Sonnet VIII by William Shakespeare in Songs of Kabalevsky, Stravinsky and Mykietyn

Sonnet VIII Music to hear by William Shakespeare belongs to socalled “procreation sonnets”, where the poet insists on a young man to get married and have children. It should grant immortality to him and his youthful beauty to the world. The poem, written in iambic pentameter, reveals the structure of an Elizabethan sonnet. The main emphasis is laid on the last stanza which does not serve anymore as a protective advice, but as a warning. The syndrome of Sonnet VIII, understood after Mieczysław Tomaszewski as a “group of constitutive features” is formed here by the following categories: musicality, metaphorism, oxymoronity, rhetoric and erotic ambivalence. The poem has found its musical interpretations in the output of the 20 th-century composers: Dmitry Kabalevsky, Igor Stravinsky and Paweł Mykietyn. All songs are both musically and expressively distant from each other, nevertheless each of them reflects an element of the Sonnet’s character. Metaphorism and oxymoronity appear in music of every composer in a very individualized way, which is proved by the analysis of relations between text and music. The sphere of erotic ambivalence is present only in Mykietyn’s song, intended for a male soprano. In a lyrical song by Kabalevsky the musicality and rhetoricof the poem are especially underlined. In a constructivist approach of Stravinsky (dodecaphony) and Mykietyn (circle canon) analogies to an intellectual game and a net of complex literary metaphors in the poem can be found.