May I share a melody and invite you to think about lilacs today?

Composed by Sergei Rachmaninov around 1900, the song Siren enhances a poem by Ekaterina Beketova (1855-1892) who, in her short life, wrote poignant verses begging to be set to music.

In the morning, at daybreak,
over the dewy grass,
I will go to breathe the crisp dawn;
and in the fragrant shade,
where the lilac crowds,
I will go to seek my happiness. . . .

In life, only one happiness
it was fated for me to discover,
and that happiness lives in the lilacs;
in the green boughs,
in the fragrant bunches,
my poor happiness blossoms. . . .

The Russian noun siren reflects syringa, the Latin name for lilacs. It turns out that syringa belong to a class of twelve species known as “flowering woody plants,” or so I have read. One of those twelve happens to be olives, which, if true, makes this week’s essay an inadvertent botanical follow-up to my panegyric on olive oil last week.

Growing up, I was not conscious of lilac bushes, either their hypnotic scent or their artistic significance.  My first spring in 1982 in St. Petersburg, Russia (then Leningrad, USSR) taught me about lilacs. In every green spot in the city, lilac shrubs burst into bloom in such copious amounts that no one minded when children (and sometimes grownups) clipped boughs of the blossoms to take home.

Those lilacs would brighten many a dank Soviet-era room. Certainly my closet-like room in the dormitory of the Leningrad Conservatory needed brightening! (One day I’ll write those stories and make the hair on the back your neck stand up.) I remember setting a stocky Soviet drinking glass full of lilacs on the broad, crumbling windowsill before the high, double-glassed wooden window typical of such 19th-century buildings. They were as luminous as the lilacs in Mary Cassat’s painting Lilacs in a Window and brought not just an intoxicating aroma, but hope after an icy winter and a difficult year in the archives.

While many performances of this song can be found, I am drawn to this one where a fine soprano Olena Tokar and equally fine pianist Igor Gryshyn present the song in an ideal setting: an intimate room that easily could be filled with friends ready to luxuriate in poetry and melody. In fact, my enjoyment of this performance (heard more times than I will admit) has caused Sirens to displace Brahms’ Wie Melodien zieht es as my absolute favorite song right now (if you don’t count “Never, Neverland” from Peter Pan or Cole Porter’s I Concentrate on You, but I digress . . . ).

I hope you will enjoy Rachmaniniov’s Sirens and Cassat’s painting, as well as an abundance of lilacs wherever you are!