The Genre of the Piano Prelude in Borys Liatoshynsky’s Creative Search: Performance Features of the Implementation of the Author’s Intention
Authors: Dongzhi Wang 
Published: December 2023

A number of discoveries in the field of musical imagery and genre compositional and linguistically expressive planes of the modern discourse of the twentieth century mark the work of Borys Liatoshynsky (1895–1968). In this context, a special place in Liatoshynsky’s legacy is occupied by the genre of piano prelude, which reflects the peculiarities of the composer’s style, the process of its expressive modernization and, at the same time, demonstrates its apparent continuity with the traditions of the past and the anticipation of the future. Outlining the author’s expressive palette in the piano preludes, this article explores the artistic tasks and the employment of the relevant expressive components during different periods of Liatoshynsky’s life, and examines aspects of interpretation of these piano works. The aim is to study the role of the genre of the piano prelude in Borys Liatoshynsky’s creative search and the issues of musical interpretation of these achievements.
Borys Liatoshynsky sporadically turned to the piano prelude at his career’s early and mature stages. The Prelude gis-moll (1914), the Mourning Prelude (1920), and the piano cycle Reflections (1925) reflect the artist’s active search for avant-garde expressive means. In the cycles of piano preludes created during the war (Op. 38, Op. 38 bis, Op. 44), the composer further enriches late Romantic stylistic attributes, polyphonizes the musical fabric along with the generous use and transformation of folklore intonation elements. In these exlorations, the composer comes to the programmatic nature of the cycle through the use of epigraphs (Three Shevchenko Preludes, Op. 38). In addition, at the level of the piano cycle, the composer builds a clear and coherent structure that is in tune with the development of the sonata cycle.
The performance of Borys Liatoshynsky’s preludes is characterized by epic expression, psychologism, and immersion in the emotional and the sensual. It is essential to show in detail the intonational, agogic, dynamic, and textural modifications of the musical fabric, which should be aimed at the architectonic integrity of the work’s construction, where development is achieved in stages.
The preludes by Borys Liatoshynsky’s (especially those of wartime) have enjoyed a fortunate fate in terms of performance. This is probably due to this music’s extraordinary emotional and spiritual intensity. The cycles attract performers with their diverse intonational specificity and exciting solutions in the field of piano technique. The performing style refers the listener to the late Romantic expressiveness, which resonates with the piano opuses of the outstanding composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The conceptual complexity of the idea opens up wide performing opportunities for the embodiment of an individual performane, which is associated with hypothetical, conditional, and source aspects of the composer’s idea. In interpreting Liatoshynsky’s prelude cycles, performers are guided by the author’s idea of symphonizing the piano genre, expanding the boundaries of the instrument’s sound, where largescale transformations of the primary core occur through symphonic means. Thus, the main performing difficulty lies in the embodiment of the idea’s symphonic nature through piano expressiveness