Relevance. The creative figure of Yaroslav Vereshchagin (1948–1999) – a composer, poet, publisher, musician and public figure – belongs to the pleiad of Ukrainian artists of the 70s and 90s. He was a contemporary of E. Stankovych, I. Karabyts, O. Kyva, H. Sasko, V. Hodziatsky, V. Zubytsky and other composers who can be considered as contributors to the renewal of the array of genre and style tools of contemporary Ukrainian music and its vocabulary. The atmosphere of stylistic changes of the late 60s and 70s of the twentieth century was vividly reflected in the neo-romantic poetics of Ya. Vereshchagin's music.
His works are quite diverse, as the composer worked in almost all genres. These are works for both full and chamber symphony orchestras: "Divertissement" (1972), "Suite" (1969), "Variations" (1970), Concerto for viola and symphony orchestra (1972); orchestral transcriptions of works by composers of the XIX–XX centuries, a large number of chamber compositions for different ensembles (string quartets, quintets for wind instruments), sonatas, sonatinas, scherzos, suites, mazurkas for different instruments (cello, flute, violin, piano, etc.). However, the original and multi-genre compositional legacy of Ya. Vereshchagin is little known both in Ukraine and abroad, and has not yet been the subject of a fundamental, holistic musicological study.
The main sources for the study of Ya. Vereshchagin's life and work are his personal archive, which is kept at the home of his daughter, Bohdana Vereshchagina. It includes personal documents, letters, posters, concert programmes, poetry, sketches and music manuscripts, which became crucial for the analysis of the composer's creative process: in total, 153 items of music and many drafts (including 8 complete music notebooks) were identified and processed. Most of these compositions, unfortunately, have not been performed and have not been studied to this day.
The archival sources were accompanied by small journalistic articles by H. Konkova, H. Lunina, I. Zinkiv, O. Zosym, O. Lavrynenko, A. Mukha, T. Nevynchana, B. Chip, O. Shvetsova, and N. Shurova in the periodicals, which describe impressions after the concerts with biographical sketches about Ya. Vereshchagin, reflections on the composer's works that were performed, journalistic dialogues, but no serious scientific work has been recorded among the available bibliographic literature. On the basis of all these materials, the life and creative path of the composer was studied in detail and a comprehensive concept of his creative evolution was created.
It is important to note that a significant place in Ya. Vereshchagin's work belongs to vocal compositions. While researching his creative heritage, about sixty works of various vocal genres were found: arrangements of Ukrainian songs, songs, romances, vocal cycles and cantatas for soprano, mezzo-soprano, bass and baritone, choral works for mixed and male a cappella.
The focus of this dissertation on vocal music by Ya. Vereshchagin is not only determined by the quantitative superiority of these compositions among other genres, but also because they are the essence of his mentality and express the way he thought about music in the most vivid way, because the artist was also a wonderful poet, he even composed his own collection of poems called "Chlorophyll grains", which, unfortunately, was not published but was found among manuscripts (it includes about seventy poems). He worked with the poetic word in a filigree and subtle way, and the expression of "artistic ideas" in vocal miniatures is closely related to the emotional colouring of the verbal text, which is why the musical fabric of these works often contains a veiled meaning and necessarily a deep intellectual idea.
Among other artists, Ya. Vereshchagin stands out for the special elegance of his concepts, the refinement of his ideas with his inherent expressive intellectuality, which is manifested in his use of chamber genres. However, there is also a peculiar desire of the composer to enlarge the form through a tendency to cyclisation, when the combination of individual miniatures grows into a large monolithic composition.
The composer's oeuvre includes 14 vocal cycles, each of which consists of two to four vocal miniatures. Unfortunately, three of the cycles from the list have not been found in their entirety, so the edited and published collection of vocal cycles "The artist painted sadness...", which has become an important supplement to the work, contains 11 items. Among them are arrangements of Ukrainian, Czech, and Slovak folk songs, cycles based on poems by Ukrainian poets V. Mordan, V. Herasymiuk, M. Udovychenko, F. Mlynchenko, M. Dolenga, P. Tychyna, D. Zahul, M. Dry-Khmara, and texts by ancient Korean poets translated by O. Zhovtis.
