Russian Romani romances
Romansy · Seven-string guitar · Tabor songs
Russia · Ukraine
Choirs, seven-string guitar, and the urban romance. Russian Romani theatre companies made this sound a national fashion in the nineteenth century. A guitar style with few remaining masters still carries it.
Romani choirs performed in Moscow and St Petersburg restaurants and on the imperial stage. The repertoire mixed Romani-language songs with Russian romances — sentimental, virtuosic, often in a minor that Russian audiences heard as “Gypsy”.
The seven-string guitar (semistrunnaya) was the domestic instrument of this world: a tuning and a right-hand style distinct from the Spanish six-string. Players such as the Kolpakov family still teach a line that almost disappeared when the six-string took over. Oleg Timofeyev documents it with them.
Theatre Romen in Moscow, founded 1931, is the institutional centre — the world’s oldest professional Romani theatre. Anna Piotrowska’s work on tsyganshchina is the scholarly frame: choirs and romances as a staged public music, not a village fossil.
History
Choirs for the restaurant and the theatre; a guitar with seven strings and a family right hand that almost disappeared.
Choirs and the romance
From the late eighteenth century, “Gypsy choirs” became a Russian fashion — the Count Orlov / Sokolov legend sits at the start of that public story. Nineteenth-century Moscow and St Petersburg paid for Romani choirs. The public heard tsyganshchina, “Gypsy-ness”: minor keys, open throats, violin and guitar, a sentimental fire that Russian literature both desired and disdained. The singers were professionals with a repertoire in Russian and in Romani. Anna G. Piotrowska has written that history from Tsarist through Soviet and post-Soviet rooms. Alaina Lemon’s Between Two Fires is the anthropology of the same stage.
Seven strings
The seven-string guitar (semistrunnaya) was the domestic instrument of this world from the late eighteenth century into the Soviet decades. When the Spanish six-string took over, the old tuning and stroke survived in a few families. The Kolpakov line is one of the last public carriers of that guitar — Alexander “Sasha” Kolpakov was music director at the Romen Theatre; Vadim Kolpakov and Oleg Timofeyev still teach the style. Loyko took tabor violin song onto post-Soviet stages.
Theatre Romen, Moscow, founded 1931, is the world’s oldest professional Romani theatre and the institutional centre of this public music. Its archive and foyer hold protocols, play texts, posters, photographs and costumes. Further records sit in RGALI. A living institution, not only a vault.
Key players
- late 20th c.–
Kolpakov Trio
- Seven-string guitar, voice · Russia
- Keepers of the Russian Romani seven-string guitar style, a line that nearly vanished when the Spanish six-string took over. Family teaching, guitar and song.
- formed 1990
Loyko
- Violin, guitar, voice · Russia
- Russian Romani ensemble that carried tabor song and violin virtuosity onto the world-music circuit after the Soviet years.