As usual, I get up in the morning and when I cook breakfast, some melody starts spinning in my brain.

Suddenly I remembered Glinka’s romance to the words of the Kukolnik “Calm down the excitement, the passions …”. It seems to be nothing unusual.

The words are meaningless, the music is good. But suddenly, AT the SAME TIME, another, melodically similar theme began to sound – the Prince’s aria from Dargomyzhsky’s opera “Rusalka” – ”Mermaid”:

«Involuntarily, an unknown force draws me to these sad shores…”.

Stop!

I have already written about it, comparing its melodic similarity to the aria of Faust from Gounod’s opera “Faust»

“Greetings to you, holy shelter!

Hello, innocent orphanage!”

It turns out that it is also similar to Glinka’s romance (Both “Faust” and Glinka’s romance were written BEFORE the opera “Mermaid”!)

And today, and again in the morning, the musical theme of the opening of the diplomatic reception-ball in the musical “My Fair Lady” 1956 by Frederick Lowe sounded. But again, something SIMILAR suddenly came to mind – the motif from the song for the movie “Meeting on the Elbe”: “The wind of the peace waves the banners of victory …” 1949 (Composer – Dmitry Shostakovich). Maybe it was an accident, or maybe not! I once wrote about his “Romance” dedicated to the memory of his wife, Nina Varzar-Shostakovich (“NITOCHKA”, as her friends called her), who was at the astrophysical congress in Yerevan, suddenly felt unwell, underwent surgery, and died immediately after the operation.

Then the same music was played in the mediocre Soviet film «Gadfly». And in the West, for some reason, it is always associated with this idiotic film, and not with the tragic sudden death of Nina.

So, they were well acquainted with Shostakovich’s works in the West, and perhaps the composer Lowe heard it somewhere, and years later, forgetting about what he had heard, reproduced something similar without even realizing this coincidence.

13 VII 2026