Attalea princeps

Victor Ekimovsky wrote the violin concerto Attalea princeps after reading the eponymous story by Vsevolod Garshin (1855–1888), a writer who only lived to the age of 33, but nonetheless left his mark on Russian literature. Garshin’s stories are simple in their plot and construction, but unusual in the representation of extreme human emotions. Overwhelming despair and lack of courage, irritability and instability, hopeless efforts to break out of a vicious circle of tribulations – aspects of his own psychic illness – predominate in these stories. In Attalea princeps (1879), Garshin formulated in a symbolic manner his feelings of being trapped in a brutal environment:

“In the botanical garden of a large city, there lived plants transplanted from tropical lands. They felt trapped in the damp and crowded greenhouse. Among them, there was a particularly tall and beautiful palm tree with the Latin name, Attalea princeps. She towered above all the plants and yearned more than all the others for the blue sky, which was obscured by the glass roof that the palm tree had almost reached. The palm decided to grow so tall that she could break through the glass roof and reach out into freedom. ‘I want to see the sky and the sun, and I will see them!’ The palm tree began to grow with all her might. As she finally broke through the roof of the greenhouse, she stood up tall and proud … but instead of bright Brazilian sunlight and lush vegetation, she saw only dirty grey clouds in the sky, a dreary landscape, and the sad faces of the leafless autumn trees; the wet snow and cold wind made her shiver. Everything had come to an end – the once magnificent palm was cut down at the roots and thrown away …”

Ekimovsky’s music for this romantic subject also requires something of the listener: while listening to the music, the audience is expected to read the complete text of the story. Growth is the compositional idea. A succession of towering waves creates an almost physical sensation of growth. Over the regular “blows of fate” from the drum and the tom-tom, the music moves inexorably toward a tremendous tutti climax. In contrast to the Symphonic Dances, here the soloist should dominate the orchestra. However, only three brief pauses provide the soloist with an opportunity to recover, after which he must somehow continue to “grow”. Just before the culmination, the soloist picks up an electric violin, whose penetrating sound “gathers threateningly over the mass of the orchestra.” The freedom-loving palm tree breaks through the roof of the greenhouse and perishes. The motion breaks off, the fate rhythm stops, the orchestral mass dissolves, and the violin’s lonely voice vanishes off into space …

Valeria Tsenova