There are people who manage to win people's hearts by heart, step by step, without great aspirations and without absurd pretensions. There are artists who are imposing a way of saying or doing things so authentically that they become a trend, that they impose themselves, despite everything they might have against them.

But these are phenomena that occur far from the so-called "Show Business", far from the limelight, far from the entertainment magazines. These are forged in the street, on a daily basis, in daily life and can reach a pattern, a way of doing or saying.

This is the case of the artist I'm going to talk about today, an actor, a singer, a poet, a composer:

Vladimir Vysotsky

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The most correct term to name his nationality is "Soviet", because he was born and died in that country that was called Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Soviet Union and was known by the acronym USSR. However, I clarify, yes, he was born in Russia and was Russian by birth (but Russia was only a part, one of the republics of the Soviet Union). In that country was born, formed and created a way to communicate, to "say his things."

Vladimir Semyonovich Vysotsky (Russian: Владимир Семёнович Высоцкий), was the son of a soldier and a German translator. As a child he lived in Germany, thanks to his father's military career. But one time back to the USSR and after completing her baccalaureate, he started engineering studies at the Moscow Institute of Civil Engineering, but there he was only one semester, because long before he had already been awakened by the passion for theater.

Both his mother and his paternal grandmother were theater lovers and both used to attend performances in the different theaters of the city. No doubt there began to germinate that passion. But during his stay in Germany, thanks to his excellent grades, the father got a piano and put him into music, an activity he did during his three years in that country.

Before finishing school, his friend, Igor Kokhanovsky, who eventually became a poet and author of many songs of that country, gave him a guitar and was the one who taught him his first chords.

When he left engineering was to enter to study what became his profession, the theater. For this he entered the Nemiróvich-Dánchenko Study School of the Moscow Art Theater, where he studied between 1955 and 1960.

His first steps were in the Pushkin Theater, but his career shone from his entry into the cast of the Drama and Comedy Theater in Taganka, one of the most avant-garde, renowned and prominent theaters in the country. His most outstanding characters in that theater were Hamlet, in his leading role; The Good Soul of Sezuan and The Life of Galileo, these last two of the German Bertolt Brecht.

His jump to the cinema did not wait and there he triumphed widely, in his role as an actor and later also in the music part.

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His music

Putting aside the fact that his formal studies were theater, he had an enormous inclination and facility for music.

The director of the Taganka, Yuri Lyubimov, said that when he invited Vysotsky to join his cast, he told him that he had written some songs and asked him if he wanted to listen to them. Lyubimov accepted and thought to listen to at least one, so as not to look bad before Vladimir. The impact that caused his repertoire was such that it became an hour and a half recital.

Initially Vysotsky only interpreted his songs for his friends, in intimate meetings. But the personality he had singing was causing an effect that soon grew his fame throughout the theater.

At that time, in the musical field, the usual thing was that there was a musician who was the composer of the melody, an author in charge of writing the lyrics for that melody and a singer who was in charge of performing the song. At least in the Soviet Union, nothing else was styled. Vysotsky begins to break with the paradigms, because the singer-songwriter did not exist. For this reason, despite the growing fame that this young man was winning, the Soviet labels did not show even the slightest interest.

In times of rebellion there are always ways of doing things and we are talking about the time when cassettes became worldwide in the form of disseminating "underground" music. And it was this tool that made his repertoire begin to spread throughout all the republics that made up the country, where they began to label him as "The Bard", a term that this artist did not like.

The style and manner of interpreting his repertoire was something so unique and personal that the specialists have developed many works to define his work.

The Wikipedia in Russian contains an article entitled "Song and poetic works of Vladimir Vysotsky", in which they give the following description:

The songs and the poetic works of Vladimir Vysotsky are considered by the researchers as a unique artistic whole, in which the text, the music and the style of interpretation coexist organically. The poet gained initial fame as the author of country and street songs. Since the mid-1960s, the themes of his works began to expand, the number of heroes of songs and images increased; Thanks to the new masks and plots, a new Soviet-style "encyclopedia of Russian life" has been created. The lyrics of the first half of the 1970s were heavily influenced by Vysotsky's work on the image of Hamlet in the play at the Taganka theater. During this period confessional intonations appeared in the texts of the poet, the author began to resort more frequently to the eternal questions of being. All the achievements of these conditional creative stages came together in the last years of Vysotsky's life; His songs, written in the second half of the 1970s, are described by high-ranking scholars as "synthesis poetry."

Wikipedia

His lyrics

One of the characteristics of his songs, which contributed to the enormous success he had, was the content of the lyrics, which played all imaginable themes. Anything that a Soviet citizen could live was reflected in some of his songs, from the critical aspect to the everyday problems, such as love, friendship, death.

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In 1974, after being known throughout the country, is the state record label Melodiya, publishes his first album, a collection of songs, under the title "Избранное" (Favorites), which were already sung by all youth.

Vladimir's death occurred at a very early age, barely 42 years old, in 1980. Heart problems added to a strenuous train of work and the excessive consumption of substances such as alcohol, drugs and tobacco produced this outcome, in an environment of mystery that awakened suspicion among the police, but that had to be discarded for lack of evidence.

After his death, Vladimir Vysotsky received all kinds of tributes and recognitions.

One day like yesterday, January 25, Vysotsky had to turn 81 years old. Serve this publication as a tribute to his work.

As curious facts, it is to be noted that he used the classic Russian guitar, which is very similar to the Spanish, but with 7 strings, which are tuned from D-G-B-D-G-B-C. However, this singer-songwriter tuned a tone down, so the sound was more characteristic. Almost all his repertoire is written in minor mode, mostly in A minor.

Vysotsky resented being asked to tune his guitar, which is why in many of his recordings the instrument is more or less tuned.

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Music

Кони привередливые (Horses fastidious)

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Утренняя гимнастика (Morning gymnastics)

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Братские могилы (Mass graves)

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Прощание с горами (Farewell to the mountains)

From film “Vertical”, 1967

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Filmography at IMDB

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