Ukrainian folklorist, choir conductor, teacher. He graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory (1886), where he later taught music theory and choral singing.
He published the collection "Collection of Ukrainian folk songs" (1870) and "Sixteen folk Ukrainian tunes" (1872). Author of textbooks on music theory and choral singing. Coll. R. was used by P. Tchaikovsky, choosing from them melodies for 2 symphonies, 2 piano concerts and the opera "Mazepa".
In the mid-1890s, he lost his eyesight, settled in a family estate near Starodub in Chernihiv province, and maintained a music and art school with his own funds.
Pedigree
The Rubtsiv family belongs to the most famous Cossack families of the Starodub region. Rutsi are known in the history of the region since the 16th century. During the days of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Starodub nobleman Ilko Rubets owned the villages of Istobka, Bobka, Chornooka and Shamivka on the territory of the future Topal hundred of the Starodub regiment, and in the second half of the 17th century. Cossack elder Mykhailo Rubets founded the village of Lakomu Buda on the territory of the modern Klimiv district, "on a site in the soil of Mykulytskyi". Among Oleksandr Rubets' ancestors were Starodub colonels, and even the Ukrainian Hetman Pavlo Polubotok was his relative. The Rubtsivka surname was so well known in Starodub region that there was even a separate district in the city of Starodub - Rubtsivka, which was located behind the city dam.
Biography
Childhood and youth
Oleksandr Rubets was born on October 13, 1837 in the city of Chuguyev, Kharkiv province, where his father was serving at that time. Little Sashko's nanny was a peasant woman from Starodubshchyna, from whom the future Ukrainian composer heard many folk songs, legends and stories of his native land in his childhood. Having grown up a little, the boy Oleksandr was already listening with enthusiasm to the stories of his father and mother, from whom he learned about the heroic fate of his own ancestors. Bandurists and lyre players were frequent guests in Rubtsy's house, whose songs left an indelible mark on the little boy's soul. When he becomes an adult, Oleksandr Rubets will learn to play the bandura himself, and he will publish the legends and fairy tales that his old nanny once told him in a separate book in Starodub.
Oleksandr Rubets studies in Kharkiv and Kyiv gymnasiums. After the death of the father in 1854, the Rubtsi family returned to live in their native Starodubshchyna, in the village of Iskrivka in the Starodub district. Since then, wherever Alexander Rubets has been, he always returns to his native land, he, like his older contemporary, Oleksiy Tolstoy, forever falls in love with Starodubshchyna, and considers it his real homeland. In 1858, Rubets began studying at the Nizhyn Lyceum, but as he later recalled: "I was lazy, I was more engaged in singing, I recorded Ukrainian songs, as a result of which I graduated from the lyceum with the rank of XIV class" (that is, the lowest). From that time on, the Ukrainian song became Oleksandr's main love. He enters the St. Petersburg Conservatory, and during the holidays he goes on trips to Ukrainian lands, collecting and processing folk songs. Almost all the overtures that Oleksandr Rubets wrote during his lifetime were, to a large extent, masterful arrangements of Ukrainian folk songs. In the summer of 1868, Rubets collected Ukrainian songs in the Kuban, publishing the article "A few words about Little Russian folk songs" in the almanac "Musical Season" upon his return. In the summer of the following year, Rubets collected Ukrainian songs in central Ukraine, and in 1870 he set Taras Shevchenko's wonderful poetry "My thoughts, my thoughts" to music and published the "Collection of Ukrainian Folk Songs".
At the St. Petersburg Conservatory
Cossack dismissed from Rubets, in Repin's painting "Zaporozhians writing a letter to the Turkish Sultan".
After graduating from the conservatory in 1866, Rubets remained there as a teacher of elementary theory and solfeggio. The textbooks that Rubets wrote for teaching these disciplines were highly respected by the professors of the St. Petersburg Conservatory even in Soviet times, and Rubets himself became a professor at the conservatory in 1879. Ukrainian musical culture always remains in a prominent place for Oleksandr Rubets. He publishes new collections "Two Hundred Little Russian Songs" and "216 Ukrainian Folk Chants", "Collection of Folk Dances (Cossacks)". In 1874, Oleksandr Rubets was officially sent by the conservatory to collect Ukrainian folk songs in the Black Sea region and the southern provinces of Russia. Rubets' authority in the field of Ukrainian music is so great that the most famous Russian composers consult him when creating their works from Ukrainian life. So Rubets helps Pyotr Tchaikovsky in the creation of the operas "Mazepa" and "Cherevychki", and Rymsky-Korsakov in his work on the opera "May Night". Absorption into the world of Mykola Gogol during this work led to Oleksandr Rubets writing the musical "Hymn to Gogol" for the writer's anniversary.
