General overview of Regamey Sr's oeuvre

A pianist by education, Régamey Sr also composed music – mainly songs with piano and instrumental miniatures. His output, scattered in various Ukrainian libraries (mainly in Kyiv) but also in Polish ones, remains largely undiscovered. In Ukraine, his works are often found among uncatalogued, unclassified library stock. Régamey Sr became much sought after as music composer around 1913, when his pieces began to be printed by the official publishing house of the tsar’s court (G.I. Indzhishek in Kyiv-Baku), which had its branches in many large Russian cities from Moscow and Saint Petersburg to Voronezh and Rostov-on- Don. The only lists of compositions available to date are those found on the covers of Indzhishek’s prints. The vast majority of the listed works are songs, vocal romances, and other small-scale vocal pieces of the kind then commonly performed in bourgeois salons. Those mini-catalogues of forthcoming publications list about a dozen songs to words by well-known Russian poets such as Aleksei Apukhtin, Leonid Andruson, and Semen Nadson, collected in Régamey’s Opp. 4, 8, 9, and 12. Of special interest is a virtuoso ballad with Spanish colouring to words by Alexander Pushkin, performed by the well-known baritone Kazimierz Czekotowski in his own translation into Polish (‘Jam, tu Inesilla’ [I, Inesila, am here]). Other surviving pieces include two piano miniatures (Improvisation, Op. 10 and Chanson triste, Op. 11, the latter being one of six now unknown pieces from that opus), as well as a graceful suite of salon waltzes titled Un coin paisible (Tikhy ugolok) printed by another, even more popular publishing house: Edition Leon Idzikowski, Warsaw-Kyiv. The last known work by Régamey Sr from that time is the (melodically particularly attractive) Berceuse, Op. 6 No. 1 for violin and piano. 

Unfortunately, only a part of Régamey Sr’s musical output has been located so far. What we have is basically functional art – piano miniatures and songs composed for performers and audiences of ‘salon music’, which was commonly performed at private homes before the October Revolution. Régamey Sr, as we know, worked as a teacher throughout his adult life. He gave piano lessons, but also contributed to the didactic literature itself by preparing and publishing educational collections of piano studies for learners. As many as twelve such booklets (Sobranye progressivo-raspredlyennykh etyudov. Sostavlenoe pod redaktsey K Regame) are known to have been published by G.I. Indzhishek in Kyiv, comprising études by such composers as Berens, Bertini, Burgmüller, Czerny, Heller, Hummel, and others. Of greatest interest to us are studies which Régamey composed himself for these editions. For instance, Book II contains three pieces of his own, Book V - five, Book VII – one. They not only illustrate the given technical problem and a texture type proper to such exercises, but also demonstrate a musical logic of their own.

Jerzy Stankiewicz, "The Forgotten figure...