Tebe Poem by Dobri Hristov

SACREd MUSIC OF BULGARIA

Dobri Hristov

Tebé poém (We Hymn Thee)

Dobri Xristov

Tebe poem

NOTES ON THE EDITION Dobri Hristov was born in Varna, Bulgaria on 14 December 1875 and died in 1941. Hrisotov studied piano and composition at the Prague Conservatory in Antonin Dvorák’s class in the last years before Dvorák died. After, he served as an assistant conductor of the Nedelya Church Choir in Sofia. During this time, some of the movements for the Liturgy No. 1 of St. John Chrysostom were composed. In either 1911 or 1913, he became the conductor of the St. Sedmochislenitsi Church choir in Sofia, spending a large portion of the most fruitful years of his career at the church, giving frequent public concerts. In 1935, Hristov was invited by the Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church to become the conductor of the St. Aleksandur Nevsky Memorial Cathedral.

The original impetus for this project came in 2001 at the Varna International Conductors Workshop, at which the participants, including the editor, were introduced to the music of Dobri Hristov. Immediately, it was apparent that the phonetic transliteration provided needed to reflect more accurately the sounds of the language and the unique Bulgarian pronunciation of Church Slavonic in a manner that was easy and consistent. In addition, there were certain musical discrepancies in the score that may or may not have been editorial in nature. Upon returning to the United States, the editor discovered that Hristov’s music was unavailable. The need for an accurate and performable manuscript of the work based on primary source documents became the basis of a United States Fulbright Research Grant to Bulgaria.

Liturgy No. 1 is scored for four-part mixed chorus and exists in four extant documents housed in the Bulgarian National Archives. The 1924 manuscript of the Liturgy and the liturgical supplement was the manuscript submitted by Dobri Hristov to his publishers in late 1924. In addition to the 1924 manuscript, the Bulgarian Institute for Applied Arts and Sciences made the 1925 first edition print available to the editor. These documents represent the primary source documents for this study.

Anecdotally, that 1925 first edition was personally dedicated by Dobri Hristov to Tsar Boris, and included a handwritten dedication by Hristov and a three-line piece of music in what seems to be G major, in cut-time. Sometime after the 1944 Communist revolution in Bulgaria, cultural officers from the new regime entered the Institute’s library and ripped the handwritten pages out of the score, thereby removing any mention of the former Tsar, as well as the music contained in the opening pages. No record had been kept of the contents of these two pages, and so only a few centimeters of music are left.

Examination of the 1924 manuscript in comparison with the 1925 first edition print show glaring discrepancies, involving dynamic markings, syllabic treatment, and musical text itself. The 1925 edition was printed cheaply with an eye toward efficiency in order to save room and paper, and many printing decisions were made at the expense of musical and expressive indications.

As a whole, the 1924 document provides much more detailed performance information than the printed version. While it is not practical to include every dynamic and articulation marking that Hristov wrote in the 1924 manuscript, since the 1925 printed version was given his mark of approval, the sparseness of the performance indications in the 1925 version makes interpreting the piece extremely difficult. If nothing else, they are important clues in the search for the composer’s original intent and compositional thought. Thus, this edition restores many of the dynamic indications that are present in the 1924 version.

Of particular interest in this movement is Hristov’s use of an “Old Bulgarian Melody” as source material. This indication refers to chants collected and arranged from seventeenth and eighteenth century Russian manuscripts from the “Titov” library by Bulgarian musicologist and composer Anastas Nikolov, a close and admired colleague of Dobri Hristov. Nikolov hoped the use of these chants in worship would raise “the oppressed and burned Bulgarian spirit.” Hristov, equally nationalistic, used them as source material in a number of places in his Liturgy No. 1, stating “through the cultural and artistic experience of singing we can find food and strength for our national self-consciousness and with this keep pace with the civilized nations.”

This edition includes a transliteration system that attempts to match the unique Bulgarian Orthodox Church pronunciation of Church Slavonic, which is significantly different than what is spoken and sung in the Russian Orthodox Church. Should conductors choose to follow the more familiar Russian pronunciation, the Cyrillic remains consistent, with only minor adjustments (the former Communist regime in Bulgarian dispensed with a number of letters in the alphabet that were considered “archaic,” a practice still in use today).

—Dr. Timothy M. Powell, editor 2002-2003 William J. Fulbright Scholar to Bulgaria

Dobri Xristov

Tebe poem Dobri Hristov (1875–1941)

Tebé poém

We hymn Thee, we bless Thee, we give thanks to Thee, O Lord, and we pray unto Thee, O God. —from the Divine Liturgy

Tebé poém, Tebé blagoslovím, Tebé blagodaòím, Gospodi, i molimtisâ, Bozhe nash.

