Yaroslav Dmytrovych Yaroslavenko (Vintskovskyi) (30 March 1880, Drohobych - 26 June 1958, Lviv) was a Ukrainian composer and conductor, railway engineer by profession.
Biography
Youth and education
Ukrainian composer, choral conductor, and public figure Yaroslav Yaroslavenko (real name Vintskovskyi) was born on 30 March 1880 in Drohobych. His father, a professor at the Lviv Gymnasium, Ukrainian writer and public figure Dmytro Vintskovskyi, was born in Ternopil region. In one of his letters, Ivan Franko mentioned him as one of the comrades who helped him to get involved in literary activity. Dmytro Vintskovskyi had a good voice and played the violin. The famous composer Yaroslav Lopatynskyi studied with him. Yaroslav's mother, Anna Vysoczanska, who came from Drohobych, played the piano and zither. The family often organised home concerts, where not only adults but also children enjoyed playing. In addition to Yaroslav, the Wintskowskis had daughters, Slawomira and Mariia, and sons, Rostyslav and Yurii.
Yaroslav was a naturally gifted child - he had perfect hearing and an excellent memory. While studying at a Ukrainian school in Lviv (1886), Yaroslav mastered such musical disciplines as counterpoint and music theory, participated in a choir, attended concerts and performances at the opera house. After graduating from the gymnasium, Yaroslavenko became a free student at the Polish Conservatory (1898-1900). He studied music in the class of musical and theoretical disciplines taught by Professor Franciszek Solomkowski and in the composition class of the famous Polish composer Stanisław Neviadomski.
From 1892, the future composer took music lessons from Professor Marian Pignia, where he studied piano, choral and vocal singing techniques. At the same time, he studied at a gymnasium. It is known that in 1892, a student of the third grade of a German gymnasium, Yaroslav Wintskowski received 120 rynski from the fund. This fund provided it only to gifted children.
In the autumn of 1898, Yaroslav entered the engineering department of the Lviv Higher Polytechnic School, where he successfully studied and in 1904 received a diploma in railway engineering. At the same time, Yaroslavenko studied at the Lviv Conservatory (1898-1900). In 1905-1918, he worked as an engineer and even had his own bureau "Building Materials".
In 1894, the Sokil sports society was founded in Galicia. On 27 October 1898, Yaroslav Wintskowski joined this society. In 1900, together with his teacher H. Vretsiona, he became a member of the society's senior officers. As a scribe of the Sokol, the composer kept careful records of the meetings of the society's yeomanry, even registering lateness. It is known that he introduced Ukrainian sentiments among the officers, for example, he began to write minutes without the Russian "y" and hard signs. He was also a teacher at an exercise school where he taught children sports games. Among his students at this school in 1900 were, among others, the children of Ivan Franko - Taras, Petro, and Andrii.
At the same time, Yaroslavenko became a member of the Kotliarevsky Russian-Ukrainian Drama Society. At the same time, F. Kolesa, M. Korduba, I. Vakhnianyn, and S. Shukhevych joined the society.
In the spring of 1900, Yaroslavenko was also the secretary of the student society "Osnova", which, among other demands, demanded that subjects be taught in Ukrainian at the institute.
In 1903, Yaroslav Vintskovskyi was elected chairman of the Sokol flag commission, which was responsible for creating the society's flag. At the same time, Yaroslavenko began his career as a composer and poet. When the Sokol board called on Ukrainian composers to write the Sokol March, Yaroslavenko, who was then leading the Sokol choir, also responded to this call.
Yaroslav Yaroslavenko's song "Falcons, Falcons, Line Up" ("Sokilskyi March") from the 1916 Vienna edition.
On 6 April 1902, the "March of the Falcons" was performed for the first time at the Falconry festival, and the choir sang the "Falconry Hymn", the music to the words of V. Korzhenko was written by Yaroslav Yaroslavenko, who at that time was still signing his own name, Vintskovskyi. "The March of the Falcons," which Yaroslavenko composed to his own patriotic poems, was arranged for a mixed choir.
