Dvořák's 'Dumky': six dumkas in a duma

Charging Cossacks – March 1st, 1915

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Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904)

Dumky Trio (1891)

In the first edition of the "Dumky" Trio in 1894, the German publisher N. Simrock added a footnote at the bottom of the first page of the score explaining,

“Dumky” [plural of "dumka"] is a Little Russian [i.e., Ukrainian] word and cannot be translated. It is a kind of folk poetry often found in Russian literature, usually of a melancholic character.

We might best call this the tip of the iceberg. Despite the publisher feeling the need to provide an explanation, it's not as if Dvořák was the first to have composed a dumka. There were dumkas by many other composers that appeared in the late 19th century, including ones by Chopin, Liszt, Borodin, Balakirev, Tchaikovsky. But before the mid-19^th century, the word "dumka" associated either with published or folk music was virtually non-existent.

In general usage, duma (pl. dumy), as well as its diminutive dumka (pl. dumky), means "thought" or "contemplation" in many Slavic languages. (It was taken up as the name for a congress or deliberative body in the former Soviet Union. But we will ignore the politician and follow the bard.) More of a poetic conceptual scheme than a musical form, the earlier dumas that inspired the creation of dumkas were lyrico-epic works of folk origin about events in the Cossack period of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Cossack riflemen listen to a kobzar in Kyiv.

The early dumas were narratives concerned with military confrontation. But rather than celebrating a victory or promoting courage in battle as one might expect, they were infused with religious and moralistic elements. They were usually concerned with the struggles of the Cossacks and the Eastern Orthodox Church against enemies of different faiths. Significant losses in these struggles account for the consistently dark tone of the dumas – somber, funereal, brooding. After the Cossack Hetmanate was dissolved by Catherine II of Russia, the singing of dumas began to die out, another tradition threatened with extinction.

Ostap Veresai,
the blind kobzar,
(1803–1890)

Then in 1871 there began a series of scholarly papers accompanied by performances of traditional dumas at musicology conferences in Kyiv and Saint Petersburg (the late 19^th century saw the birth of ethnomusicology). The performances were by one of the last of the bards (kobzary), Ostap Veresai. Many composers either would have heard Veresai's dumas or seen transcriptions of them.

At some point in this transfer from itinerant bard to

cosmopolitan composer, duma became dumka. The epic duma's form was characterized by uneven periods governed by the unfolding of a story. Each period was a finished, syntactical whole conveying a complete thought. But at this point, shifting to the relatively sudden appearance of dumkas mid century, we enter a no man’s land of musicological conjecture. That is, we have no idea exactly how it happened, but we can make an educated guess.

As epic poetry, a traditional duma’s length is supported by its story line floating on a music that supports mood changes in the text shifting between darker and lighter. The musical mood-changes and other characteristic features can be transferred to a more abstract (non verbal) musical form, but not the epic length which would be excessive without the story line. So the conjecture is that composers taken with the idea of the duma around 1870 selected a period or two from the duma, retaining the duma’s idea of mood changes within the period resulting in a “little duma,” a “shorter duma” – a dumka. We now return to consideration of Dvořák ’s chain of dumkas that comprise the Trio.

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Attempts have been made to force the structure of the "Dumky" Trio into a classical form such as the sonata by treating the first three dumkas as the "first movement" and the final three dumkas as movements 2, 3, and 4. Some listeners may try to follow along as if it were a giant quasi-rondo form such as A–B–A–C–D–A– ⋯. None of these attempts at force-fitting work because, in the end, this work is simply a collection of six dumkas that take us through twenty-five[!] tempo changes (– or mood shifts if you prefer): six complete thoughts that add up to a story told with nothing but tones. So given what we know about the history of the dumka’s predecessor, the duma, we’re tempted to ask if Dvořák  may have been attempting to regain the epic stature of the old duma with each of the six dumkas representing a period in an epic duma.

There are two primary ways that Dvořák  expresses the alternation of darker and lighter moods between the sections in each dumka. One is by alternating minor and major modes; for example, E minor makes a turn to E major then back again and so on. The other way is by alternating slower and quicker tempos. At times he uses these two by alternating a slower tempo in a minor mode (dark mood) with a quicker tempo in a major mode (light mood). At other times he mixes these up by combining slower with major (for dark or light) and contrasting that with sections that are quicker and in minor (for light or dark). The result is surprisingly coherent – a whole of contrasts. But what is the plot if these six dumkas are not separate, but add up to an epic “Duma” Trio?

As so often in music, the story, if there is one, is the listener’s to conjure. But remembering the heritage of the dumka, it's difficult not to imagine Cossack soldiers drinking in a tavern, reliving battles fought for their faith and land – some won, others lost – and the darker, chastening moods that inevitably overcome them from reflecting on battles won or lost – contemplating the story, the memories, personal and collective – their shared duma.

(Program note for the 2017 Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival

– Stephen Soderberg)

Dvořák. Trio no. 4, Op. 90, "Dumky"

Trio Bell'Arte

Noe Inui, vl; Benedict Kloeckner, vc; Vassillis Varvaresos, pf

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Post Script (22 February, 2022)

Since writing the above note I learned more about the fate of the kobzars after WWI. The following is from the article “Kobzars” on the website Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine.

In the 1930s, with forced collectivization, the Famine-Genocide of 1932–3, and the Stalinist suppression of Ukrainian culture, the kobzars were again repressed. Party directives to create a new socialist folklore and ‘Soviet’ kobzars resulted in the First Republican Conference of Kobzars and Lirnyks in April 1939, sponsored by the Institute of Fine Arts, Folklore, and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. Thirty-seven kobzars, including Petro Huz, F. Kushneryk, Yehor Movchan, Pavlo Nosach, Oleksander A. Markevych, Ye. Adamtsevych, S. Avramenko, and Volodymyr Perepeliuk, were brought together to discuss ‘the first examples of Soviet dumas and heroic songs and the task of creating a Soviet epos.’ A number of such examples (eg, ‘Duma about the Communist Party,’ ‘Duma about Lenin’) were composed with the institute's workers and members of the Writers' Union of Ukraine and Union of Composers of Ukraine and performed at the conference's closing concert. The ‘creators’ were immediately inducted into the writers' union, and a Section of Folk Arts was formed in the union to ‘organize systematic creative and methodological assistance for kobzars and lirnyks.’ Yet, as composer Dmitri Shostakovich testifies in his memoirs (Testimony, 1979), several hundred kobzars and lirnyks were brought to the congress from all parts of Ukraine and after the congress ended almost all of them were shot.

To hide this tragedy, the Institute of Fine Arts, Folklore, and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR and the Kyiv Philharmonic jointly set up a State Ethnographic Kobzar Ensemble in early 1941, consisting of Yehor Movchan, Pavlo Nosach, Petro Huz, Oleksander A. Markevych, Volodymyr Perepeliuk, and I. Ivanchenko; M. Hrinchenko was appointed artistic director. During its brief existence, the ensemble performed throughout Ukraine and in Moscow until the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.

Memorial to the Kobzars executed by Soviet authorities following the First Republican Conference of Kobzars and Lirnyks in April 1939. 

 (Kharkiv, Ukraine)