PROGRAM
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-FOURTH SEASON
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Riccardo Muti Zell Music Director
Pierre Boulez Helen Regenstein Conductor Emeritus
Yo-Yo Ma Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant
Global Sponsor of the CSO
Thursday, January 22, 2015, at 8:00
Friday, January 23, 2015, at 8:00
Saturday, January 24, 2015, at 8:00
Riccardo Muti Conductor
Alisa Kolosova Mezzo-soprano
Sergey Skorokhodov Tenor
Chicago Symphony Chorus
Duain Wolfe Chorus Director
Scriabin
Symphony No. 1 in E Major, Op. 26
Lento
Allegro dramatico
Lento
Vivace
Allegro
Andante
ALISA KOLOSOVA
SERGEY SKOROKHODOV
CHICAGO SYMPHONY CHORUS
First Chicago Symphony Orchestra performances
INTERMISSION
Prokofiev
Alexander Nevsky, Op. 78
Russia under the Mongolian Yoke
A Song about Alexander Nevsky
The Crusaders in Pskov
Arise, People of Russia
The Battle on the Ice
The Field of the Dead
Alexander’s Entry in Pskov
ALISA KOLOSOVA
CHICAGO SYMPHONY CHORUS
The appearance of the Chicago Symphony Chorus is made possible by a generous gift from Jim and Kay Mabie.
Saturday’s concert is endowed in part by the League of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association.
This program is partially supported by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
COMMENTS by Phillip Huscher
Alexander Scriabin
Born January 6, 1872 [December 25, 1871, old style], Moscow, Russia.
Died April 27, 1915, Moscow, Russia.
Symphony No. 1 in E Major, Op. 26
From his youth, when he
interpreted the significance of his birth on
Christmas Day as a sign
that he should do great
things, Scriabin believed
he would play a decisive
role in the history of
music. But his early death
at the age of forty-three
cut short his career just as he was venturing into
pioneer territory. Like many composers of a less
revolutionary bent, Scriabin started his musical
life as a pianist and his composing career writing
only piano pieces. In 1884, he began to study
piano with Nicolai Zverev, who already had
accepted Sergei Rachmaninov as a pupil. The two
students became good friends—Scriabin was
older by just one year—though they were
sometimes later portrayed as rivals once their
musical ambitions ventured in different directions. At the time they met, both Scriabin and
Rachmaninov were beginning to compose piano
pieces for themselves to play. In 1888, Scriabin
entered the Moscow Conservatory, where he
excelled equally as a pianist and composer. When
he graduated in 1892, he was awarded the second
gold medal in composition (Rachmaninov took
first place, for his opera Aleko).
After Scriabin left the conservatory, he began
a career as a concert pianist. While his recital
programs often included music by Schumann and
Liszt, two composers who also started out as pianists, Scriabin’s particular favorite was Chopin.
COMPOSED
1899
FIRST PERFORMANCE
November 11, 1900; Saint Petersburg,
Russia (without soloists or chorus)
March 16, 1900; Moscow, Russia
(complete)
2
That influence is reflected not only in his repertoire, but in the titles and nature of the music he
wrote at the time—sets of preludes, impromptus,
etudes, and even Polish mazurkas. To study the
first nineteen opus numbers in Scriabin’s catalog,
all pieces for piano solo, one would never predict
the important orchestral music that would
quickly follow.
The move away from writing solo piano
music was a tough and decisive step for all the
pianist-composers of the nineteenth century,
but Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, and Brahms
already were mature artists with individual and
recognizable styles when they stopped composing
exclusively for the piano. But when Scriabin
wrote a piano concerto in 1896—the first of
his works to call for orchestra—he had not yet
discovered the voice that would ultimately make
his music unique. The Chopinesque concerto
scarcely hints at the direction Scriabin’s career
would take. Then, three years, later, he began
his first symphony, and a new world of complex
sounds and philosophical ideas opened up before
him. He was now on the path to becoming, as
the novelist Boris Pasternak later said of him,
“more than just a composer.”
In retrospect, knowing the pioneering orchestral works that would quickly follow from his
pen, Scriabin’s First Symphony sounds like
a throwback, a last vestige of romanticism.
But more importantly, it is a score that shows
Scriabin mastering the language of his day, and,
at the same time, yearning to break free of its
conventions and limitations.
