Song from the Bohohlasnyk «When the Soul is Separated from the Body»: Sources and Textual Aspects
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31318/2522-4190.2025.144.347573Keywords:
European and Ukrainian musical art of the 17th – 18th centuries, spiritual song, Eastern Christian hymnography, manuscript songbooks, Bohohlasnyk, musical source studies, musical textology, musical genreAbstract
Relevance of the study. Among the works of the Bohohlasnyk, one of the most popular is the song “When the soul is separated from the body”. It was known to Ukrainian believers even before the Bohohlasnyk was published, thanks to its widespread circulation in manuscript songbooks. Due to its theological, literary and musical value, the song was included in the first Ukrainian cantional, which is the Pochaiv edition, and thanks to this it became part of the national spiritual song canon.
The purpose of the article is to conduct a comprehensive study of the song “When the soul is separated from the body” in its historical path from the original source to the codified version in the Bohohlasnyk.
The methodological basis of the article was, in addition to source-meaning-textual methods, historical-cultural, analytical, comparative and heuristic methods, which made it possible to comprehensively consider different versions of the song “When the soul is separated from the body” and trace its textual and melodic transformations in historical dynamics.
The results and conclusions. The text of the song “When the soul is separated from the body” refers not only to Ukrainian baroque poetry with motifs of memento mori and vanitas vanitatum, but also to church hymnography. The incipit of the song is taken from the text of the canon included in the Order of the Departure of the Soul (Ἀκολουθία εἰς Πυχορραγοῦντα), and its content is concentrated on the key moments of the hymnographic primary source, at the same time the author strengthens the moral and instructive orientation. The melody of the song “When the soul is separated from the body” has Polish origins. The work is a textual and melodic contrafactum of the song “I am already leaving you, sweet child”, which is an adapted translation of the Polish planctus song “Już Cię żegnam, najmilszy Synu Jezusie”. When preparing the work for publication, the editors of the Bohohlasnyk made a literary revision of it, which did not affect the content and formal features, however, these changes a clear separation the pre-Bohohlasnyk and post-Bohohlasnyk versions of text. The themes of the songs “I am already leaving you, sweet child” and “When the soul is separated from the body” are not related, but since the theme of death is central in both works, it was this that inspired the author of the latter to turn to the translation of the Polish planctus as a textual and melodic model. The analysis of melodic variants from the mid-18th century manuscript and the Bohohlasnyk showed the kinship of the melodies of the songs “I am already leaving you, sweet child” and “When the soul is separated from the body”, and also revealed melodic transformations that arose in the process of existence, in which we observe a tendency to maximally assimilate the contrasting parts of the melody of the original. In the version of the song “When the soul is separated from the body” from the Bohohglasnyk, we see not only a smoothing of contrasts, but also its approximation to the sound of Ukrainian church monody, thereby more closely linking it with the text, which is based on Eastern Christian church hymnography
Downloads
References
Vozniak, M. (1922). Dva spivanyky polovyny і tretoi chetvertyny ХVIII v. [Two songbooks of the half and the third quarter of the 18th century]. In: Zapysky Naukovoho tovarystva imeni Shevchenka [Notes of the Shevchenko Scientific Society]. Lviv, Vol. 133, рр. 115–172 [in Ukrainian].
Vozniak, M. (1924). Z polia ukrainskoi dukhovnoi virshi [From the field of Ukrainian spiritual verse]. In: Analecta Ordinis S. Basilii Magni, Vol. 1. Zhovkva, рр. 177–232 [in Ukrainian].
Vozniak, M. (1913, 1914, 1925). Materiialy do іstorіі ukraіnskoі pіsnі i vіrshі. Teksty i zamitky [Materials for the history of Ukrainian song and verse. Texts and notes]. In: Ukraіnskoruskyі arkhіv [Ukrainian-Ruthenian Archive]. Lviv, Vol. IX, рр. 1–240; Vol. X, рр. 241–480; Vol. XI, рр. 481–589 [in Ukrainian].
Hrushevskyi, M. (1897). Spivanik z pochatku ХVIII v. [Songbook from the beginning of the 18th century]. In: Zapysky Naukovoho tovarystva imeni Shevchenka [Notes of the Shevchenko Scientific Society]. Lviv, Vol. XV, рр. 1–48; Vol. XVII, рр. 49–98 [in Ukrainian].
Zosim, O. L. (2009). Zakhidnoievropeiska dukhovna pisnia na skhidnoslovianskykh zemliakh u ХVII–ХІХ stolittiakh [Western European spiritual song in the Eastern Slavonic lands in the 17th–19th centuries]. Kyiv: DAKKKiM, 204 р. [in Ukrainian].
