3 Songs

Ya li v pole da ne travushka bïla? Op.47 No.7 (1880)

Net, tol'ko tot, kto znal Op.6 No.6 (1869)

Pesnya Zemfiri (1855–60)

The Tchaikovsky group seems to offer alternative answers to the dilemma so poignantly described in the first of them, Ya li v pole da ne travushka bïla? – a consciously Russian, almost even Mussorgskyan setting of a translation from a Ukranian original which makes particularly expressive use of a folk-derived inflections in the three-line refrain. One answer is to go on lamenting like Goethe’s Mignon, whose suffering (of a quite different order from that of the Ukranian girl) has inspired many versions of “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt” but few as moving or as accomplished as Tchaikovsky’s setting of Lev Mey’s Russian translation. The other alternative is to rebel like Pushkin’s Zemfira, the spirited Gypsy protagonist of the first of Tchaikovsky’s several Gypsy songs and one of the earliest of all his works.