Amani Nicolas. Album pour la jeunesse pour piano

Moscow: Jurgenson, 1904. — 30 p.The "Album pour la jeunesse" is Nikolai Amani's (1872 - 1904) last published opus, his swan song. It was written on the Crimean peninsula, to which Amani had retreated because of his tuberculosis, from which he also died soon after. Amani, who was penniless throughout his life, was a composition student of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Anatoly Lyadov at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. He was a protégé of the St. Petersburg publisher Mitrofan P. Beliaev, who ran the publishing house of M. P. Belaieff in Leipzig, where he made sheet music by Russian composers available to a Western audience.
Amani was probably first inspired to write the title by his famous predecessors Robert Schumann and Peter Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky's album was already reminiscent of Schumann, whom he revered. Tchaikovsky even expressed the opinion "that the music of the second half of this century will go down in the history of art as a period that later generations will call Schumann's." However, I see circumstantial evidence that Amani also had other sources of inspiration for this: quite certainly the "Album für die Jugend" by the German composer Xaver Schwarwenka, which was published internationally by several publishers at once beginning in 1885 https://imslp.org/wiki/Album_for_the_... Both compositions consist of 12 parts. The compositional technique is similar in part (for example, movement technique and chromaticism in the two marches), and there are striking key and melodic affinities (compare, for example, Scharwenka's "Im Volkston" and Amani's "Chansonnette"). Particularly striking, however, is the use on both sides of the rather rarely used title "Scherzino" and the inclusion of Baroque musical forms or dance movements (both have a minuet), so absent from Schumann and Tchaikovsky's collections. Both cycles end with a more difficult virtuoso piece.
Schumann's pieces are much easier to play than Amani's, and the level of difficulty of Amani's "youth pieces" also exceeds that of Tchaikovsky's. The level of difficulty probably begins in the lower-middle range and extends to pieces that require a higher level of pianistic skill and that are at best accessible only to more advanced students. This leads to the question of what Amani's goal was with the pieces. They are probably intended less as instructional pieces than as independent character pieces; in part, he is already following a trend in which pieces masquerading as children's albums already seem to be taking on a life of their own (Scharwenka, for example, but others as well). Amani, who knew about his bad state of health, lived himself out here once again, in which he tried his hand at different compositions between reminiscence of baroque, classical and late romantic chromaticism. Reminiscences of old times ("A la leçon de piano", Gavotte) are paired with longings and worries. Even if the album begins light-footedly and contains cheerful and even winking moments (the piece "A la leçon de piano", for example, turns a superficial finger exercise into a genuine sonata or sonatina with all the requirements of the classical sonata form) - it is nevertheless noticeable that half of the pieces strike a decidedly plaintive note, at least in part (No. 2, 3, 4, 6, 9 and 11). This is the case even in pieces where one would hardly expect it, such as the "Petite Valse" or even quite abruptly in the "Chansonnette" which begins very light-heartedly.