Sevdana

Zlatev-Cherkin wrote Sevdana for violin and piano in 1944, and Nedyalka Simeonova played it that same year with Lilyana Baynova at the piano. He was primarily a voice teacher — trained in Vienna, later rector of the State Academy of Music in Sofia and for three years a professor at conservatories in China — and this short piece has outlasted his operettas and his fifty songs. Sevdana is a girl's name; his grandson, the pianist Georgi Cherkin, has said it belonged to a love the composer never realised. Versions for viola, cello and for violin with orchestra followed.