O. Begicheva, T. Andrushchack

Forgotten ballad story of the american romanticism

At the end of the 19th century, there was a steady artistic tendency in Ro-manticism associated with the reactualization of the «Scandinavian text». In line with the passion for the images of the wild North appears a ballad «Skeleton in Armor» by an American poet G. Longfello. Received popularity and many musical incarnations during the author’s lifetime, it is, however, almost unknown in Russia. By the middle of the 19th century, two typological varieties of the ballad genre – horror and national-historical – had established themselves in European artistic culture. The purpose of the work is to consider the principles of combining the two varieties of ballad in the literary source of the «Skeleton in Armor» and its musical embodiment in the choral ballad of an American composer A. Foot. Among the main objectives of the article is analysis of poetry and musical works, based on the methodology of genre analysis of romantic ballad outlined in the works by O. Begicheva. An equally important condition for establishing the typological variety of a romantic ballad is the gravitation towards an aesthet-ic paradigm of the literary kind. The methodology of M. Mikhailov is used to solve this issue. After the undertaken analysis it becomes obvious that all three literary kinds – epic, dramatic and lyric poetry – take place in «Skeleton...» by G. Longfello. In the conclusions it is noted that parallel coexistence in the one text of a horror and national-historical ballad allows to maintain balance, in which the uniqueness of poetic opus is seen. G. Longfello’s musical «reading» of «Skeleton in Armor» gravitates to-wards epic poetry. Coming closer to the national-historical variety of the genre, the choir ballad does not reach a sense depth in the embodiment of the main in-tonation of Nordic sublime, which comes from the Nordic spirit-Logos. Never-theless, it merits attention as an opus of «second-line», expanding the notion not only of the ballad genre in music, but also of American romanticism.

Key words

American romanticism, ballad of horror, ballad of national-historical, G. W. Longfellow, A. W. Foot, «Skeleton in Armor».

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