Petro Nischynskyy (1832-1896) - Ukrainian composer

[Christopher]

Here's a romantic-era Ukrainian composer I came across today while "youtubing":

Petro Ivanovych Nishchynsky (1832–1896)

http://youtu.be/oaESvZ9TNUg - Two Fragments from "Vechornytsi" (A Village Party, composed 1875 as incidental music to Taras Shevchenko's play "Nazar Stodolya") - Aria and overture

Complete incidental music to "Vechornytsi" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJZi__oquBU and also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfyaifgeFaY

Song - "The Chained Grey Cuckoo" ("Zakuvala ta siva zozulya") - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc4SB5dkjuk   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFL93JpJElQ   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcfkU2u_j70    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyulKzv3qxw  


His wikipedia entries in Ukrainian, Russian and English read as follows:

Petro Ivanovich Nischynskyy (literary pseudonym Peter Baida, born 9 (21) September 1832l died 4 (16) March 1896) - a famous Ukrainian composer and poet and translator.

Born in the village Nemenka (now Illinetskyi region Vinnytsia region). He studied at the Kiev-Sofia (1842) and Kiev-Podolsky (1844-1845) religious seminaries. From 1850 – he was a singer in a church choir in Athens. In 1856 graduated from the University of Athens (philosophical and theological faculty), and later got a Masters degree. After returning home in 1857 he taught Russian and Greek in schools in St. Petersburg (1857-60), Odessa (1860), Ananyiv (1855, now Odessa region) and Berdyansk (1888-90).

He collected and arranged Ukrainian folk songs ("Baida" "Oh, the Noise, the Mother, the Alarm"), wrote music, organized music groups and supervised them. In 1875 Nischynskyy wrote the musical picture "Vechornytsi" (A Village Party) as incidental music to the play "Nazar Stodolya" by Shevchenko (given its first performance that year by the artistic circle of Mark Kropyvnytsky in Elisavetgrad). "Vechornytsi" contains the well-known male chorus "The Chained Grey Cuckoo".  Nischynskyy maintained contacts with well-known Ukrainian cultural and public figures such as the composer Mykola Lysenko, the writer and dramatist Kropyvnytsky, the dramatic writer Ivan Karpenko-Karim, the actor and director Panas Saksahanskoho , the revolutionary Andrei Zhelyabov, and others. From 1880 he lived in the village of Voroshylivtsi (now Tyvrovsky region in Vinnytsia oblast).

Nischynskyy translated into Ukrainian works of ancient classics ("Antigone" by Sophocles, 1883, "Odyssey" by Homer, 1889 - 1892, 6 songs from "The Iliad" by Homer, 1902-03), and translated the Ukrainian work "The Tale of Igor's Campaign" (about Prince Igor) into Greek in 1881. He was the author of a textbook on Greek grammar and research on Greek music. For his translation of "The Odyssey" into Ukrainian, which was banned by the censor, he was accused of "ignorance of the Greek language" and moved to Berdyansk For his publication of "The Odyssey" in Lviv (which at the time was in Austria-Hungary) he was fired.

His main musical compositions were the sung epic poems "the Cossack Sophron"; "About Baida"; and "Vechornytsi" (for solo, choir and orchestra), from the unfinished opera "Nazar Stodolya."