Japan, Cone and the forgotten ballet, miraculously discovered on the Internet

TAKASAKI. At a concert in a special city in Japan, fragments of the forgotten ballet of George Konyus were demonstrated.

George Konyus is a name known to professionals, but not to the general public. Although it is enough to list the names of his students to assess the contribution of this teacher, music theorist and composer to the history of Russian culture. The extensive list includes Scriabin, Glier, Medtner, Goldenweiser, Blanter. A fellow student of Georgy Eduardovich at the Moscow Conservatory was Sergei Rachmaninov, where they both studied composition under the guidance of Anton Arensky. His brother Julius, a composer and violin virtuoso, was a student of Tchaikovsky, a friend of Rachmaninov and Metner. The younger brother Leo is a teacher, pianist, author of the textbook Fundamentals of Piano Technique (“Fundamentals of Piano Technique”).

The influence of the analytical theory of metrotectonism, developed by Georgy Konus, which is universal for musical styles and trends of any era, is clearly traced in the sketches to Skryabin’s light-musical poem “Prometheus”. Among the well-known works of George Eduardovich are the piano composition Feuillets d’album, the sympho-poem “From the World of Illusions”, a cantata dedicated to Alexander III. The score of the ballet "Daita", written in 1896, was considered lost. For the first time in the work of the Russian composer, the Japanese theme was sung in the libretto and music for this composition; Konyus took an old legend and national folklore as a basis, using the music archive of Pavel Makhrovsky. The bandmaster of the Military Symphony Orchestra brought many beautiful melodies from his trip to Nagasaki. It was no coincidence that the Asian theme arose in the composer’s work. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, there was a peak in the interest of the Russian intelligentsia in Japanese culture: language, painting, literature, theater, religion. A few years later, the ballet was "on the shelf" due to hostilities between Russia and Japan at the beginning of the last century.

The return of the work, miraculously discovered on one of the Internet resources with musical rarities, occurred in the city of Nakasaki at the concert "Japan - Russia: the musical bridge." In addition to fragments of Konyus’s ballet, Shostakovich’s cycle to verses by Japanese poets and songs by Kosaku Yamada from the series “Songs of the Russian Doll” sounded.

Elena Tanakova © Gallerix.ru