In 1905, Yaroslavenko was the first to make piano and orchestral transcriptions, as well as his own choral interpretation of the Ukrainian anthem "Ukraine has not yet died!". In the same year, together with Anatoliy Vakhnyanyn and Filaret Kolesa, he organised and headed the specialised music publishing house Torban, which lasted until 1944 and published about 350 pieces of music. In 1927, Torban published a collection of Sich Riflemen songs. Yaroslavenko became friends with the director of the Echo Choir, Polish composer Jan Hal (1856-1912). He took composition and harmony lessons from him.
On 1 March 1905, J. Wintskowski was hired as a railway employee in Brody. In 1910, he worked in Drohobych, and from September 1911 until the occupation of Lviv by the Russian army (1914), he was the head of the bridge group in the Lviv railway administration (he was not drafted into the army because he had injured his right leg before the war; he limped on it for the rest of his life). At the same time, he was engaged in composing and conducting work: he directed the choir of the Ukrainian theatre and worked at the Lviv "Boyan"
From 1914 to 1918, Wintskowski worked as a junior engineer in the technical department of the railway, which means that he was in the service of the tsarist authorities in Galicia. Later he continued to serve under the Central Rada.
In 1918, Yaroslav married Yevheniia Antonovych, a widow 10 years his senior. Shortly after the marriage, J. Wintskowski founded his "Technical Office for Trade and Industry", which installed and equipped various factories, sawmills, brickyards, and sold and bought their products. Yaroslavenko also tried teaching. In 1919, he taught classes in technical rice farming (drawing) at a trade school on Korniaktiv Street. There he taught the structure of machines. Yaroslavenko did not abandon his social and musical activities. He corresponded with the composer D. Sichynskyi, supported him morally and financially, and after his death in 1909, he collected and handed over his handwritten works to the National Academy of Sciences, adding 38 letters of their correspondence.
In 1911, Yaroslavenko composed music for the Plast anthem "The Colour of Ukraine and Beauty", the author of the text of which was O. Tysovskyi, and in 1923, at the request of the leaders of the Transcarpathian Plast, the song "Hey, Plast, Hey, Young Men", the lyrics of which were written by Spyridon Cherkasenko, which is still commonly known in the Plast community as the "anthem of the Transcarpathian Plast". He set to music the poem by Ivan Franko "The Sun is Circling the Sky", and this song became a sports anthem in Galicia. He also composed arrangements of rifle songs for piano, marches for the Sich and Sokoliv for brass band. In 1918, when the First Cossack Rifle Division of the Sirozhupanniks was being formed at the call of the UPR Military Ministry, Yaroslavenko sent several marches of his own composition to their orchestra.
Y. Vintskovskyi was an active member of the Sich movement. Among other things, he organised the production and distribution of Sich paraphernalia, as well as Sich and riflemen uniforms. This was evidenced by numerous commendations from the Main Sich Committee and K. Trilliovskyi personally. Over the years, Yaroslavenko directed the choirs of the Sokil and Osnova societies, the Ukrainian choirs Boyan and Zorya, and the Polish choirs Echo and Lutnia.
On 1 August 1927, he got a job as a railway official. At the same time, he led the brass band of Lviv tram drivers. On 28 February 1935, he was arrested and sentenced by the Polish authorities to a 2-week detention for publishing revolutionary songs. After Yaroslavenko's dismissal from the railway service, publishing became the only source of income for the family. Their house at 78 Sofiia Street became the editorial office and the main warehouse of the Torban, from where publications were sent to customers.
When Soviet rule came to Western Ukraine in 1939, the Torban publishing house was liquidated, and Yaroslavenko effectively became an unemployed composer with no means of support. On 18 March 1941, he was hired as a musicologist at the Lviv Scientific Library of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR.
After the occupation of Lviv by the Germans, Yaroslavenko made attempts to restore his publishing house. As an experienced railway worker, the Germans mobilised the composer in 1941 as part of the railway's auxiliary technical staff, and 2 years later he was appointed an engineer. In 1944 he was forced to leave for Krakow, and only a year later the couple returned to Lviv.
From September 1945 to April 1948, Yaroslavenko worked as the head of the music department of the Lviv Library of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, which was headed by V. Shchurat.