Zosim, O. L. (2004). Ukrainska dukhovna pisnia zakhidnoievropeiskoho pokhodzhennia v istorychnomu rozvytku (XVII–ХХ st.) [Ukrainian spiritual song of Western European origin in historical development (17th–20th centuries)]. Manuscript of dissertation work for gaining the degree of the Candidate of Art Criticism by specialty 17.00.03 Music Art. Kyiv, 207 р. [in Ukrainian].
Kudryk, B. (1995). Ohliad istorii ukrainskoi tserkovnoi muzyky [Overview of the history of Ukrainian church music]. Lviv, 127 р. (Series: History of Ukrainian Music. Issue 1. Research) [in Ukrainian].
Medvedyk, Yu. (2015). Ad Fontes: z istorii ukrainskoi muzyky XVII — poch. XX st.: vibrani statti, materialy, retsenzii [Ad Fontes: from the history of Ukrainian music of the 17th – early 20th centuries: selected articles, materials, reviews]. Lviv: LNU im. Ivana Franka, 617 р. [in Ukrainian].
Findeizen, N. (1929). Psalmy i kanty XVIII veka [Psalms and kants of the 18th century]. In: Ocherki po istorii muzyki v Rossii s drevneishikh vremen do kontsa XVIII veka [Essays on the history of music in Russia from ancient times to the end of the 18th century], Vol. 2: S nachala do kontsa XVIII veka [From the beginning to the end of the 18th century]. Issue 6. Moskva – Leningrad: Gosizdat, Muzsektor, рр. 186–206 [in Russian].
Franko, I. (1981). Kamianskyi bohohlasnyk 1734 r. [Kamianka's Bogoglasnyk of 1734]. In: Zibrannia tvoriv u 50-ty tomakh [Collected works in 50 volumes], Vol. 32. Kyiv : Nauk. dumka, рр. 336–346 [in Ukrainian].
Yavorskyi, Yu. (1909). Dva zamechatelnykh karpato-russkikh sbornika ХVIII-go v., prinadlezhashchikh Universitetu Sv. Vladimira. Opisanie rukopisei i teksty [Two remarkable Carpatho-Ruthenian collections of the 18th century, belonging to the University of St. Vladimir. Description of manuscripts and texts]. Kyiv: Tipografiia Imperatorskogo Universiteta Sv. Vladimira Akts. O-va pech. i izdat. dela N. T. Korchak-Novitskogo, 95 р. [in Russian].
Yavorskyi, Yu. (1934). Materialy dlia istorii starinnoi pesennoi literatury v Podkarpatskoi Rusi [Materials for the history of ancient song literature in Subcarpathian Rus]. Praha, 345 р. [in Russian].
Bogoglasnik Pěsni blagogovějnyia (1790/1791): Eine Sammlung geistlicher Lieder aus der Ukraine: Facsimilie und Darstellung: in 2 Bd. (2016). Köln; Weimar; Wien: Böhlau. Bd. 2: Jurij Medvedyk. Der Bohohlasnyk von Počajiv: das erste gedruckte ukrainische Liederbuch mit geistlichen Liedern aus dem 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. VIII, 431 S. (Bausteine zur slawischen Philologie und Kulturgeschichte. Neue Folge: Reihe B: Editionen; Bd. 30, 2) [in German, Ukrainian].
Stern, D. H. (Ed.). (2000). Die Liederhandschrift F 19-233 (15) der Bibliothek der Litauischen Akademie der Wissenschaften / Eine kommentierte Edition von Dieter Hubert Stern. Köln; Weimar; Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 767 S. (Bausteine zur slawischen Philologie und Kulturgeschichte. Neue Folge: Reihe B: Editionen; Bd. 16) [in German].
Goar, J. (Ed.). (1730). Euchologion sive Rituale Graecorum. Opera R. P. Jacobi Goar, Parisini, Ordinis FF. Prædicatorum, S. Theologiæ Lectoris Editio secunda. Venetiis: Ex Typographia Bartholomei Javarina. 735 p. [in Greek and Latin].
Dolskaya, O. (Ed.). (1996). Spiritual Songs in Seventeenth-Century Russia. Edition of the MS 1938 from Muzejnoe Sobranie of the State Historical Muzeum of Moscow (GIM). Köln; Weimar; Wien: Böhlau Verlag, XLIX, 370 S. (Bausteine zur Slavischen Philologie und Kulturgeschichte: Reihe B, Editionen; Bd. 4) [in English].
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Our journal abides by the CREATIVE COMMONS copyright rights and permissions for open access journals.
Authors, who are published in this journal, agree to the following conditions:
The authors reserve the right to authorship of the work and pass the first publication right of this work to the journal under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution License, which allows others to freely distribute the published research with the obligatory reference to the authors of the original work and the first publication of the work in this journal.
The authors have the right to conclude separate supplement agreements that relate to non-exclusive work distribution in the form in which it has been published by the journal (for example, to upload the work to the online storage of the journal or publish it as part of a monograph), provided that the reference to the first publication of the work in this journal is included.
