Ex. 10-12: No. 5, Five Japanese Poems

No. 5 of Ippolitov-Ivanov's Five Japanese Poems (Op. 60), composed in 1928 for voice and piano. The texts are Russian translations of old Japanese waka (short poems) by Anna Gluskina, a Soviet scholar of Japanese who later made the first complete Russian translation of the Man'yōshū, Japan's oldest poetry collection.

Of the five poems, only this one has a named author: Ki no Tomonori, a court poet of the Heian period and one of the compilers of the Kokin Wakashū (around 905). The other four are anonymous. Another song from the set — No. 2 — is also in this app. (Ex. 12-10: No. 2, Five Japanese Poems by Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov)

Ippolitov-Ivanov (1859–1935) had studied with Rimsky-Korsakov, and is best remembered for his orchestral Caucasian Sketches. He was drawn to "eastern" subjects all his life, and wrote this Japanese set near its end, at about sixty-eight.

From the album Oriental Romances by Hibla Gerzmava and Ekaterina Ganelina (2004)
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