Composer Georgi Genkov - one of the last "flying people"

“My friend’s music… I often wonder how to describe it, and among the adjectives ‘strange, gentle, delicate’ that come to mind - unexpectedly, I know - there appears the word ‘smart’…” – these are words by the magnificent Bulgarian poet Valeri Petrov about the work of Bulgarian composer Georgi Genkov (1929–2010).

Renowned specialists claim that Genkov was the most talented “translator” of Valeri Petrov’s poetry into the language of music and the stage. Proof of this are his four musicals and one opera, based on the poet’s beloved fairy tales: А Button for Sleep, To Put It Mildly, Sea Blue, In the Moonlit Room, and A White Fairy Tale - long recognized as classic examples of Bulgarian musical theatre.

Georgi Genkov passed away on Christmas Day, December 25, 2010. Days later, on the pages of Kultura newspaper, he was remembered in memoriam as “a luminous personality and a proverbially modest man.”

A creator with a distinctively refined and exquisite aesthetic, in the second half of the 20th century Georgi Genkov produced representative works in Bulgarian theatre and film music. His characteristic style - vivid, associative, concise, with an extraordinary sense of dramaturgy - left a specific imprint, often described as “Wildean,” on more than 100 theatre productions, over 200 films, several symphonic suites, and dozens of children’s and popular songs.

At the beginning of the book An Attempt at a Portrait, published three years after his death, the composer’s wife - the prominent theatre director Prof. Bistra Atanasova - asks: “How can I encompass this vast and unusual personality? Exceptionally gifted, merged with the music he loved and wrote. Speaking with enthusiasm above all about others - whether geniuses in the arts or colleagues and friends - never about himself… He was an extraordinarily erudite musician… something like a musical encyclopedia - as he himself says in an interview: ‘For me, music is like the periodic table—if I hear something I don’t know, I immediately find its place in it.’”

In a conversation with musicologist Rumyаna Karakostova, published in 2004, Georgi Genkov concludes with the words:

“I continue to think that music is a world somewhere above us…” During his lifetime, he did not merely strive for other worlds - higher than ours; he quite literally dwelled there.

One of the most striking proofs is a perfect vocal miniature that first sounded in the film Adios, Muchachos. This touching drama by director Yanko Yankov, based on a screenplay by Valeri Petrov and Vasil Tsonev, premiered in 1978 and is largely forgotten today. Yet from its soundtrack comes the incomparable - in both text and music - Song of the Flying People. It is about those who do not come from outer space, who are born among us, yet who sometimes take flight—above the mud and ash, above mundane problems and material possessions, above insignificant joys and worries of life. They are “the flying ones,” at whose sight the rest of us secretly sigh and feel a strange ache from the vague memory that perhaps we too once belonged “to their kind.”

Georgi Genkov passed away on Christmas Day, December 25. It is said that the brightest and most righteous souls depart on great religious holidays -those who already fly while still alive. Like the creators of that wondrous song - Valeri Petrov and Georgi Genkov- and its performer, the unforgettable actor Asen Kisimov.

Read also:

• 105th anniversary of the birth of Valeri Petrov – the Knight of Poetry

English version: R. Petkova