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
These are the Chicago Symphony
Orchestra’s first performances.
four horns, three trumpets, three
trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion,
harp, strings
INSTRUMENTATION
mezzo-soprano and tenor soloists;
mixed chorus; an orchestra consisting
of three flutes and piccolo, two
oboes, three clarinets, two bassoons,
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
51 minutes
S criabin writes six movements and calls
for two soloists and a chorus in his finale,
a grand ode to the power of art. Its formal design alone makes it a work of unusual
ambition. The music came to him quickly. He
worked on nothing else during the summer of
1899. “He would write a measure and rush to
the piano to make certain the sound was exactly
as he wanted it,” his friend, the composer Lev
Konyus, said. He took the score to bed with
him at night. “All summer long he kept saying
this was his best music yet,” Konyus recalled.
But when the symphony was first performed in
Saint Petersburg in November 1900, conducted
by Anatoly Liadov, it fell flat. There were boos
and catcalls. Scriabin complained that the
tempos were too slow and Liadov’s interpretation
“flabby.” Since the Saint Petersburg choral society had refused to perform for no fee, Scriabin’s
finale was done without voices, depriving it of
both its message and its blazing musical impact.
However, Vasily Safonoff, the director of
the Moscow Conservatory and the conductor
later credited as the first to lead without using a
baton, declared the score a “divine creation,” and
gave a second performance, for the full forces,
in Moscow the next March. “Safonoff had the
look of a man opening a treasure and displaying
it,” recalled the composer Leonid Sananeyev,
who sat in on the rehearsals. But still it failed to
impress the public. “The reason is the complexity
of this brain child,” wrote one of the critics. “The
average man is not prepared for it.” Scriabin
reportedly threw the score across the room the
next day. But, within little more than a decade,
the symphony was played and even acclaimed in
Europe, as well as in Russia. Like all of Scriabin’s
visionary orchestral works, it has since fallen in
and out of favor. (Because of the unusual forces
Scriabin calls for, the symphony is not often
programmed, and, in fact, these are the Chicago
Symphony’s first performances. The first work
by Scriabin the Orchestra played, oddly, was his
final completed score, Prometheus, in its U.S. premiere in 1915. The performance of such advanced
and unconventional music drew hisses from the
Orchestra Hall audience, which one critic said
proved “the dynamic vitality of the composer.”
Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy, however, soon became
a Chicago favorite: Frederick Stock, the CSO’s
second music director, programmed it almost
annually for nineteen years, from 1922 to 1941.)
T he first five, relatively short movements
represent Scriabin’s vision of the late
nineteenth-century symphony. The first,
luxuriously scored—there is a particularly rich
violin solo—and majestically paced as its rises
and falls, acts as a kind of a substantial slow
introduction. It is followed by four movements
that suggest the outlines of a standard symphony, crowned by a big chorale finale (which,
like Beethoven’s before it, recalls themes from
earlier in the symphony). The second movement,
an Allegro, is colored by music of high drama
and governed by the powerful contrast and
development of sonata form. Next, Scriabin
writes a magnificent and spacious slow movement, followed by a fast, delicate, and playful
scherzo. A surging Allegro—with wonderfully
lyrical episodes—suggests an air of climax and
finality, but it merely paves the way for Scriabin’s
big last movement. This unusual finale with
voices—echoing those by Beethoven, Liszt, and,
closer to Scriabin’s own time, Mahler—begins
with mezzo-soprano and tenor soloists singing
alternately, and then blossoms, in its last pages,
into music for full chorus and orchestra. (The
entry of the chorus is underlined by the switch
from the symphony’s prevailing triple meter—
throughout five and a half movements—to
common time.) This is a glorious hymn to the
sovereignty of Art, one of the themes that is
integral to Scriabin’s entire output. Once, when
the directness of Scriabin’s text was criticized,
he defended the grand rhetoric of his finale: “I
wanted something simple, something international, common to all peoples.” The poem,
shared by soloists and chorus, is Scriabin’s own:
O wonderful image of the Divine,
Harmony’s pure Art!
To you we gladly bring
Praise of that rapturous feeling.
You are life’s bright hope,
You are celebration, you are respite,
Like a gift you bring to the people
Your enchanted visions.
In that gloomy and cold hour,
When the soul is full of tumult,
Man finds in you
The spry joy of consolation.
Strength, fallen in battle, you
Miraculously call to life,
In the exhausted and afflicted mind
3
You breed thoughts of a new order.
