The birth of the choir (1952–1956)

The fullest account of the choir’s beginnings comes from Lyuba Lipova, for many years its chair and deputy chair, and the author quotes her memoir at length. She links Morski Zvutsi to the city’s whole choral tradition – from Dobri Hristov’s Gusla (1899–1900) and the Morski Zvutsi society (1925–1926), a member of the Bulgarian Singers’ Union, to the Stefan Yovchev youth ensemble founded in the autumn of 1945.

After Morski Zvutsi (1948) and Stefan Yovchev (1951) closed, Varna was left without a choir of its own. Lipova describes 1952–1955 as years of sleepless nights and failed attempts: four or five times singers came together under different conductors, but the groups were small, rehearsals started at 10 or 11 p.m. when the endless meetings were over, and the conductors Lyuben Todorov, Petko Mechkov and Iliya Dushek lost heart and gave up. What was missing was a unifying force.

As chair of the council’s standing committee on culture, Lipova was tasked with finding a way to create a representative choir. She travelled to Sofia and persuaded Prof. Georgi Dimitrov to release Marin Chonev – who was being groomed for a career in Sofia – so that he could return to his home town. She quotes the professor’s words: Varna deserved help to revive its musical life and to become a centre of choral art and international cultural exchange.

Her proposal – a choir of 120 singers under the City Committee of the Fatherland Front and the City People’s Council, with Marin Chonev as conductor – was adopted as decision No. 25 in minute No. 7 of the executive committee of 1 March 1956 (a copy of the document is reproduced in the book). Chonev gave up his post as assistant conductor of the Academic Choir in Sofia and set about recruiting singers.

The first rehearsal took place on 26 April 1956 in the hall of the Cultural Workers’ Club. The start was hard: the choir had 30–40 members, often only two or three tenors and five or six basses turned up, and sometimes the women’s parts were missing altogether. The conductor was young, the singers were almost his age, and that is exactly what bound them together. At the first general meeting, on 25 December 1956, the choir adopted its rules and elected a board: chairman Hristo Hristov, deputy chairman Iliya Iliev, secretary Nadya Borisova, cultural officer Mira Petkova and treasurer – the author himself, Stoyan Boychev. The question of a name was postponed until the choir “looked like a true representative choir”.

The singers themselves recruited new members. Many former members of the old choirs were wary of the new ensemble, but in the autumn of 1956, with the help of recruiting committees in offices and factories, the choir grew quickly – the sopranos, if anything, too much. Each section rehearsed once a week, and the full choir once a week, with vocal and sight-singing exercises; the repertoire was mostly a cappella and demanding, and progress was slow but steady.