Sonatas of K. Shymanovskyi in Imitation of Biedermeier's Characteristics of Sonats of F. Chopin
Authors: Zhu Ziyi 
Published: October 2024

The purpose of the work is to reveal the continuity of features of F. Chopin's Biedermeier Sonatas in the compositions of the same genre by K. Shymanovskyi, who in the first half of the 20th century became the same focus of the style of national music as it was a century earlier with regard to the works of F. Chopin. At the same time, the Polish national meaning of F. Chopin's music was formed against the background of the importance of kinship with Rococo in the music of the salon "noble Biedermeier" of the Restoration era, while the flowering of K. Shymanovskyi took place in Ukraine and Odesa based on the achievements of aristocratic and artistic salon art. The salon base brought together the work of Polish and Ukrainian-Polish composers, especially since "Chopinism" became a stable feature of Ukrainian piano creativity in contact with the traditions of the Polish-Ukrainian salon of the 19th century. The methodological basis of the study is the intonation approach in accepting the genetic unity of musical and speech principles in the concepts of B. Asafiev and B. Yavorskyi, as we have in the works of D. Androsova, O. Markova, I. Podobas, L. Stepanova, L. Shevchenko, with emphasis on the hermeneutic perspective of this approach. Moreover, highlighted are the biographical-descriptive methods, with an emphasis on its intellectual-biographical aspect (see generalisation in the work of V. Shulhina and O. Yakovlev), analytical-structural methods with a focus on the musicological specificity of the presentation of compositions, cross-species stylistic comparative. The scientific novelty of the research is determined by the independent direction of the Biedermeierian imitation, firstly, in the "large" forms, initiated by Chopin, and, secondly, on the specifics of the Biedermeierian "trace" in the modernist palette of symbolism, noted as a whole as the continuity of the salon setting in the culture of the first half of the 19th century on the verge of the 19th and 20th centuries. Conclusions. K. Shymanovskyi's awareness of the succession from Chopin, despite his concern for the modernisation of national thinking, stimulated the features of genre continuity from the Polish genius for the sake of presenting modernised findings in the same field. The eclecticism of citation in the Biedermeier method, most openly presented in the First Sonata by F. Chopin, has analogies in the emphasised reliance on M. Reger in the First Sonata by K. Shymanovskyi, a certain kinship of the methods of expression of Chopin's Second and Third Sonatas has analogies in the stylistic proximity of the Second and Third Sonatas Shymanovskyi, in which expressive "Scriabinisms" are emphasised, indicative of the Ukrainian stylistic palette of the 1910s – 1920s. At the same time, Biedermeier's salon manner of playing Chopin himself "facilitated" the feeling of stylistic quotations from L. Beethoven and J. S. Bach, while the performance of Shymanovskyi's Sonatas on "tight" instruments contributed to the "easiness" of textural embodiment, compared to the quasi-Listian sonata Scriabin's exposition.