An endless ocean of emotion you
Breed in the enraptured heart,
And sings the best songs of songs,
Your high priest, by you enlivened.
On Earth gloriously reigns
Your spirit, free and mighty,
Man lifted by you
Gloriously conducts the greatest feat.
Come, all peoples of the world,
Let us sing the praises of Art!
Glory to Art,
Glory forever!
Translation: © David Kettle
I n the fifteen years he had left after writing
his First Symphony, Scriabin ventured
farther into the great unknown, where
music and color are closely linked and where
“art must unite with philosophy and religion
in an indivisible whole to form a new gospel.”
After his Fifth Piano Sonata, composed in
1907, he broke with tonality. A single dissonant
chord, the so-called mystic chord, provided the
foundation for all of his final compositions. He
had, in effect, created a new system of tonal
organization to replace traditional harmony.
After his death, no one truly followed his path
(Prokofiev and Szymanowski briefly came
under his spell), and, in the end, despite the
urgency and fierce passion of his ideas, he did
not—to use current parlance—make a difference.
Stravinsky, who disliked both Scriabin and his
music, once commented, “Although his death
was tragic and premature, I have sometimes
wondered at the kind of music such a man would
have written had he survived into the 1920s.”
Scriabin’s original language was, in its own
way, as revolutionary as that of Mahler, Strauss,
Schoenberg, or Debussy, all of whom were
writing at the same time. It is difficult to know
where Scriabin was headed, and how he might
ultimately have changed the course of music. Sergei Prokofiev
Born April 23, 1891, Sontsokva, Ukraine.
Died March 5, 1953, Moscow, Russia.
Alexander Nevsky, Op. 78
During a stay in Denver,
on his American tour in
February 1938, Prokofiev
received a phone call from
a Hollywood agent who
wanted to sell the rights
to Prokofiev’s Peter and
the Wolf to Walt Disney.
By chance, the composer
had just seen Disney’s
newest release, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,
and was excited by its seamless integration of
sound and image. Prokofiev boarded a plane to
Los Angeles three days later. His meeting with
Disney went well—“le papa de Mickey Mouse,”
as the composer dubbed him, was highly
impressed with the Peter and the Wolf score—and
Prokofiev left town boasting that Hollywood had
shown “unusual interest” in his modern music.
Ultimately nothing came of that project, but
Hollywood had renewed Prokofiev’s interest in
writing film music.
4
That May, within days of his return to Russia,
Prokofiev was approached by the great Russian
director Sergei Eisenstein. Each man was already
at the peak of his powers. Eisenstein had directed
two of the defining silent film classics of the
1920s—Battleship Potemkin and October: Ten Days
that Shook the World. Eisenstein proposed collaborating on a film about the thirteenth-century
military hero Alexander Nevsky. It would be his
first film in nine years and his first with sound.
They started work early that summer. Prokofiev
began to sketch music before production started.
As the two men worked together, they quickly
developed an unusually close and responsive
creative process. The highly detailed contract
Prokofiev signed allowed him “to participate
directly in the film’s production through the
entire process.” During one particularly exhaustive planning meeting with Eisenstein, Prokofiev
annotated nearly all eighty-four typewritten
pages of the director’s script with specific ideas
about the nature of music needed (on the first
page he noted that one meter of film required
two seconds of music, the equation that made
clockwork synchronization possible throughout
the film).
Sometimes music was recorded before a scene
was shot, so that Eisenstein took his cues directly
from the score. (It has been suggested that this
method appealed to Prokofiev ever since watching
Disney’s films, where the imagery is precisely
matched to precomposed music.) But more often
the process was reversed. Prokofiev visited the
film locations and then reviewed footage with
Eisenstein that evening, taking detailed notes
about the shape and rhythm of each scene. As
they wrapped up work late, Prokofiev would
invariably turn to Eisenstein and say that he’d
have the music by noon the next day. “Although
it is now midnight, I feel quite calm,” Eisenstein
later wrote, reliving those nights. “I know that
at exactly 11:55 a.m. a small dark blue car will
bring Sergei Prokofiev to the studio and that in
his hands there will be the necessary pieces of
music for Alexander Nevsky.” It was a relationship
of exceptional sensitivity to each other’s needs.
