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Artemy Lukyanovich Vedel (), born Artemy Lukyanovich Vedelsky, was a Ukrainian-born Russian Empire Bertil van Boer: Historical Dictionary of Music. Scarecrow, 2012. P. 577. Dowley, Tim: Christian Music: A global history. Fortress Press 2018Goncharuk A. Y. Socio-pedagogical foundations of the theory and history of musical art. Moscow 2015. P. 196.Razumovsky D. V. Church singing in Russia. Moscow 2013. P. 13.Askochensky V. I. Russian composer Artemy Vedelev. Kiev 1854, № 10. Imperial composer of Liturgy and military music. He produced works based on Ukrainian folk melodies, and made an important contribution in the music history of Ukraine. Together with Maxim Berezovsky and Dmitry Bortniansky, Vedel is recognised by as one of the "Golden Three" composers of 18th century Ukrainian classical music, and one of Russia's greatest choral composers.
Vedel was born in Kyiv, the son of a wealthy wood carver. He studied at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy until 1787, after which he was appointed to conduct the academy's choir and orchestra. In 1788, he was sent to Moscow to work for the regional governor, but he returned home in 1791 and resumed his career at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. General Andrei Levanidov recruited him to lead Kyiv's regimental chapel and choir—under Levanidov's patronage, Vedel reached the peak of his creativity as a composer. He moved with Levanidov to the Kharkov Governorate, where he organised a new choir and orchestra, and taught at the Kharkiv Collegium.
His fortunes declined when the cultural life of Kharkiv was affected by decrees issued by Tsar Paul I of Russia. Lacking a patron, and with his music unable to be performed, he returned home to Kyiv in 1798, and became a novice monk of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra. The monastery's authorities discovered handwritten threats towards the Russian royal family, and accused Vedel of writing them. He was subsequently incarcerated as a mental patient, and forbidden to compose. After almost a decade, the authorities allowed him to return to his father's house to die.
Vedel's music was censored during the period that Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. More than 80 of his works are known, including 31 , but many of his compositions are lost. Most of his choral music uses texts taken from the Psalms. The style of Vedel's compositions reflects the changes taking place in classical music during his lifetime; he was influenced by Ukrainian Baroque traditions, but also by new Western European operatic and instrumental styles.
Choral music has a special significance for Ukrainian culture; according to the musicologist Yurii Chekan, "choral music embodies Ukrainian national mentality, and the soul of the people". Ukrainian choral music changed during the Baroque music; passion and emotion, contrasting dynamics, timbre and musical texture were introduced, and monody was replaced by polyphony. The new polychoral culture became known as the ("singing in parts") style. During the 19th century, Znamenny chants were gradually superseded by newer ones, such as the Kyiv chant, which in their turn, were replaced by music that was closer to recitative. Most Znamenny melodies gradually become lost or forgotten. In the early 19th century, music in West-European was making the transition from classical to predominantly Romantic music, having earlier shifted away from the Baroque style.
The tradition of Russian church music can be traced back to Dmitry Bortniansky, who revered the Russian liturgical musical tradition. The early part of the 19th century was a period that marked a low ebb in the fortunes of traditional Russian music. Bortniansky studied in Venice before eventually becoming the director of music at the court chapel in St Petersburg in 1801. Composing in an era when attempts were being made to suppress the Russian Empire's cultural heritage, Bortniansky's choral concertos, set to texts in Russian, were modelled on counterpoint, the concerto grosso and Italian instrumental music. Under him, the Imperial Court Chapel expanded its role so it influenced, and eventually controlled, church choral singing throughout the Russian Empire. Vedel followed Bortniansky in combining the Italian Baroque style to ancient Russian , at a time when classical influences were being introduced into Ukrainian choral music, such as four-voice polyphony, the soloist and the choir singing at different alternative times, and the employment of three or four sections in a work.
Documents relating to Vedel were accidentally discovered in 1967 by the Ukrainian nationalist Vasyl Kuk when he was researching the Moscow military archives about NKVD operations against the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Today, advocates of Vedel such as Mykola Hobdych, the director of the Kyiv Chamber Choir, and the musicologist Tetiana Husarchuk, continue to research and popularise his music. The task of studying Vedel is made more difficult for historians and musicologists because of the fragmentary and superficial nature of the sources—information about his methods is lacking, and his works cannot always be accurately dated.
