‘Last time it came out even better,’ remarked the female voice. ‘After the king’s wealth, you sang: ‘Is my honey’s good health.’ It came out more tender. You must have forgotten today’ [Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Transl. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. PP. 293-294].
The main reason for my giving this long quotation at full length was to show you how easily a work of art, pretending to be more than it actually is or making use of words and expressions that are not really freighted with meaning, becomes a ‘lackey trill,’ to use Dostoyevsky’s expression. I wish you would be aware of that each time you write your music.
There is nothing new under the sun (Ecclesiastes, 1:9). I would be very much obliged if you gave me some examples of the ‘lackey trills’ of today, meaning the (pseudo-)artistic phenomena of contemporary culture whose authors involuntarily vulgarise the artistic traditions they try to imitate. I believe you will find them in abundance.It is very interesting to observe the further development of the Russian romance in the twentieth and the early twenty-first century. To some minor extent, it is still used as a cultural means of intersexual communication. The Irony of Fate, a 1976 Soviet romantic comedy film, shows how a man and a woman, forced to spend the New Year’s Eve in the same apartment, get closer together during a long intelligent conversation part of which is performing romances to each other. The situation is still credible, even if a bit strained. It must be noted that both Zhenya and Nadya, the two main protagonists of the story, are in their thirties (Zhenya is in fact thirty-six): it requires both intelligence and a certain skill to sing a romance; it takes life experience to enjoy it.
(What makes me say that?) No wonder, therefore, that romances in their capacity of conversation fillers and vehicles of flirtation are gradually replaced by the so-called author songs that do not set very high requirements for its performers.