3 Songs for Children from Op.54 (1883)

A Legend

Lullaby in a Storm

The Cuckoo

Stimulated perhaps by Tchaikovsky’s A Little Children’s Song published in the periodical Recreation for Children in 1881, Alexei Pleshcheyev - two of whose poems, O my Friend and O Sing that Song, Tchaikovsky had already set to music - sent the composer a collection of his verse for children with the inscription, “a mark of affection and gratitude for his beautiful music to my poor words.” Flattery seems to have got him where he wanted. “I have set about composing children’s songs and am writing one regularly every day,” Tchaikovsky wrote to his brother Modest in 1883. “It is very light and pleasant labour, for as my text I am taking Pleshcheyev ’s The Snowdrop, where there are many delightful things.”

Of the fourteen Pleshcheyev settings in the Sixteen Songs for Children Op.54, the most successful - at least in the sense that it is the most widespread - is A Legend, which the composer arranged for voice and orchestra in 1884 and for unaccompanied chorus five years later (and which Arensky drew on for his memorial Variations on a Theme of Tchaikovsky in 1894). There is no question here, or in any of the other Songs for Children, of an overelaborate piano part. That of Lullaby in a Storm is a sonorously sympathetic if slightly lugubrious accompaniment to its tenderly affectionate melodic line (of which Stravinsky was to make such artful use in his Baiser de la fée ballet) while the scoring of The Cuckoo is as economical as it is witty.