Na kholmakh Grouzi i(The Hills of Georgia) Op.3 No. 4 (1866)

Ne veter, veya s vïsotï (It's not the breezes in their flight ) Op. 43, No. 2 (1897)

Zvonche zhavoronka pen′ye (Hear the skylark sweetly sing) Op 43 No. 1 (1897)

Rimsky-Korsakov attached relatively little importance to song-writing. Between his stage works and large-scale orchestral pieces, however, he did find time to produce perhaps as many as 80 songs, often in isolated bursts of enthusiasm and usually with no long-term strategy. The nearest he came to adopting a consistent approach to the art was in the late 1890s when, having written no songs for 14 years, he turned to the poems of Aleksey Tolstoy.    As he recalled in his memoirs, “I wrote four songs and felt that I was composing them differently from before. The melody, following the turns of the text, poured out from me in a purely vocal form… whereas formerly, with few exceptions, the melody was conceived as it were instrumentally, apart from the text and harmonising only with its general content.”

The Hills of Georgia, written 30 years before that revelation, must be one of the “few exceptions.” Certainly, there is nothing instrumental about the way the vocal line so melodiously and so expressively takes shape in accordance with the inflections of Pushkin’s verse. The two other songs in this group are among the 20 he wrote in 1897 immediately after the Tolstoy epiphany. They both come from a short cycle called Vesnoy (in Spring) which includes settings of three poems by Tolstoy and one by Afanasy Fet. Simply accompanied by piano figuration derived perhaps from Tolstoy’s allusion to the lyre, the tenderly lyrical outer sections of It's not the breezes in their flight are offset by an agitated middle section. Hear the skylark sweetly sing, the opening song in the cycle, is an ecstatically inspired greeting to Spring.