To Russian Professor, with Love
April 3, 1933–Nov. 24, 2020
When his Colgate colleagues and former students ponder Professor Richard Sylvester’s many talents, they are unlikely to think of his genius for prosody. But for Dick, who taught Russian at Colgate from 1978–95, the study of poetic meter and rhyme — and of the subtler tonalities and textures in poetry, whether written, spoken, or sung — was an engrossing passion. From boyhood, Dick collected records of classical and popular music, and he cherished the well-phrased and delicately delivered song. Beginning with Sarah Vaughan and Frank Sinatra, his appreciation grew to embrace the American jazz and pop of the war and post-war eras; the songsters of classic rock ’n’ roll; and the Russian bards, folk, and rock singers he discovered in his journeys in the Soviet Union. He adored the stars of opera, from Chaliapin to Callas, Obukhova to Hvorostovsky, and they helped inspire his research into Russian romance songs.
After leading his final Russian study groups, Dick retired in 1995 to work on his two magisterial volumes of poetic analysis, Tchaikovsky’s Complete Songs (2002) and Rachmaninoff’s Complete Songs (2014), both of which were also translated into Russian. These two books were published in the Indiana University Press “Russian Music Studies” series. Dick was thrilled when concert organizers asked to use his translations in vocal programs at Carnegie Hall and the Oxford Lieder Festival. It delighted him that opera singers (some well known) consulted him on fine points of delivery, or wrote to tell him how his books helped guide their performance of Russian songs.
Except for his ability on the castanets, which he picked up (along with tap dancing) in Long Beach, Calif., as a boy, Dick was not a musician; he painstakingly taught himself to read music and musical theory. He studied Russian at West Point (along with the mathematics of artillery targeting), English literature as a Rhodes scholar at Worcester College, Oxford, and Slavic languages and literatures for his Harvard PhD. Even late in life, he rejoiced in calling out iambs, trochees, and anapests as he dwelt over lines of John Donne, Robert Frost, or Joseph Brodsky. When Dick listened to Sinatra, he caught the unexpected pauses and unusual rhythms that made Sinatra so breathtaking; Dick heard Sinatra as a deliverer of poetry, not only as a seductive crooner.
Brodsky, Dick’s friend for three decades, remarked on these literary talents. In a 1975 letter, he called Dick “an extremely thoughtful specialist in Russian literature, who possesses, in addition, great artistic feeling” and praised Dick’s “irreproachable” mastery of Russian language and Slavic and English literatures. Nobel laureate Brodsky also remarked on Dick’s faithful friendship through many challenging times in the poet’s life.
Dick’s longtime partner, Vasya Petyarkhin of Moscow, was himself a singer and student of vocal music, and it was Dick’s immense joy to be able to bring Vasya to the United States and the United Kingdom after the end of the USSR. Together they went to operas in England, Scotland, and California, and to their beloved Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, N.Y.
Alongside his immersion in poetry and song, Dick’s students were the other main passion of his life. He introduced them to Russian music, poetry, art, architecture, cuisine, and the rituals of everyday life in his courses on campus and on the six Colgate Russian study groups he led. His former students remained devoted and attentive to their teacher, mentor, and friend, and his interest in their lives never waned. With regularity, they visited him at his home in Hamilton, and as he said in the summer of 2020: “My students have brought me the greatest joys of my life. And they are so faithful.”
Richard Sylvester lived to be 87. He leaves a sister and other family, as well as many friends, former students, and appreciative scholars and singers all over the world. Not long after he died, Wigmore Hall in London wrote to request use of his translations for a concert of Tchaikovsky songs. He would have sung a happy tune to know that.
— Nancy Ries, professor of anthropology and peace and conflict studies