Mio ben ricordati by Franz Schubert and Mikhail Glinka: Concerning the Problem of “the Personal” and “the Alien”

Abstract

Mio ben ricordati is one of Pietro Metastasio’s popular operatic texts that was set to music by many composers, including Franz Schubert and Mikhail Glinka. The reason for comparison was not only the closeness of their compositions during the time of their creation (respectively, 1820 and 1828), but also the similarity of the situations of their lives: both composers, when achieving mastery of the basics of music, studied with Italian teachers, both composed masterpieces in the field of vocal miniature works in their native languages. The article attempts to place Schubert’s canzona and Glinka’s arietta in the context of the tradition of the musical manifestation of Mio ben ricordati that had developed by their time, revealing their common and specialized features, as well as to compare the works of the two composers with each other, to determine the degree of their closeness to their Italian prototypes and the peculiarities of the style of the original author of the text. Thus, from the perspective of form, Glinka’s arietta turns out to be more traditional than Schubert’s canzona, but at the same time, in some peculiarities of its melody and tonal-harmonic plan, it forms a prototype of the composer’s later, more famous romance I Recall a Wonderful Moment. In Schubert’s musical interpretation of Mio ben ricordati, individual moments of the poetic text are especially emphasized that were clearly important for Metastasio, and techniques characteristic of the art of Italian opera are applied – namely, the parallel minor/major keys (chiaroscuro) and the harmonic color of the lowered harmonic second degree. On the other hand, both composers use the triple meter, bring in repetitions in the text, traditional for the arias of Mio ben ricordati, and also rely on the periodicity intrinsic to Rossini’s works.