Kyrylo Stetsenko

Stetsenko worked between 1882 and 1922 across Eastern Orthodox priest, conductor, composer, music educator and musicologist and 2 further recorded occupations. The registers place that work in art song, patriotic music, choral music, opera, children's opera and folk music. This article rests on 1 catalogued composition and 4 scholarly references drawn from named institutional registers. Every statement below returns to a source shown in the evidence panel; where the record is silent or divided, the article says so instead of resolving it.

Kyrylo Stetsenko studied at Kiev Theological Academy and Mykola Lysenko Music and Drama Institute. Training under Mykola Lysenko is recorded. Yevmen Ivanovych Marykivsky is recorded as having studied under Kyrylo Stetsenko. The recorded working language is Ukrainian and Russian. The field of work recorded is composed musical work, conducting and pastoral care. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are art song, patriotic music, choral music and opera. Places of work recorded in the authority are Kyiv, Vepryk and Donbas. Employment is recorded with Mykola Lysenko Music and Drama Institute.

• Name — Kyrylo Stetsenko • Born — 12 May 1882 • Birthplace — Kvitky, Russian Empire (now Ukraine) • Died — 29 April 1922 • Place of death — Vepryk, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union • Instrument — * Voice • piano • harmonium • Genre — Classical • Occupation — * Composer • conductor • teacher • priest

Kyrylo Stetsenko was born in Kvitky, in the land of Cherkashchyna, in Ukraine. His father, Hryhoriy, was a painter of icons and was known around for painting churches in nearby villages. His mother, Mariia, was the daughter of a deacon in the same village. Kyrylo was eighth of eleven children. When Kyrylo Stetsenko was aged 10, his maternal uncle Danylo Horyanskyi took him to study at the Saint Sophia Church School, where the boy was enrolled for five years, from 1892 to 1897. The young boy lived with his uncle in Kyiv, only returning home to his parents during the summer. However, since his family was poor, the boy had to work during this "vacation", and his mother would spend the money that he earned on new clothes for him. During his studies at the school, Stetsenko sang in the school choir and after three years, he already conducted the group. The boy also learned how to play the harmonium and the piano. At age thirteen, wrote his first composition: I Will Always Praise the Lord for choir.

The composer's life was constantly affected by political events. Stetsenko was complicit in the publication of his own choral arrangement of the Ukrainian national anthem without Russian censor approval in 1911. The printer (A. Chokolov) took the blame fully on himself refusing to implicate Stetsenko, and as a result was sentenced to death. The Russian authorities could not prove Stetsenko's complicity, and he was exiled from Kyiv. He managed to return to the city only to leave one year later due to political and economic pressures. In 1911, urged by his uncle, Stetsenko became an Orthodox priest. Financial security, however, came at a price. The composer was required to serve in an obscure village in south-western Ukraine, far from the cultural life of Kyiv. There, in his self-imposed exile, Stetsenko weathered the political storm of World War I.

Kyrylo Stetsenko returned to Kyiv with the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of 1917. When the Ukrainian People's Republic was declared, Stetsenko was made head of the Music Section in the Ministry of Education. He created two national choirs. One choir was led by composer Oleksandr Koshyts toured Europe and North America to promote Ukraine as an independent nation. Stetsenko led the other choir, touring Ukraine to promote national unity. When the Bolsheviks took over Ukraine in 1920, the Koshyts choir was stranded abroad while Stetsenko's choir was disbanded by the new Communist government. Stetsenko left Kyiv to work in a parish in the village of Vepryk, south of the city. The language of this parish was solely Ukrainian and in 1921, he became one of the founders of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. In Vepryk he founded a choir and theatre where he was performed on stage. The villagers referred to Stetsenko as the "bright Father". As political repressions were renewed against Ukrainians, famine and disease began to spread. In spring 1922 Stetsenko died of typhus while tending to the sick during an outbreak of the disease.

His daughter, Dora Kuzmenko, was an opera singer in her native Ukraine. She escaped capture by the Soviets during WWII and lived in a Displaced Persons camp in Austria for a number of years before immigrating to United States. She died in Syracuse NY in the 1960s. His grandson, Kyrylo Stetsenko, is a violinist and composer in Ukraine. He provides information about his grandfather.

In his works and activity, Stetsenko continued the national focus in Ukrainian music, that was started by Mykola Lysenko. Stetsenko composed over 30 solo vocal works to the words by Ukrainian poets Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, Lesya Ukrainka, Pavlo Hrabovsky, Oleksandr Oles and others. He wrote 42 art songs, over 100 sacred and secular choral pieces, including two liturgies and a requiem, and music to a dozen stage works. His Art Songs have been recorded by renowned British Bass Baritone Pavlo Hunka. Stetsenko's greatest and most well-known works were written a few months before the end of his life. His last work was the panakhyda written in memory of his teacher and friend Mykola Lysenko. Among Stetsenko's arrangements is the song Ой видно село (Oh a Village Can Be Seen), written by Ukrainian Sich Riflemen officer Levko Lepkyi during the First World War. Stetsenko's version of the song sung by fighters of the Red Ukrainian Galician Army became a popular wedding and army song in Ukraine under the Soviet rule. Since 2022 it has been performed by the Ensemble of Song and Dance of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

• Choral works • church pieces (2 liturgies, 1 pankhyda) • cantatas • choruses a cappella and with piano accompaniment • arrangements of Ukrainian folk songs. • Plays • Proposing to a Potter's daughter by Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko • What Thyrsus rustled about by Spyrydon Cherkasenko • Buval'shchyna by A. Velysovskyi • Operas (incomplete) • Polonianka • Karmaliuk • Haidamaky • Theatre works • Ifigenia in Tauridia after a drama by Lesya Ukrainka • music to the poem Haidamaky by Taras Shevchenko • Children's operas • Ivasyk-Telesyk • The Fox, the Cat, and the Rooster • Numerous children's songs.

Kyrylo Stetsenko is recorded with the occupation Eastern Orthodox priest. Recorded with the occupation choir director. Recorded with the occupation music educator. Recorded as eastern orthodox priest, conductor, composer, music educator and musicologist.