The Vedelsky family adhered strictly to the Orthodox faith. Lukyan Vlasovich Vedelsky was a wealthy carver of wooden iconostasis, who owned his own workshop. The name Vedel, probably an abbreviated form of Vedelsky, was how the composer signed his letters, and named himself in military documents. His father signed himself "Kyiv citizen Lukyan Vedelsky".
Vedel attended the academy until 1787. After that he studied philosophy and music, and began composing as a student of Potemkin's Musical Academy. Whilst studying the advanced philosophy course, he was appointed as the conductor of the academy's choir—the academy provided extensive programmes for the training of choral singers—and conducted the student orchestra. He also performed as a solo violinist. He studied the academy's theoretical books on music, and became acquainted with the religious works (including ) composed by the academy's students, as well as the spiritual concerts of , and perhaps also those of Sarti and Maxim Berezovsky.
Vedel's talent was recognised by other musicians in Moscow. He probably continued his musical studies at the university. During this period, he had the opportunity to become more familiar with Russian and Western European musical cultures. He did not stay in Moscow for long and, resigning his position, he returned home to Kyiv in the early 1790s.
On 13 March 1796, Levanidov was appointed as Governor General of the Kharkiv Governorate. The composer moved to Kharkiv, along with his best musicians. In Kharkov (now Kharkiv, Ukraine) Vedel organised a new gubernia (governorate) choir and orchestra, and taught singing and music at the Kharkiv Collegium, which was second only to the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in terms of its curriculum. The music class at the Kharkiv Collegium was first recorded in 1798, when in January that year two canons and a choral concerto by Vedel were performed.
Vedel did much of his composing during this period. Works included the concerts "Resurrect God" and "Hear the Lord my voice" (dated 6 October 1796) and the two-choir concerto "The Lord passes me". The composer and his works were highly valued in Kharkiv; his concerts were studied and performed at the Kharkiv Collegium, and they were sung in churches. Bortniansky, who conducted the St. Petersburg State Academic Capella, praised the quality of Vedel's teaching. In September 1796, Vedel was promoted to become a senior adjutant, with the rank of captain.
The tsar's decrees caused the cultural and artistic life of Kharkiv to decline. The city's theatre was closed, and its choirs and orchestras were dissolved. Performances of Vedel's works in churches were banned, as the tsar had prohibited singing in churches of any form of music except during the Divine Liturgy.
The loss of Levanidov's support caused Vedel to become deeply depressed. Despite the support he received from Teplov, Vedel decided to leave Kharkiv. He distributed his belongings (including all his manuscripts), and the end of the summer of 1798 he returned to live at his parents' house in Kyiv. There he wrote two choral concertos, "God, the law-breaker of the rebellion against me" (11 November 1798) and "To the Lord we always mourn". The concertos were performed in the and St Sophia Cathedral in the city.
According to Turcaninov's biography, the Metropolitan of Kyiv commissioned Vedel to write a song of praise in honour of a royal visit to Kyiv, but Vedel instead wrote a letter to the tsar, probably of a political nature. Vedel was arrested in Okhtyrka, pronounced insane, and returned to Kyiv.
Vedel returned to live with his father in an attempt to regain his mental health. Back home in Kyiv, he was able to compose, read, and play the violin, and he may have returned to teach at the Kyiv Academy. By leaving the monastery before his training was completed, Vedel may have angered Hierotheus, the Metropolitan bishop. When the monastery authorities discovered a book containing handwritten insults about the royal family, the Metropolitan accused Vedel of writing in the book. He dismissed Vedel's servants, and personally detained him. On 25 May 1799, Hierotheus declared that Vedel was mentally ill.
After the death of Paul I in 1801, the new tsar, Alexander I, proclaimed an amnesty for unjustly imprisoned convicts, and many prisoners were released. Alexander ordered that Vedel's case should be re-examined, but Vedel was again declared insane and remained an inmate. The tsar wrote of Vedel on 15 May 1802: "... leave in the present captivity".
In 1808, after nine years' imprisonment, and by now mortally ill, Vedel was allowed to return home to his father's house in Kyiv. Shortly before his death there on 14 July 1808, he is said to have stood and prayed in the garden.
