Ex. 14-8: Hai Luli!

"Haï luli!" is a song by the French mezzo-soprano and composer Pauline Viardot (1821–1910). It was published in Paris in 1880, in her collection 6 Mélodies et une havanaise (Six Songs and a Havanaise), where it is No. 4, in B-flat major.

The words are by Xavier de Maistre (1763–1852), a writer from a noble family in Savoy, an Alpine region between France and Italy. In 1792, France took over his homeland of Savoy, and de Maistre escaped to Russia. There he became an army officer and wrote fiction in French. The poem comes from his novella Les Prisonniers du Caucase (The Prisoners of the Caucasus, 1825), where it appears as a Russian folk song.

A girl waits alone for a lover who does not come. In the last verse she cries that if he has been unfaithful, "let the village burn, and me with it." The title words, "Haï luli," are a refrain with no real meaning — a sad, sighing sound, like the "lyuli" syllables sung in old Russian folk songs.

Viardot came from a famous Spanish family of singers — her father was the tenor Manuel García, and her sister was the celebrated Maria Malibran — and she spoke many languages, including Russian. She had deep ties to Russia herself: she toured there and did much to bring Russian songs to the rest of Europe. For about forty years her closest companion was the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, who lived near the Viardot family until his death.

As a girl she took piano lessons from Franz Liszt. Liszt is said to have called her "a woman composer of genius," though the exact words are not documented. She was also a close friend of Frédéric Chopin, and she arranged twelve of his mazurkas as songs, adding French words.

In 1863 the Viardots left Paris for political reasons and settled in Baden-Baden, a spa town in Germany, where her home drew musicians such as Clara Schumann and the young Johannes Brahms. In 1870 she sang the first public performance of Brahms's Alto Rhapsody, a work for solo alto, choir, and orchestra.

From the album Charmes by Olena Tokar and Igor Gryshyn (2021)
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