—na BoΩestvennoj Liturgii

π b 4 &b 4 œ

Мн. бавно [Moderately slow]

Soprano

Te Те

π b 4 &b 4 œ

Alto

Piano

b & b 44

(for rehearsal only)

œ

˙

œ

Te Те

-

be´ бе

Te Те

-

be´ бе

be´ бе

˙

Мн. бавно [Moderately slow]

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-

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be´ бе

Te Те

b 4 π b V 4 œ

Tenor

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œ œœ œœ

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po по

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ém, ем,

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ém, ем,

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ém, ем,

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˙

po по

œ

We Hymn Thee

ém, ем,

˙ ˙˙ ˙ ˙

, , ,

Timoti Majkl Pauel, redaktor Timothy Michael Powell, editor

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Te Те

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bla - go - slo бла - го - сло -

Te Те

-

be´ бе

bla - go - slo бла - го - сло -

Te Те

-

be´ бе

bla - go - slo бла - го - сло -

œ

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-

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*Composer’s note: Performed for the first time by the choir of the late An. Nikolov in a concert. Sofia 1920.

Editor’s note: Anastas Nikolov was a colleague of Hristov’s. His Liturgy was the source of most of the Old Bulgarian Chants in Hristov’s Liturgy.

Hr0011b

Copyright © 2016, by Musica Russica, Inc. All rights reserved.

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6 THE BULGARIAN PRONUNCIATION OF CHURCH SLAVONIC The Bulgarian Orthodox Church, in addition to being the earliest autocephalous Slavic Orthodox Church, employs a unique pronunciation of Church Slavonic that is distinct from the more familiar pronunciation found in the Russian Orthodox Church.

Bulgarians pronounce Church Slavonic the same way they pronounce modern Bulgarian. The most notable departure from Russian Church Slavonic is the absence of palatization. In fact, the unique Bulgarian pronunciation so permeates performance practice and is so closely tied to the national consciousness and pride that Bulgarians refer to Church Slavonic as “Old Bulgarian.”

A helpful feature of the Bulgarian pronunciation of Church Slavonic is that the sounds of the language have a direct “one to one” phonetic representation in Cyrillic, unlike English, which has many traditional spellings that do not coincide with the sounds of the words. Following the 1945 Communist revolution in Bulgaria, the Bulgarian alphabet also underwent reforms in an attempt to modernize which extended in some ways to Bulgarian Church Slavonic. The employment of a “one-to-one” system of transliteration allows the singer and conductor to quickly learn the phonetic combinations, or graphemes, corresponding to the Cyrillic. Since the transliteration is given in Italics directly above the Cyrillic, the “one-to-one” relationship is quite clear.

Care must be taken, though, to ensure that each grapheme is given consistent phonetic treatment, regardless of its placement within syllabic combinations.

One other unique feature of the Bulgarian Church Slavonic worthy of discussion is the treatment of voiced and un-voiced ending consonants. Voiced consonants that occur on the end of a word are pronounced in their unvoiced form. Thus, “b” becomes “p,” “d” becomes “t,” “v” becomes “f,” and (rarely occurring) “g” becomes “k”. Traditionally, names such as Христов have been transcribed as Hristov, even though in actuality, they are pronounced Hristof when speaking. The accepted form of these final consonants in Church Slavonic is for them to be sung as voiced consonants, yet the overwhelming custom in Bulgaria is to sing and to speak them unvoiced, particularly at the end of phrases. The Italic graphemes within the music take this practice into account.

Cyrillic letter

Phonetic rendering and equivalent English pronunciation

А a as in “art” (but shorter) Б b as in “book” В v as in “vice” Г g as in “good” Д d as in “dot” Е e as in “elephant” Ж zh as the “s” in “pleasure” З z as in “zigzag” И i as in “inch” Й i/y as in “yes” К k as in “king” Л l as in “label” М m as in “man” Н n as in “not” О o as in “offer” П p as in “pet” Р r as in “rat” С s as in “sister” Т t as in “tent” У ou as in “soup” Ф f as in “fifteen” Х h as in “horrid” (slightly guttural) Ц ts as in “fits” Ч ch as in “church” Ш sh as in “ship” Щ sht as in “fishtail” Ъ u as in “hunter” (but shorter) ь y as in “York” Ю yu as in “youth” (but shorter) Я ya as in “yarn” (but shorter)

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