, which they quickly did.

The ceremony was extraordinarily grand. Just like during Elizabeth’s coronation, the entire Senate and Synod as well as the highest-ranking state officials, generals, and members of the diplomatic corps were in attendance. The court choir sang a song to Elizabeth’s health (Mnogaia leta), as did Skovoroda, who grudgingly joined in. Bells rang out and cannons roared. This was followed by a banquet that lasted until 2 a.m., with the Italian singers and the court choir entertaining the state nobility. Skovoroda thus witnessed Fike, or Catherine II, taking her first steps to the Russian throne.

Skovoroda disliked court life. The endless balls, masquerades, dances, excessively luxurious apparel, and love affairs and flirtations irritated the philosopher, who was used to a semi-ascetic lifestyle. He conveyed his disheartening impressions of the Russian court and experiences in his work Son (Dream), dated Nov. 24, 1758. In it he depicts a dream in which he finds himself in the royal chambers in St. Petersburg: “I was in a place where there were royal chambers, attires, dances, musicians, and where lovers were singing or looking at themselves in the mirror upon running into a room from the reception hall and taking off their masks, with richly decorated bedclothes, etc.”

Skovoroda was a man of universal knowledge-a philosopher, thinker, theologian, poet, enlightener, pedagogue, singer, and composer. His unique and immeasurably rich creative heritage will always be a perpetual light shining on the difficult path toward understanding oneselves, the world, and God’s truth. Current and future generations will draw spiritual power and inspiration from his enlightening legacy.