There was uncertainty about exactly when Vedel died, until his death certificate was found in 1910. The cause of his death was never revealed by the authorities. His friend (the archpriest of Kyiv Cathedral and a well-known preacher) obtained permission for a decent funeral, an indication that Vedel was considered by the government "to be untrustworthy for the rest of his life". Many mourners attended Vedel's funeral, including students from the Academy. He was buried in the Shchekavytsia cemetery. When the area was redeveloped in the 1930s, the cemetery was destroyed. The location of Vedel's grave is now lost.
Many of Vedel's works have been lost. The V.I. Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine holds the only existing autograph score by the composer, the Score of Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom and Other Compositions. The score consists of 12 choral concertos (composed between 1794 and 1798), and the Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom. The ink varies in colour, which suggests that Vedel worked on the compositions at different times. It was acquired by Askochensky, who bequeathed it to the Kyiv Academy.
Vedel was considered during his lifetime to be a traditional and conservative composer, in contrast to his older contemporaries Berezovsky and Bortniansky. Unlike Vedel, they composed secular, non-spiritual works. He was a famous violinist, but no music by Vedel for the violin is documented. His works, perhaps even more than those of Berezovsky or Bortnyansky, represented a development in Ukrainian musical culture. According to Koshetz, Vedel's music was based on Ukrainian folk melodies.
Vedel's music was written at a time when Western music had largely emerged from the Renaissance and Baroque eras. The style of his compositions reflected two contrasting traditions. He was strongly influenced by the baroque traditions of the Ukrainian hetman culture, with its religious-mystical music linked with ideas about spiritual enlightenment, but was also influenced by developments in new operatic and instrumental styles emerging from Western Europe at that time.
Vedel's compositions were rediscovered during the early 20th century by the conductor and composer Alexander Koshetz, at that time the leader of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy's student choir, and himself a student. They were first published in 1902. Koshetz, one of the earliest conductors from Ukraine to attempt to revive performances of Vedel using the autograph scores, noted that "the great technical difficulties of solo parts... and the need for large choruses" made his works difficult to perform in public. Koshetz toured Europe and America, conducting the Ukrainian Republican Chapel in performances of Vedel.
Koshetz's revival of Vedel's music was banned by the Soviets after Ukraine was absorbed into the Soviet Union in 1922. Unlike many of the sacred works written by Western composers, Orthodox sacred music is sung in the vernacular, and its religious nature is visible and tangible to Orthodox Christians. Because of this, Soviet anti-religious legislation prohibited Russian and Ukrainian sacred music from being performed in public from 1928 until well into the 1950s, when the Khrushchev Thaw occurred, and Vedel's works were once again heard by Soviet audiences.
The gap of nearly two centuries when Vedel's music was forgotten adversely affected the development of Ukrainian church music. Vedel made an important contribution to late 18th-century music, but his accomplishments were largely undocumented and so were not realised. Early attempts to produce a narrative of Vedel's life and work based on the recollections of his contemporaries were only begun after they themselves had died, and this led to contradictory accounts of his life. The most important studies about Vedel produced in 19th and early 20th centuries belonged to musicologists as Askochensky, , Vladimir Stasov, and Pyotr Turchaninov. Some of these authors, such as Askochensky, were representatives of the Russian national movement; according to and Oksana Dondyk, the historical studies of these authors were distorted to suit their particular views about Ukrainian politics and music.
Vedel made an important contribution in the music history of Ukraine, and musicologists consider him to the archetypal composer of the baroque style in Ukrainian music. Koshetz stated that Vedel should be seen as "the first and greatest spokesperson of the national substance in Ukrainian church music". The musical culture that developed in Ukraine during the 19th century was founded in part on Vedel's choral compositions. According to the ethnomusicologist Taras Filenko, "His free command of contemporary techniques of choral writing, combined with innovations in adapting the particularities of Ukrainian melody, make Artem Vedel's works a unique phenomenon in the context of world musical culture." According to Chekan, Vedel's texture is "at times monumental and at others subtly contrasted, strikingly showing the possibilities of the a cappella sound".
A memorial plaque to Vedel was made by the sculptor in 2008. The plaque is located on the wall of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. The Vedel School in Lviv, a school of contemporary music founded in 2017 by the musician Mikhail Balog, was named in honour of the composer. There are streets named after the composer in Kyiv and Kharkiv.
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