But every year, more and more Oleksandr Rubts wants to leave imperial Petersburg and settle forever in his native Starodubshchyna, among his compatriots. Oleksandr Rubets spends more and more time in his native Starodub, which he does not forgetin never, but constantly visited all his life. In 1878, the artist Ilya Repin, who at that time was going to work on the painting "Zaporozhians writing a letter to the Turkish Sultan" came to Rubets twice to visit Starodub. The colorful Cossack figure of Oleksandr Rubets captivates the artist so much that the Old Dub composer becomes the prototype of one of the heroes of this picture.
Oleksandr Rubets was very worried about the fate of his native city - once, during the Hetmanship, a flourishing Starodub, and now a neglected provincial corner of the empire. Rubets is making a lot of efforts to revive the city. With its help, the first boulevard is being built in Starodub, where trees are planted, which will soon turn this boulevard into a luxurious park, which grateful Starodub residents will informally call "Rubets Park". Oleksandr Rubets also travels around Starodub villages, looking for talented young men and women with a musical ear, and sends them to study in St. Petersburg at his own expense. Among the students of Rubets from Starodub Oblast, there will be later famous singers - Petro Levando and Kostyantyn Isachenko (future professor of the Leningrad Conservatory, originally from the village of Lomakivtsi, Starodub Oblast).
Return to the native Starodubshchyna
In 1895, Oleksandr Rubets was seriously ill with cataracts. After a failed operation, he will be permanently blind. But severe misfortune will not break Rubets. He decides to permanently move to Starodub and devote the last years of his life to his native city. In St. Petersburg, he left about 6,000 records of unpublished folk songs to the director of the Public Library, V. V. Stasova. When, after some time, Rubets demanded that these records be returned to him, he was told that they were not included in the library. For Rubets, this was terrible news, and may have brought his death closer. Having a good pension, Rubets spends almost all of it on rebuilding his native Starodub. Not every healthy person could do as much as this "big blind man". In his house, he arranged public concerts and classes of the folk choir, which he created, and in the wing there were music and drawing schools and tailoring and sewing courses. In the village of Budi Koretskyi, where Rubets rests every summer, a village school is being built at his expense, and the first cinema is being built in Starodub. The Starodub teacher M. F. Sereda wrote down from his words the Starodub folk legends and tales that he had heard as a child from his nanny and collected around the Starodub region later, and in 1911, two years before his death, he published these records in Starodub as a separate book "Tales , legends and tales of Starodub's hoary antiquity". During his travels in Starodubshchyna, Oleksandr Rubets collected not only Ukrainian songs and stories. He also recorded the songs of Belarusian immigrants, and in the village of Lytovska, where the descendants of ethnic Lithuanians who came here since the time of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania lived, he recorded a local "chivalric" legend, which tells about the "Lithuanian queen Jadwiga, princess Beruta, prince Syanchil and the knight Vrat-Smeladovych from Vilnius".
On January 15, 1908, Oleksandr Rubets opened a congress of the heirs of Hetman of Ukraine Pavlo Polubotka in Starodub, to which he himself belonged, and which was attended by 350 Hetman's descendants. This congress discussed the issue of the return from England of the hetman's treasures, which were allegedly handed over by his sons in 1720, during Peter I's persecution of their father, for safekeeping in the bank of the East India Company. (See Gold Polubotka).
Death and posthumous memory
Rubets memorial in the old oak park, which he once planted.
Oleksandr Rubets died on May 11, 1913, and was buried in the cemetery of the Starodub Voznesensk church. Old oak residents gratefully remembered their great compatriot, especially for the luxurious Rubtsia Park, which he planted, and which became a favorite place for walks and entertainment of the city's residents. But the Russian Bolsheviks, having seized power in Starodub region, did everything possible to erase from the memory of the people of Starodub any mention of the great Ukrainian. "Rubets Park" has now become "Schors Park", and the street where Rubets lived, and where, albeit in a dilapidated state, his house has been preserved, is now named after the infamous Moisei Urytskyi, head of the Petrograd Cheka, who never visited Starodub region. Even after the Second World War, the Ascension Church was destroyed by the Soviet authorities, and together with it, the grave of Oleksandr Rubets was trampled into the asphalt, and a magnificent monument was stolen from it. Only with the beginning of Perestroika in the USSR did the memory of Rubets begin to recover. They returned the name of Rubets to the music school in Starodub (because he founded it). They made a symbolic grave in Shchorsa Park - because the real one was never found. But the Starodub local historian and popularizer of the Rubets name, the author of the book "A Heart Devoted to People: The Story of O. I. Rubets", Georgy Metelsky wrote about this grave:
" "Dust is blown over her, raised by the wind, and a few pitiful flowers are swaying. No one takes care of them, no one wipes the dust from the monument to this great worker. How sad it is, my dear compatriots...". »