“Eisenstein’s respect for music was so great,”
Prokofiev later wrote, “that at times he was prepared to cut or add to his sequences so as not to
upset the balance of a musical episode.” Eisenstein
recognized that Prokofiev’s score “never remains
merely an illustration, but reveals the movement
and the dynamic structure in which are embodied
the emotion and meaning of an event.”
The result is one of the rare occasions when
a great film not only boasts a great score, but is
made infinitely more powerful and meaningful
by that score. Although Eisenstein and Prokofiev
collaborated one more time, on Ivan the Terrible,
it is Alexander Nevsky that remains their
COMPOSED
1938, as film score
1939, adapted as a cantata
FIRST PERFORMANCE
May 17, 1939; Moscow, Russia
(cantata). The composer conducting
FIRST CSO PERFORMANCES
March 5, 6 & 10, 1959, Orchestra Hall.
Rosalind Elias as soloist, Chicago
Symphony Chorus (Margaret Hillis,
director), Fritz Reiner conducting
greatest achievement, and, for all the technical
sophistication of the movie industry in recent
years, it is still unrivalled in the brilliance of its
linking music and film—what Eisenstein called
“the organic cinematographic fusion of sound
and image.”
A lexander Nevsky recalls a signal moment
in Russian history—one that had unmistakable applications to the Soviet situation at the time, as Hitler’s threat was mounting.
(The studio did not hide its propagandistic
desire to “prepare every Russian man, woman,
and child to meet with optimism any war that
came.”) The historical Alexander Nevsky was
the thirteenth-century prince Alexander of
Novgorod, who became a national hero after
leading a successful revolt against Swedish
invaders at the Neva River in 1240 (earning him
the name Nevsky—of the Neva). Eisenstein was
intrigued by the fact that Nevsky was a famous
Russian icon about whom very little was known,
which allowed him to create his own portrait of
a leader capable of stirring his people to extraordinary actions. The film centers around the
historical Battle on the Ice, when Nevsky and his
forces defeated invading Teutonic Knights on the
frozen surface of Lake Peipus, on April 5, 1242.
At the peak of the fight, as the ice began to give
way under the weight of so many heavily armored
men, countless soldiers of the invading army
were swallowed by the freezing water. (This scene
was filmed during a July heat wave on a vast field
covered with sodium silicate to simulate ice.)
T he film was released in December of
1938, to great acclaim. Shortly afterwards, Prokofiev decided to make a
MOST RECENT
CSO PERFORMANCES
February 17, 18 & 20, 1977, Orchestra
Hall. Lucia Valentini-Terrani as
soloist, Chicago Symphony Chorus
(Margaret Hillis, director), Claudio
Abbado conducting
tenor saxophone, four horns, three
trumpets, three trombones, tuba,
timpani, percussion, two harps, strings
INSTRUMENTATION
mezzo-soprano soloist; mixed chorus;
an orchestra consisting of two flutes
and piccolo, two oboes and english
horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet,
two bassoons and contrabassoon,
CSO RECORDING
1959. Rosalind Elias as soloist, Chicago
Symphony Chorus (Margaret Hillis,
director), Fritz Reiner conducting. RCA
APPROXIMATE
PERFORMANCE TIME
42 minutes
5
concert piece from the score. He later said he
found this process more difficult than composing the film music, because he now had to
give form to music that was no longer tied to
visual imagery. He also reorchestrated it, since
it originally was written for a small studio
orchestra. The cantata, as he labeled it, reconstructs a new work, in seven movements, from
the sixty-some minutes of music Prokofiev had
supplied for Eisenstein’s 107-minute film.
Prokofiev’s cantata opens with an orchestral
prelude: spare, icy music of desolation written for
the beginning of the film. In Eisenstein’s words:
“Woeful traces of the ravages wrought on Russia
by the Mongols—heaps of human bones, swords,
rusty lances. Fields overgrown with weeds and
ruins of burned villages.” Prokofiev’s keening
first theme, played by instruments four octaves
apart, with no sound between them, at once
reveals the composer’s uncanny ability to match
imagery with sound.
The people’s Song about Alexander Nevsky—
in the film, it is sung by fishermen on the shores
of a tranquil lake—recalls the leader’s victory
over the Swedes two years earlier. It ends with a
call to arms.
In The Crusaders in Pskov, the invading
Germans, who have successfully taken over the
city, prepare fires in which they threaten to burn
those who do not convert to their religion. The
crusaders repeatedly chant in Latin: Peregrinus
expectavi pedes meos in cymbalis est (A foreigner,
I expected my feet to be shod in cymbals).