After his dismissal from his job at the library, the composer found himself in severe financial difficulties. He periodically sent his works for publication to Kyiv and Moscow music publishers, but all these proposals were rejected under various pretexts. In 1948, Yaroslavenko asked the Union of Composers to accept him as a member of the Music Fund. In his application, he stated that over 50 years of work, he had published more than 270 of his own compositions, and there were 135 unpublished ones.
On 2 October 1948, the 68-year-old composer was hired as a choral singing teacher at the Lviv School for Blind Children, where he worked until 1951.
In 1950, G. Shyrma, the artistic director of the Belarusian Folk Choir in Hrodna, established close and warm ties with him. Shyrma sent Yaroslavenko texts of Belarusian folk, partisan and collective farm songs for arrangement. In total, by the spring of 1953, the composer had arranged 26 Belarusian songs for mixed choir, 3 for male choir, and 3 for solo performance. Yaroslavenko not only arranged Belarusian songs, but also distributed them. Several of them were adopted by the Polish radio in Wroclaw, the Hutsul Song and Dance Ensemble in Stanislaviv, and some Moscow singers who visited Lviv on tour.
In March 1952, Yaroslavenko sent 15 arrangements of Belarusian folk songs for mixed choir to the Moscow publishing house Muzgiz, but was rejected. The same fate awaited a collection of 11 of his arrangements of Polish folk songs. In 1956, this publishing house refused to publish his choruses to the words of I. Franko.
Finally, in 1953, a collection of 18 Ukrainian household and lyrical songs arranged by Yaroslavenko was published in Kyiv. They were selected from 50 songs he had sent. The collection had a print run of only 200 copies and quickly sold out across Ukraine. At the beginning of 1954, Yaroslavenko asked for another 3,000 copies to be printed, as he was interested in Minsk, Warsaw, Krakow, Bratislava, Sofia, and Prague. The publishers at Mystetstvo kept their word: in October 1955, the collection was reprinted in Kyiv with 7 new songs. However, Yaroslavenko's attempts to republish collections of Ukrainian dances (his own, Lopatinsky's, and Sichynsky's) failed. Until the end of his life, he did not receive a positive response to his requests, which he had been making since 1946.
On 26 June 1958, the life of 77-year-old Yaroslav Yaroslavenko ended. His family buried him next to his wife at the Lychakiv Cemetery.
Works by Yaroslav Yaroslavenko
The cover of the collection of works by Yaroslav Yaroslavenko, published in Lviv around 1920-1923.
Yaroslav Yaroslavenko's creative work includes the opera The Witch (1922) ("In the Spell of Love") based on a libretto by S. Cherkasenko (based on the story by N. Hohol "The Lost Letter"), which premiered on 27 May 1922, "The Girl with the Lily", "Over the Dnipro" (dedicated to his wife Yevheniia), operettas "Women's Rebellion", "In a Strange Skin" (libretto by Y. Shkrumeliak), farce "Vlodus", music for the performance based on the story by S. Cherkasenko "Forest Magic", cantata "Grow, Vine, Greyhound" (based on the words of Ivan Franko). Franko), solos, choral works, arrangements of folk songs, marches for the Sich and Sokol for military brass bands, music for the anthems of the Ukrainian Sokol and Plast, arrangements of riflemen's songs for piano, and Divine Liturgies.
Honouring him
A street in Lviv, where the composer lived, was named after Yaroslavenko. In 1982, the composer's house (30 Yaroslavenko St.) was added to the list of historical monuments of the city by the decision of the Lviv Regional Executive Committee. However, on 2 September 2008, the Lviv City Council adopted a decision "On the design by citizen Melnyk of an apartment building with built-in office space and car parks at 30 Yaroslavenko Street with the demolition of the house", after which the monument was destroyed by its new owner, Rostyslav Melnyk, on 10 September 2008. The destruction of the monument caused outrage among the Lviv community, but only 5 years after the destruction, on 13 February 2014, the Sykhiv District Court of Lviv ordered the owner to rebuild the monument in accordance with the design and estimate documentation for the restoration of the destroyed building.
