[RUSSIAN FOLK-SONGS.] DOPPELMAIR, Georg von.

Russische Volkslieder für eine Singstimme mit Klavierbegleitung aus dem Russischen übersetzt und Ihrer Majestät der Kaiserin aller Reussen [sic] und grossen Frau Elisabeth Alexiewna in allertiefster Ehrfurcht und Unterthänigkeit zu Füssen gelegt.

Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, [c. 1805]. Oblong 4to, pp. [1], 5–12, 38, [2]; engraved title-page with hand-coloured engraved vignette by Christian G. H. Geissler of costumed Russian peasants singing and playing instruments while watching a dancer; letterpress music, German text; some scattered light browning and spotting but a very good copy in German contemporary marbled boards with gilt leather label to front cover; covers and head and tail of spine a little scuffed. First edition: a very early collection of Russian folk songs, taken from manuscript sources, translated and edited by Georg von Doppelmair, collegiate councillor and ‘literary correspondent’ of the University of Dorpat (Tartu in present-day Estonia). In the preface, he praises Johann Richter’s Russische Miszellen (1803–4), ‘which have only been out a few months’, for bringing Russian folk songs to the attention of German lovers of foreign literature. ‘But the editor of the collection omitted one thing in those excellent translations: the tunes - an addition which would have increased their value and made them even more welcome to German lovers of song …’. Doppelmair’s book attempts to redress the balance with the 24 songs here, ‘nordic snowdrops and briar-roses taken from the banks of the Volga, Moskva and Neva and transplanted into German soil’.The collection is suitably dedicated to Elizabeth Alexeyevna, a lover of the arts, who was Princess Louise of Baden before her marriage to the future Alexander I.The first major collection of Russian folk songs had only been published in 1790, by Nikolai Lvov. See Terras’s long entry Folk Song for a full discussion of the genre.OCLC and RLIN list 1 copy at Eastman School of Music. RISM D 3420 records three copies (all in Germany).

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