Prokofiev and Eisenstein considered adapting
medieval music here to underline the ancient
setting, but decided it “was far too remote and
emotionally alien to us to be able to stimulate the
imagination of the present-day film spectator.”
6
Arise, People of Russia is another call to
arms as the citizens of Novgorod prepare to
defend their land. The lyrical melody at its heart
becomes the signal musical theme of the score.
Prokofiev’s concert version of the film’s
climactic Battle on the Ice is thrillingly dramatic,
and, even without
imagery, highly cinematic in its placement of sounds from
faraway and nearby,
and its rapid cutting
from one scene to
another—the distant
crusader’s battle
chant, the rhythmic
hoof beats of the
German horses
surging forward,
the clamor of the
Sergei Eisenstein
fighting, the rousing
marching music,
the retreat of the invaders back onto the lake,
the catastrophe as the ice breaks, and finally the
stillness of horror.
A lone girl sings The Field of the Dead as she
searches for her lover, surveying the vast stretches
of dead and wounded.
Their victory complete, Alexander Nevsky’s
men return to the city of Pskov in proud, clangorous triumph. Phillip Huscher is the program annotator for the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra.
ALEXANDER NEVSKY
1. RUSSIA UNDER THE MONGOLIAN YOKE
2. A SONG ABOUT ALEXANDER NEVSKY
Chorus of Russians
A i bїlo dyelo na Nyevyeryekye,
Na Nyevyeryekye, na bolshoi vodye.
Tam rubili mї zloye voinstvo,
Zloye voinstvo, voisko shvyedskoye.
It happened on the Neva River,
on the Neva, the great water.
There we slaughtered the evil army,
the evil army of the Swedes.
Ukh! kak bilis mї, kak rubilis mї!
Ukh! Rubili korabli po dostochkam.
Nashu krov’rudu nye zhalyeli mї
za vyelikuyu zyemlyu ruskuyu.
Oh, how we fought, how we slashed!
Oh, we chopped their boats into kindling!
We did not spare our golden blood
in defense of the great Russian land.
Gde proshol topor, bїla ulitza.
Gde lyetyelo kop’yo pyerye ulochek.
Polozhili mї shvyedovnemchinov,
Kak kobїl’travu na sukhoi zyemlye.
Where the axe passed, there was a street,
where the spear flew, an alley.
We mowed down our Swedish enemies
like feather-grass on dry soil.
Nye ustupim mї zyemlyu russkuyu.
Kto pridyot na Rus’, budyet nasmyert’ bit.
Podnyalasya Rus’ suprotiv vraga,
podnimis’ na boi, slavnїi Novgorod!
We shall not yield up the Russian land.
Whoever invades Russia shall be killed.
Russia has arisen against the foe;
arise for battle, glorious Novgorod!
3. THE CRUSADERS IN PSKOV
Crusaders
Peregrinus expectavi pedes meos in cymbalis est.
A foreigner, I expected my feet to be shod
in cymbals.
4. ARISE, PEOPLE OF RUSSIA
Chorus of Russians
Vstavaitye, lyudi russkiye,
na slavnїi boi, na smyertnїi boi,
vstavaitye, lyudi vol’nїe,
za nashu zyemlyu chestnuyu.
Arise, people of Russia,
for the glorious battle, for the deadly battle,
arise, free people,
to defend our honest land.
Tenors, Basses
Zhivїm boitsam pochyot i chest’,
a myortvїm slava vechnaya.
Za otchii dom, za russkii krai
vstavaitye, lyudi russkiye.
To living warriors, respect and honor,
and to the dead, eternal glory.
For our fathers’ home, our Russian territory,
arise, people of Russia.
(Please turn the page quietly.)
7
Chorus
Vstavaitye, lyudi russkiye,
na slavnїi boi, na smyertnїi boi,
vstavaitye, lyudi vol’nye,
za nashu zyemlyu chestnuyu.
Arise, people of Russia,
for the glorious battle, for the deadly battle,
arise, free people,
to defend our honest land.
Women, then Men
Na Rusi rodnoi, na Rusi bol’shoi
nye bїvat’ vragu.
Podnimaisya, vstan’,
mat’ rodnaya Rus’!
In our native Russia, in great Russia,
let no foe exist.
Raise yourself up, stand up,
our own mother Russia!
