Hooked on Dark Eyes
I still find myself thinking about seeds. Back in Sedona, Mike, the farmer at Verde Valley School Farm, introduced me to the horticultural term for plants that grow where they weren’t planted: volunteers.
He’d point out a tangle of volunteer tulsi that grew amid carefully planned tomatoes and corn. He’d voice delight at volunteer asparagus peeking out from a storm drain outside the farm’s perimeter.
The word makes my anthropomorphizing heart quicken. After all, the root of the word volunteer is the Latin voluntas meaning will or choice. (Other meanings include desire, purpose, intention and testament.) To ascribe voluntas to plants is to infuse everything in the botanical world with spirit.
And — if plants are intentional about where they flourish — what about musical seeds?
Plenty of melodies take root far from where they were first conceived. Sometimes, it’s a matter of deliberate gardening. Think of Dvorak’s American Quartet, with its Native American tunes woven in like a sprig of quince grafted onto a mature apple tree.
But many times it’s chance that transports a musical idea to a faraway clime where it unexpectedly flourishes. Take, for example, the song “Ochi Chernye” (“Dark Eyes”) made famous by the great Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin.
According to some sources, it’s based on a text about obsessive love by the Ukrainian poet Yevhen Hrebinka with music by a certain Florian Hermann. That composer has left no other trace in history, but he was said to have been a band leader in Napoleon’s invading army. The army retreated, the melody stayed.
According to a different narrative the melody – with equivalent Spanish lyrics about a pair of “ojos negros que fascinan” -- was composed in Havana by Sindo Garay (1867-1968), a leading proponent of the Cuban lyrical revival called trova. You can watch an old interview with him (unsubtitled) in which the 100-year-old Garay relates the story of a visiting opera company from Russia. He says he wrote the song as a gift to a young woman in the chorus. (Hear him sing it at 9:30 minutes into the video.) Years later, a friend spotted the song, now in Russian, in a film from the Soviet Union.
Garay said he felt flattered.
In Chaliapin’s recorded version, the song is a wild waltz spun out in call and response between the impassioned bass solo and a chorus. The melody loops in such close circles it feels like a spinning top more than a carousel.
But by 1935 the song is back in the New World, recorded by the Uruguayan tango leader Francisco Canaro. The rhythm now has that caged tiger prowl of the tango, and instead of a chorus there’s the compressed sigh of a bandoneon. But the obsessive nature of the melody is just as vivid.
I wonder if it’s that compulsive quality that carried this tune so far and helped it take hold wherever it went. It’s such a sticky earworm that I can easily imagine a touring chorister humming it all the way from Havana back to Moscow.
In the botanical world, plants disperse their seed in many ways — wind, water, animal feces and fire. In the field where I walk my dog, a type of bramble grows with tiny spiked balls that attach themselves to Lucky’s fur and are a pest to get out. For the plant it’s a brilliant strategy for spread and survival. In pop music, too, a successful song has a “hook.”
Meanwhile “Dark Eyes” has remained a favorite encore for opera singers. YouTube has multiple videos of the phenomenally gifted Dmitry Hvorostovsky singing it at various stages of his career. The most heartbreaking one is this version he sang in Budapest in 2016, when he already knew of the brain tumor that would kill him the following year. The orchestration is colorful and flashy – with the concertmaster adding a Gypsy-tinged violin solo – but the drama comes from the heroic voice of Hvorostovksy and the defiant way he stretches the rhythm, as if trying to halt a wheel that is inexorably spinning.
The performance simmers with voluntas — will, desire, intention and testament.
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For a little transatlantic time travel, here is a playlist — with advance warning that you might find yourself humming “Dark Eyes” wherever your travels take you.
Image: Roma Kaiuk courtesy of Unsplash