The Aeolian harp. This poetic image entered the Russian literary language from the end of 1814-the time of publication of the ballad of V. A. Zhukovsky with this name. Let us recall a fragment of this poem in the part concerning the "musical" theme. Arminius, the bard, who was in love with Princess Minwana, hung his harp on an oak tree as a pledge of their pure love. According to the singer's prediction, after his death, the harp sounded by itself: "something staggered / Leaves without wind; / And something snuggled up / To the strings, invisibly flying down from a height... / And suddenly ... out of the silence / Rose a long, pensive chime." Having thus learned of the death of her lover, Minwana also died of grief soon after. Her soul merged in heaven with that of Arminius, but since then "the oak tree stirs and the strings [of the harp] resound."
The idea of a lyre hanging (on a cypress tree), which was supposed to leap up after the death of the hero (fortunately, he was still alive, and the lyre hung silently "in the dust", i.e. in the dust), is also played out in I. I. Dmitriev's poem "To the Lyre" (1791). Despite the fact that Zhukovsky mentioned Aeolus in the title of the ballad, the harp in his work does not sound at all from the wind, although usually such harps "played" precisely at the will of the winds. What was the Aeolian harp?
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The Encyclopedia of Music explains that it was a box-resonator with several metal strings that sounded from the wind. The first mention of such an instrument dates back to the X century.
The appearance of the image of the Aeolian harp in European poetry and the disclosure of its mystical purpose is shown in the detailed work of A. E. Mokhov "The Aeolian Harp: the Thing and the Poetic World" (Russkaya rech. 1993. N 4), to which we refer interested readers. In turn, we will use some information from Mokhov's article concerning the history of the instrument.
The Aeolian harp, as understood by Zhukovsky's contemporaries, was ...
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