Nikolai Diletsky (1630- 1680)
DILETSKY, Nikolai Pavlovich (b. c. 1630, Kiev; d. c. 1680, according to other sources, c. 1690, Moscow) — received his musical education in Warsaw and Vilnius; taught church singing and was a precentor in Vilnius, and around 1677, in Smolensk; thereafter lived and worked in Moscow. Diletsky played a leading role in the establishment and dissemination of partesny singing (part-singing in the Western European style) in Russia and was the founder of an entire compositional school — Titov, Kalashni-kov, Bavykin, and many others. His Musikiyskaya grammatika [Musical grammar], written in Polish in 1675, and later translated into Russian, became the fundamental theoretical work that introduced Western European musical theory and composition in 17th-c. Russia. The extent of Diletsky’s compositional output has not yet been precisely established. At the present time the following works are known: for four voices — Sluzhba [Service] and a concerto “Izhe obrazu”; for eight voices — Sluzhba preportsial’naya and Sluzhba Kievskaya, the Voskresenskiy kanon [Kanon of the Resurrection] and the concertos “Voshel yesi” “Telo Hristovo” and “Priidite, liudiye” (The kanon and all concertos except for the last one have been published in: M. Dilets’kïy, Khorovi tvorï, Kiev: 1981. ) Other works of Diletsky, e. g., a Vespers comprised of 18 hymns, are known only from incomplete sets of part books and have not yet been reconstructed.
