'Mykola Lysenko and the emergence of Ukrainian national music'| Muzyka 2026

Ukrainian art songs — long suppressed by Russia — are a testament to resilience. Meet the composers who kept Ukraine's voice alive.

Like various contemporaries across Europe, Mykola Lysenko (1842–1913) sought to develop and cultivate a national art tradition in music by drawing inspiration from folk music and local literature. Working in the Russian Empire, however, which proscribed the development of Ukrainian national culture in various ways, his activities were both particularly challenging and particularly significant, rendering him a luminary for the Ukrainian national movement, and an instructive case for understanding the politics of culture and identity under imperial rule.

Lecturer

Rutger Helmers

Rutger Helmers is assistant professor of musicology at the Department of Arts and Culture at the University of Amsterdam, and works on questions of nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and imperialism in the musical life of the nineteenth-century Russian Empire. His current research concerns the representation of Ukraine in musical discourse and compositions of the late tsarist era, for which he was a HURI Research Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute in 2022. His publications include a monograph Not Russian Enough? Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century Russian Opera (2014), and contributions to The Oxford Handbook of the Operatic Canon (2020), Čajkovskij-Studien (2022), and The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism (2023).