Katyusha
Matvey Blanter
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Browse piano sheets by Matvey Blanter on Zen Virtual Piano. Matvey Blanter was a composer who emerged as one of the creators of the Soviet "mass song" in the 1930s. He was born in the town of Pochep, then in the Chernigov Governorate of the Russian Empire, the son of a Jewish craftsman. Blanter studied piano and violin at the Kursk Higher Music School and, from 1917 to 1919, violin and composition in Moscow. His studies of violin and composition in Moscow and his place among the creators of the mass song may suggest a path from instrumental training to song writing. Blanter's earliest songs date from the 1920s, a period of light dance and jazz writing that included "John Gray" (1923), a foxtrot and a major hit. In the 1930s, as Soviet culture grew more ideologically strict, Blanter shifted toward writing Soviet propaganda songs. In 1935 the newspaper Pravda ran a competition of Soviet song, and Blanter wrote "Partisan Zheleznyak" with the poet Mikhail Golodny. If the 1923 foxtrot and the 1935 competition song are set side by side, they may show a range from jazz dance music to songs written for a newspaper contest. In 1938 Blanter began a collaboration with the poet Mikhail Isakovsky, and their first song was "Katyusha". Isakovsky recalled that the first eight lines came and then work stopped; soon after he met Blanter, who wrote music for those eight lines straight away. About seven variants of the final song came out of their work, and the two chose one of them. Valentina Batishcheva sang "Katyusha" at the first concert of the State Jazz Orchestra in Moscow. Could the eight lines that Blanter set first, beside the seven variants of the final song, mean that the words kept changing after the music existed? Stalin commissioned Blanter to write a symphony on the capture of Berlin, and he travelled to Berlin with the Red Army in 1945. His 1945 song "The Enemy Burned Down His Home" was banned by the authorities as too pessimistic and was first performed in 1961. The trip to Berlin and the banned song of the same year may point to a year in which both a commission and a ban touched his work.
Browse piano sheets by Matvey Blanter on Zen Virtual Piano.
Matvey Blanter was a composer who emerged as one of the creators of the Soviet "mass song" in the 1930s. He was born in the town of Pochep, then in the Chernigov Governorate of the Russian Empire, the son of a Jewish craftsman. Blanter studied piano and violin at the Kursk Higher Music School and, from 1917 to 1919, violin and composition in Moscow. His studies of violin and composition in Moscow and his place among the creators of the mass song may suggest a path from instrumental training to song writing.
Blanter's earliest songs date from the 1920s, a period of light dance and jazz writing that included "John Gray" (1923), a foxtrot and a major hit. In the 1930s, as Soviet culture grew more ideologically strict, Blanter shifted toward writing Soviet propaganda songs. In 1935 the newspaper Pravda ran a competition of Soviet song, and Blanter wrote "Partisan Zheleznyak" with the poet Mikhail Golodny. If the 1923 foxtrot and the 1935 competition song are set side by side, they may show a range from jazz dance music to songs written for a newspaper contest.
In 1938 Blanter began a collaboration with the poet Mikhail Isakovsky, and their first song was "Katyusha". Isakovsky recalled that the first eight lines came and then work stopped; soon after he met Blanter, who wrote music for those eight lines straight away. About seven variants of the final song came out of their work, and the two chose one of them. Valentina Batishcheva sang "Katyusha" at the first concert of the State Jazz Orchestra in Moscow. Could the eight lines that Blanter set first, beside the seven variants of the final song, mean that the words kept changing after the music existed?
Stalin commissioned Blanter to write a symphony on the capture of Berlin, and he travelled to Berlin with the Red Army in 1945. His 1945 song "The Enemy Burned Down His Home" was banned by the authorities as too pessimistic and was first performed in 1961. The trip to Berlin and the banned song of the same year may point to a year in which both a commission and a ban touched his work.
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Matvey Blanter emerged as one of the creators of the Soviet "mass song", and in the 1930s he shifted toward writing Soviet propaganda songs.
Blanter's first songs came in the 1920s, when he wrote light dance and jazz music, including the foxtrot "John Gray" (1923), which became a major hit.
Blanter began working with the poet Mikhail Isakovsky in 1938, and "Katyusha" was their first song. Blanter wrote music for Isakovsky's first eight lines, and about seven variants of the final song followed.
Blanter's 1945 song "The Enemy Burned Down His Home" was banned by the authorities as too pessimistic, and it was performed for the first time in 1961.