Women
Vstavaitye, lyudi russkiye,
Arise, people of Russia,
Men
na slavnїi boi, na smyertnїi boi,
for the glorious battle, for the deadly battle,
Women
arise, free people,
vstavaitye, lyudi vol’nye,
Men
to defend our honest land.
za nashu zyemlyu chestnuyu.
Women
Vragam na Rus’ nye kazhivat’,
polkov na Rus’ nye vazhivat’,
putyei na Rus’ nye vidїvat’,
polyei Rusi nye taptїvat’.
Let no foe march through Russia,
let no regiments rove across Russia,
let them not see the paths to Russia,
let them not tread on the fields of Russia.
Chorus
Vstavaitye, lyudi russkiye,
na slavnїi boi, na smyertnїi boi,
vstavaitye, lyudi vol’nye,
za nashu zyemlyu chestnuyu.
Arise, people of Russia,
for the glorious battle, for the deadly battle,
arise, free people,
to defend our honest land.
5. THE BATTLE ON THE ICE
Crusaders
Peregrinus expectavi pedes meos in cymbalis est.
Vincant arma crucifera. Hostis pereat!
8
A foreigner, I expected my feet to be shod
in cymbals.
May the arms of the cross-bearers conquer! Let
the enemy perish!
6. THE FIELD OF THE DEAD
A Russian Woman
Ya poidu po polyu byelomu,
polyechu po polyu smyertnomu.
Poishchu ya slavnїkh sokolov,
zhenikhov moikh, dobrїkh molodtsyev.
I shall go over the white field,
I shall fly over the deadly field.
I shall seek the glorious falcons,
my bridegrooms, the sturdy young men.
Kto lyezhit, myechami porublyennїi,
kto lyezhit, stryeloyu poranyennїi,
Napoili oni krov’yu aloyu
zyemlyu chestnuyu, zyemlyu russkuyu.
One lies hacked by swords,
one lies wounded by the arrow.
With their crimson blood they have watered
the honest soil, the Russian land.
Kto pogib za Rus’ smyert’yu dobroyu,
potseluyu togo v oghi myertvїe,
a tomu molodtsu, shto ostalsya zhit’,
budu vyernoi zhenoi, miloi ladoyu.
Whoever died a good death for Russia,
I shall kiss upon his dead eyes,
and to that young man who remained alive,
I shall be a faithful wife, a loving spouse.
Nye voz’mu v muzh’ya krasivovo:
krasota zyemnaya konchayetsya.
A poidu ya za khrabrovo.
Otzovityesya, yasnyi sokolyi!
I shall not marry a handsome man;
earthly beauty comes to an end.
But I shall wed a brave man.
Cry out in answer, bright falcons!
7. ALEXANDER’S ENTRY INTO PSKOV
Chorus of Russians
Na vyelikii boi vïkhodila Rus’.
Voroga pobyedila Rus’.
Na rodnoi zyemlye nye bїvat’ vragu.
Kto pridyot, budyet nasmyert’ bit.
Russia marched out to mighty battle.
Russia overcame the enemy.
On our native soil, let no foe exist.
Whoever invades, will be killed.
Women
Vyesyelisya, poi, mat’ rodnaya Rus’!
Na rodnoi Rusi nye bїvat’ vragu.
Nye vidat’ vragu nashikh russkikh syol.
Kto pridyot na Rus’, budyet nasmyert’ bit.
Be merry, sing, mother Russia!
In our native Russia, let no foe exist.
Let no foe see our Russian villages.
Whoever invades Russia will be killed.
Men
Nye vidat’ vragu nashikh russkikh syol.
Kto pridyot na Rus’, budyet nasmyert’ bit.
Na Rusi rodnoi, na Rusi bol’shoi
nye bїvat’ vragu.
Let no foe see our Russian villages.
Whoever invades Russia will be killed.
In our native Russia, in great Russia,
Let no foe exist
All
Na Rusi rodnoi, na Rusi bol’shoi
nye bїvat’ vragu.
Vyesyelisya, poi,
mat’ rodnaya Rus’!
In our native Russia, in great Russia,
let no foe exist.
Be merry, sing,
our own mother Russia!
Na vyelikii prazdnik sobralasya Rus’.
At the mighty festival, all Russia has
gathered together.
Be merry, Russia,
mother of ours!
Vyesyelisya, Rus’!
rodnaya mat’!
© 2015 Chicago Symphony Orchestra
9