Ex. 12-10: No. 2, Five Japanese Poems

No. 2 of Ippolitov-Ivanov's Five Japanese Poems (Op. 60). Another song from the set — No. 5 — is also in this app. (Ex. 10-12: No. 5, Five Japanese Poems by Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov) The texts are Russian translations of old Japanese tanka (short poems) by Anna Gluskina. This poem is anonymous, and the singer says he is tired of suffering in this world.

Gluskina published these translations in 1926, in a small collection called Pesni Yamato (Songs of Yamato). She was 22. Ippolitov-Ivanov set them a few years later, near the end of his life. In his 1934 memoir, Fifty Years of Russian Music in My Memories, he credited the poems to a translator named "Gusmova" — he had misremembered Gluskina's name. The translator was Gluskina, who went on to make the first complete Russian translation of the Man'yōshū, Japan's oldest poetry collection.

When he wrote these songs, Ippolitov-Ivanov was about sixty-eight and one of the leading figures in Soviet music. He had led the Moscow Conservatory for years and had been a conductor at the Bolshoi Theatre since 1925.

A Russian study of the cycle describes this song as a quiet, hymn-like piece: the piano moves in solemn chords while the voice keeps the sound of a Japanese five-note scale.

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