According to many sources, the musical basis for the legendary song of the Aquarium group was an Italian melody of the Renaissance era. We checked whether this is actually true.

Few people in the post-Soviet space are unfamiliar with this motif. On a song that became widely known after the film's release "Assa" (1987), several generations have grown up. Thousands of teenagers learned the simple melody of “City of Gold” on the guitar, and in 1999 the composition took third place on the list “One hundred best songs of Russian rock in the 20th century” according to Our Radio. The Italian composer Francesco Canova da Milano (1497–1543) is mentioned as the author of its melody not only on numerous music sites, but also on the envelope first vinyl edition songs (titled "City") on the album "Ten Arrows". The author of the words is the Russian poet and translator Anri Volokhonsky. This live album was compiled back in 1986, but until 1992 it had the status of only a cassette samizdat.

However, you should not look for the story of the birth of the song in the biography of Boris Grebenshchikov. The fact is that he was not the first performer of “City of Gold”. The musician heard the composition in the early 80s in the play “Sid” at the theater studio of Eric Goroshevsky. BG later recalled: “Within five minutes I adopted how it was played - I have never heard a better song in Russian.” Grebenshchikov unsuccessfully tried to find out from the director the names of the authors of the masterpiece. It took years, the song had already become part of the Aquarium repertoire, and only in the late 80s the names of two emigrants reached Grebenshchikov: the bard Alexei Khvostenko and the poet Anri Volokhonsky.

It was Khvostenko who first performed the song in the first half of the 70s. And if Grebenshchikov was unable to contact Volokhonsky, who moved to Germany, he met Khvostenko in Paris in 1991. The musicians immediately became friends, although it all started with a heated debate. “I, without hearing it, sang “under the blue sky,” and he sang “above the blue sky.” A fundamental theological difference that we argued about then, in Paris, at four o’clock in the morning. We compared our versions,” remembered Boris Grebenshchikov. The issue of plagiarism was not even discussed.

As for Henri Volokhonsky, he really was the author of the poems for the song, and this was confirmed by extensive investigation, published by Ze'ev Geisel in 2005. This is what Volokhonsky told Geisel over the phone:

“I heard... a record where it was written that this was the music of Francesco di Milano. He walked and purred. I was in a depressed mood then, since Khvostenko, with whom we wrote many songs, left for Moscow, and I remained in St. Petersburg. With the thoughts “How am I going to write songs now?” I was walking around St. Petersburg and went into the workshop of my friend Axel and wrote this text in about 15 minutes. This was in November-December 1972.”

By Axel here we meant the Leningrad artist Boris Axelrod, who was then commissioned to create a mosaic panel “Sky” for the Tauride Garden. Unfortunately, the panel remained unfinished, but, according to eyewitnesses, various animals could be seen against its blue background (hence the fundamental “above the sky” in the original lyrics of the song). That's why the poem got the title "Paradise".

However, we are more interested in the very record that Volokhonsky is talking about. It was called “Lute Music of the 16th–17th Centuries” and went through several editions starting in 1970. Here are some of them:

The cover doesn't tell us much, but the back of the sleeve and the record itself are quite informative:

So, the Italian’s work, which Henri Volokhonsky listened to, was called “Suite for Lute: Canzone and Dance,” and it was performed by a certain Vladimir Vavilov. There’s just one catch: in da Milano’s work there is no such genre as canzone at all. There is no such word in lists his works, nor in related authoritative articles on the Internet. For some reason, it appears only in Russian-language sources, and most of them are associated with the song “Golden City”. And of all the heritage of Milano, only "Fantasy No. 30" bears a very distant resemblance to the beginning of the song.

As Ze'ev Geisel found out, immediately after its release the record caused outrage among Soviet musicologists, who could not find similar works in the works of these composers (and there were quite famous people among them). However, they also had no evidence to the contrary, and the main performer, Vladimir Fedorovich Vavilov, then avoided commenting. Unfortunately, it was simply impossible to obtain these comments during the investigation - the prominent Leningrad lutenist and guitarist died in 1973 at the age of 47 from cancer.

The first truly useful information about Vavilov was given to Geisel by his colleague Yadviga Kovalevskaya: “Volodya Vavilov? Well, of course, I remember him very well. And the melodies that he composed... And this one, which he passed off as Francesco da Milano.” Her words were confirmed by another honored guitarist Abram Brushtein: “Yes, I knew this personally from Vavilov: he himself wrote the music on this record.” The latter helped Geisel contact Vladimir Vavilov’s daughter Tamara. She put an end to the investigation: “Father was sure that the works of an unknown self-taught man with the banal surname “Vavilov” would never be published. But he really wanted his music to become known. This was much more important to him than the fame of his last name..."

In the end, it turned out that of what ended up on the record, only the famous melody “Green Sleeves” (attributed to, by the way, to Henry VIII himself) and "Spagnoletta" were not created by Vladimir Vavilov. Moreover, “Canzona” was not the only one that gained fame. "Richercar" supposedly by Nicolo Nigrino, Soviet Central Television used it in many programs. A wonderful fate awaited “Ave Maria,” which Vavilov left on the record without an author, but then, handing over the notes to the famous opera singer Irina Bogacheva, saidthat the author of the work is Giulio Caccini. And today, the best voices on the planet continue to perform this masterpiece, and in the credits often the name Caccini is indicated. In music schools, students study “Naisiedler” and “Galilee”, not knowing that all this music was written by a wonderful and not at all vain composer with a tragic fate, Vladimir Fedorovich Vavilov.