“Dedicated to the highly respected and dear professor”
An exhibit dedicated to the 130th birth anniversary of Stanislav Liudkevych is launched in Lviv
Solomia Krushelnytska Music Memorial Museum has presented an homage to the outstanding composer, music critic, and pedagogue. The exposition comprises materials from the personal library of the artist. Those are publications and books by composers, performers, music critics, folklorists, writers, and literary critics dedicated to Stanislav Liudkevych. Among the authors we find such well-known names as Vasyl Burakivsky, Borys Kudryk, Yevhen Vakhniak, Ostap Lysenko, Maria Zahaikevych, Bohdana Filtz, Klyment Kvitka, Volodymyr Hoshovsky, Hryhorii Nudha, Bohdan Lepky, Taras Franko, Vasyl Pachovsky, Pavlo Tychyna, and Maksym Rylsky.
Liudkevych evoked deep respect, admiration, and gratitude amongst his contemporaries, who highly appreciated him as a composer, music critic, pedagogue, folklorist, music activist, and public figure, as well as a decent and honest man.
Recently the museum has presented the monograph Stanislav Liudkevych. Life and Creative Work. Vol. 2 (1939-79), published by the Misioner Publishing House. The book was written by the composer’s widow, senior fellow at the Liudkevych Memorial Museum, Zenovia Shtunder. The first volume of the monograph describes the musical Lviv on the verge of centuries and the composer’s life until 1939 (the book collects the materials of Liudkevych’s family, which has acquired renown in the Ukrainian culture).
“The second volume of the monograph describes the last 40 years of composer’s life,” Zenovia Shtunder said, “it was under the totalitarian regime, when one was not allowed to talk about the many of Liudkevych’s collegues who went abroad. In particular, this referred to Oleksandr Kolessa and his daughter Lubka Kolessa, a renowned pianist, who both lived in Germany. Those times had an imprint on my destiny, too: in 1945, at the age of 17, I was arrested by the NKVD, and served a three-year sentence in prison… In 1948, I entered the Lviv Conservatory, where I was taught by Stanislav Liudkevych, who at the time was 67 years old. Although Liudkevych himself was not persecuted, many of his fellow composers suffered, specifically Volodymyr Starosolsky, who died in a Soviet concentration camp in 1942, and Vasyl Barvinsky, who spent 10 years in exile.
“After graduation, being a post-graduate student, I worked as an assistant at the Lviv Conservatory and took up the study of folklore, I travelled across the entire Hutsul region in the 1980s. In 1973 I published my first book about the composer Music works of Stanislav Liudkevych. At that time I became interested with the composer’s thesis entitled ‘Two Problems of Development of Sound Representation,’ which he wrote in Vienna and that was scarcely known in Ukraine. I started to correspond with Erich Schemko, head of the Vienna Music Institute. For that correspondence with a foreigner I was fired for being a ‘class enemy’ and threatened with revocation of my degree.”
The second volume of the monograph written by Shtunder Stanisav Liudkevych. Life and Creative Work provides a detailed bibliography of the composer’s music works from the 1939-79 period: choral, symphonic, vocal-symphonic, piano, solo singing, arangements of people’s songs and church music. It offers exhaustive information about Liudkevych’s music variations of works by other composers, editions and arrangements, as well as a list of the composer’s works.
“No monograph of this kind has been dedicated to any other Ukrainian composer,” an associate professor at the Lysenko Music Academy in Lviv Yakym HORCHAK noted, “The two-volume monograph by Shtunder Stanislav Liudkevych. Life and Creative Work comprises the whole publicistic and scholarly oeuvre of the composer, it also gives quite an exhaustive bibliography of his music works. The book corrects the mistakes made by music critics in previous monographs, specifically that in 1903 Liudkevych started to work at the Lysenko Higher Music Institute in Lviv as one of its founders. It is also the first time that the composer’s works from after 1939 were analyzed.”
Reading Shtunder’s monograph truly shows how little attention Liudkevych’s personality received from the authors of the previous monographs. However, after reading the book I felt that it lacked a general assessment of Liudkevych’s music manner. As for the composer’s life, it was quite fully highlighted by the monograph’s author, which cannot be said about his creative work, analyzed in a scant and somewhat imbalanced manner (Liudkevych’s participation in the church singing commission was not highlighted at all, which is recalled by Father Babiak in the memoirs published in 2000).
To give a full and exhaustive answer to the question, what is Stanislav Liudkevych’s place in the Ukrainian culture, one has to publish a full academic collection of his music works. But to do so, a whole institute of music studies would be needed.
The Day ’S FACTFILE
Stanislav LIUDKEVYCH (Jan. 24, 1879, Jaroslaw, now Poland, - Sept. 10, 1979, Lviv, buried in the Lychakiv Cemetry) was a Ukranian composer, music critic, folklorist, pedagogue, music activist and public worker. He is a winner of the state Taras Shevchenko Prize. In 1897 he graduated from the gymnasium, in 1901 – Philosophy Department at Lviv University (specialized in Ukrainian and classical philology). He studied composition on his own, in 1897-99 he consulted with Mieczyslaw Soltys, listened to lectures on music theory in the Lviv Conservatory. In 1906-08 received musical education in Vienna. Since 1903 he worked at the Lviv-based Lysenko Music Institute, which he headed in 1910-15. In 1919-73 was a professor, head of the department of history, theory, and composition at the Lviv-based Lysenko Conservatory. In 1939-41 he was a senior fellow at the Lviv branch of the Folklore Institute at the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Liudkevych is one of the most oustanding Ukrainian composers of the 20th century, his ouevre combines the features of national music style with peculiar features of the late Romantic style of European music. The composer preferred social and national themes, choosing for music interpretation the works of the greatest national poets, Taras Shevchenko and Ivan Franko: symphonic cantata Caucasus, symphonic poem Moses, choral symphonic cantata Testament, Transcarpathian symphony.
