Crossing the Borders in Serbian Art Song of the First Half of the Twentieth Century

In this paper, we examine the vocal creation of three Serbian composers from the first half of the twentieth century: Petar Konjović (1883‒1970), Miloje Milojević (1884‒1946), and Stevan Hristić (1885‒1958). Their work in this generic field is very varied, thanks to the different poetic inspirations, and is marked by a constant going beyond the borders once established: aesthetic and stylistic, generic but also geographical. The three composers who were educated and had spent a long time in European cultural centers were naturally influenced by different stylistic currents. In a period of artistic creation marked by the plurality of stylistic and aesthetic currents, as well as by borrowings from cultural heritages from distant countries, their art song is part of this intersection of stylistic, generic, and geographic frameworks. Stylistically, it spreads from Romanticism, through Impressionism, to atonal Modernism. Generically, their art song affirms the proximity with the German Lied, the French mélodie, the Russian romance and the Balkan vocal models, like sevdalinka. Geographically, the work of all these authors, as well as of their important contemporaries such as Marko Tajčević (1900‒1984) or Josip Slavenski (1896‒1955), was inspired by folkloric music from different, then Yugoslav, regions, more broadly, from the Balkans, by European folkloric heritage, but also by distant or “exotic” cultures. Although all three authors composed sevdalinka, stylizing the traditional song of Bosnia and Herzegovina, this generic variant was the most represented in Konjović’s opus. We will examine in our paper the art songs by Konjović ‒ Sabah (1922) stylizing the Islamic tradition, by Stevan Hristić ‒ The Spanish song (ed. 1949) evoking the Iberian folkloric milieu, as well as songs by Miloje Milojević, whose extensive vocal work has several times exceeded previously set poetic frameworks.