Our idea and our song
Will neither die nor perish…
And that, good people, is our glory,
The glory of Ukraine!
No gold, no stone,
Nor cunning speech
But loud and true,
Just like the word of God

Students of the Foreign Languages Department with the curators Iryna Postolenko (Associate Professor at the Chair of English and methods of teaching English) and Yevgenia Protsko, the teacher at the same Chair, visited a concert dedicated to the 200th anniversary of Ukrainian national genius Taras Shevchenko held in the central city library.

The students had the opportunity to learn about Shevchenko’s music. He was a poet, painter, artist and musician famous in the world culture. An excerpt from the "Musician" shows Shevchenko as a romantic. He skillfully wrote about his personal tender love for the cello. "Arnovskiy has brought a cello. God, what a lovely toy it is! This magnificent musical instrument can sing and cry like a human soul. It might have been created by the Prometheus. I lay it down beside my bed and fall asleep. This is my life, my second ego. And if I were a slave twice, I would sell myself into slavery for the third time just to be able to own this instrument."

Speaking about Shevchenko and music it should be noted that Taras Shavchenko immensely loved the folk songs, easily learned them by heart and knew a lot of them. Shevchenko had a very good feel for music, moreover – he taught himself to play the piano and perform simple works by Mozart and Beethoven. He was an academician of the Academy of Arts - the title that was extremely hard to earn because one had to be highly educated to be awarded this title. Interestingly, Shevchenko visited all opera premieres, prestigious concerts; he was very fond of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Paganini, Servais, Vieuxtemps. All this suggests that Shevchenko was an intellectual of an elaborate artistic taste. The diaries of Shevchenko abounded with thoughts on music as he was analyzing it. He often referred to the Viennese classics. And of course, he had always been fascinated with the harmony of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The participants of the recital were interested in the fragment of Shevchenko’s notes made in 1957: "I heard a little orchestra playing the overture to Mozart's opera. This is such wonderful music that I think it can not be performed wrong, it always sounds divine."

The audience was captivated by the literary and musical events in the city library. Everyone discovered the Great Poet as a musician and a great connoisseur of music. Besides, everyone was impressed by the vocal and musical abilities of "Yatran" folk ensemble of Uman regional music school named after Porphyry Demutsky and the conservatory students. So the team expressed their gratitude to the central city library and students and faculty of the Uman conservatory for the noticeable achievements in commemoration of Ukrainian genius.