Abstract

Poema is a key work in Russia's Soviet Period (1917-1991): it is an epic portrayal of Russia's historic path and a lexicon of twentieth-century programmatic techniques. In it, Georgy Sviridov (b. 1915) pays homage to a prominent Russian poet, Sergey Esenin (1895-1925), with whose poetry he develops a posthumous yet powerful bond. The fusion of these two artistic mediums, poetry and music, produces a work that is saturated with illustrations, symbolism, and a number of "symbiotic links:" between the composer and the poetry, the two artists and a given idea or sentiment, such as patriotism, and, curiously, between the two artists. Esenin's poetry becomes so dear to Sviridov that he attempts to give meaning to the poet's suicide. In creating a redeeming program for Poema and the poet, Sviridov also describes the tragic but hopeful path of old, pre-Revolution to new, post-1917 Russia. The purpose of this essay is to identify and describe a few of the numerous "links" in Poema and, in so doing, provide a way to assess its compositional merits.

Keywords: symbiosis, programmatic music, illustration, musical symbolism, patriotism, catharsis.