Tchaikovsky (song)

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Tschaikowsky is a patter song with the lyrics by Ira Gershwin and the music by Kurt Weill . The song is part of the musical Lady in the Dark and was first performed on stage by Danny Kaye on January 23, 1941.

song

In the musical Lady in the Dark , the lady is on trial in a dream circus because she does not want to keep a wedding promise. After her song I never gave him my word , the baritone- singing ringmaster asked who composed the melody that was just being sung. To Tchaikovsky's answer ! does he answer with Tchaikovsky? I love Russian composers, and I am starting a list of Russian composers. The text is a staccato-like list of fifty composer names with a Russian sound. In the form of the patter song, the names are rattled down in a chant. In Gershwin's text, the song has a six-line introduction ( may I announce it? ) And then four stanzas with 4 lines of verse. Four or five composer names are listed per line, until in the last stanza the singer begins to repeat himself with the names and in the last lines comes to the conclusion that there is now enough for him and the audience on stage.

Weill uses Allegro barbaro , 152 ( MM ), as the tempo designation , for the singer the instruction is not pronounced too quickly and clearly and for the piano in Albert Szirmai's piano reduction semper staccato . The lecture ends with a crescendo fortissimo and towards the end the other singers come up with the two repeated names Stravinsky and Kvoschinsky .

Some of the men announced as "Russians" (women are absent) are not Russians, but are of Polish origin, such as Moniuszko, Maliszewski and Godowsky, come from other parts of the Russian Empire such as the Ukraine or were already in like Vernon Duke and Igor Markevitch emigrated at a young age. The title of the song refers to the Russian Romantic composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky . In his poem, Gershwin used the usual German spelling "Tschaikowsky" instead of the English spelling or a scientific transliteration . For the other names, too, a poetic spelling applies, which, however, must be made phonetically by the singer, even if only in the Rhythm of speech and in the rhymes.

Ira Gershwin, who wrote the libretto for Lady in the dark in 1941 , had published some of his poems under the pseudonym Arthur Francis, since he was only registered in public as his brother George Gershwin's librettist . This text was originally printed under this pseudonym in a student newspaper, and Gershwin's own plagiarism was later uncovered.

Kaye had the ambition to bring the number faster and faster and brought it to a time under a minute. In the musical, however, the song was not performed a cappella . Other singers have also made the song a parade number with which they can prove their speaking speed.

In a cabaret show in 2003 , Mark Nadler dismantled the song into its components and linked each of the fifty names with a cabaret text.

Composers

List of composers' names in Gershwin's spelling in the piano reduction and in their order in the song.

Malichevsky , Rubinstein , Arensky , Tchaikovsky , Sapelnikoff , Dmitrieff , Tscherepnin , Kryjanowsky , Godowsky , Arteiboucheff , Moniuszko , Akimenko , Solovieff , Prokofieff , Tiomkin , Korestchenko , Glinka , Winkler , Dmitry Bortniansky , Rebikoff , Ilyinsky , Medtner , Balakireff , Zolotareff , Kvoschinsky , Sokoloff , Kopyloff , Dukelsky , Klenofsky , Shostakovitsch , Borodine , Gliere , Nowakofski , Liadoff , Karganoff , Markievitch , Panchenko , Dargomyzski , Stcherbatcheff , Skriabine , Vasilenko , Stravinsky , Rimsky-Korsakoff , Mussorgsky , Gretchaninoff , Glazounoff , Caesar Cui , Kalinikoff , Rachmaninoff , Rumshinsky .

Recordings

literature

  • Lady in the Dark , piano-vocal score, Chappell Music Company / Hal Leonard HL00312238. Tchaikovsky on pp. 122–124
  • Bruce McClung: Lady in the Dark, Biography of a Musical . Oxford University Press, 2007 ISBN 0-19-512012-4
  • Ira Gershwin: Lyrics on Several Occasions . Knopf, New York 1959

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Lady in the Dark , piano-vocal score, pp. 122-124
  2. ↑ in the piano reduction: Kvoschinsky , in the CD booklet (1997) Rumshinsky
  3. ↑ The tempo designation Allegro barbaro looks like a bow to Weill's early work Allegro barbaro by Béla Bartók, composed thirty years earlier
  4. ↑ Rex Reed: Holy Stravinsky, The Russians Are Back! , In: The New York Observer , January 20, 2003
  5. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Some of the names that are currently not yet available in the German Wikipedia have no link in German transliterations.