Mykola Leontovych, born in Vinnytsia in 1877, picked up where his teacher left off by setting a cappella folk songs and drawing from national forms of poetry and prose. It was a student of Lysenko’s, however, who made the biggest impression in Kyiv’s choral scene. More recently, Putin has outright denied the existence of a unique Ukrainian culture. Under the Czar, and then later the Soviet regime, Ukraine’s robust and diverse musical traditions - including Cossack songs and Romani music - were heavily regulated (and, at times, censored entirely) by the authorities. Yet for some Ukrainians, these discussions miss the point.Īs one Ukrainian online petition argued, the history of composers like Shostakovich, who was censured by the Soviet musical apparatus, has long overshadowed parallel - and often more violent - repressions against Ukrainian composers. Since the invasion began, the question of whether to perform music by Russian composers in the shadow of Putin’s war has been debated, with arguments both in favor of and against cancellations.
To support his dubious claims, Putin pointed to instances of Western European and American orchestras dropping performances of works by Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff - even though many of these composers are hardly wanting for attention on the world’s biggest stages. Laying the blame on an encroachment of so-called cancel culture and sanctions imposed in response to the war, he claimed that Western countries were “attempting to erase a thousand years of culture” in Russia.
In late March, a month after his invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, decried what he called “the West’s Russophobia.”