On the Rivers of Babylon (Vedel)

Artemy Vedel composed On the Rivers of Babylon, his choral setting of Psalm 137, at some point during the years he later looked back on as his most productive, though no precise date for this particular concerto survives among his roughly thirty one sacred concertos. He had trained at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy under the Italian composer Giuseppe Sarti, taken over the Academy's own choir and orchestra after graduating in 1787, and reached the height of his output between 1794 and 1798 under the patronage of General Andrei Levanidov, for whom he organized regimental chapel choirs first in Kyiv and then, from 1796, in Kharkiv, where he also taught at the Kharkiv Collegium.

Psalm 137's lament, its refrain asking how a people can sing the Lord's song in a foreign land while held captive far from home, gave Vedel material for one of his most emotionally direct concertos, scored for unaccompanied choir in the style scholars now describe as the archetype of Ukrainian Cossack baroque, a blend of the Ukrainian choral tradition he had inherited with the operatic and instrumental idioms then arriving from Western Europe. Nine of his eleven surviving concertos share that same pleading, minor key character, and this setting is counted among the most performed of them. Within a few years of whichever year it was actually written in, the patronage and the regimental choirs that had made this productive period possible were both gone, dissolved by imperial decree before Vedel's own life took its own far darker turn.

Artemy Vedel's life after his most productive years turned into one of the harsher stories in Ukrainian music history. Tsar Paul I abolished the regimental chapel choirs that had employed him in 1797 and prohibited non-liturgical church music outright, ending the patronage that had sustained his composing. Vedel entered the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra monastery as a novice in 1799, and that same year monastery authorities discovered a book containing handwritten insults about the royal family, attributed it to him, and had him declared mentally ill, confining him to an asylum for nearly a decade with no formal arrest or trial ever taking place. He was released in 1808, dying shortly afterward, and even his burial proved difficult to arrange given how the authorities still regarded him.

The suppression outlived him by a century. Performance and publication of his works were banned by two successive tsars, Paul I and then Alexander I, for more than a hundred years after his death, and it was only in the early twentieth century that the choirmaster Oleksandr Koshyts revived his music from surviving autograph manuscripts, bringing concertos like this one back into performance for the first time in generations. Soviet authorities then banned religious music performance again from 1928 until the political thaw of the 1950s, a second suppression layered on top of the first. Vedel is remembered today, alongside Maxim Berezovsky and Dmytro Bortniansky, as one of the Golden Three composers of eighteenth century Ukrainian classical music, a reputation his own century almost entirely failed to let him keep.