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Words people. Recorded in Moscow in 1971 Valery Gavrilin about his Russian Songbook I once heard a story about a tenth-form student in a school in Leningrad who had died of an illness. He was handsome and intelligent and was loved by many. It was a tragic event and there is nothing that can be done to change it. There was so much he had not learned or seen. Nor had he experienced love. And there may live a girl who would have loved him if he still lived. So, I decided to write a story in place of this girl, a story of love that could have been but never was, a poem about love and death. I tried to order the eight songs within the cycle to juxtapose emotions and to enable the listeners to follow the plot. These are songs of reminiscence with folk lyrics collected in the Leningrad, the Vologda and the Smolensk regions. As for the music, it does not contain any folk tunes. However, it is related directly to intonations of folklore and uses different folk genres.
