Abstract. The article presents a comparative analysis of various vocal and performing interpretations of one musical and poetic text – P. I. Tchaikovsky’s romance “Tell Me What in the Shadow of the Branches...”. The topic of individual and personal understanding of the musical image and the discovery of the semantic multiplicity of the literary text is touched upon. The scientifi c novelty of the research consists in the attempt to study and analyse equally convincing performing interpretations of the chamber vocal work from the perspective of the hermeneutic approach proposed in the works of H.-G. Gadamer. As a result, the conclusion is made about the possibility of using the hermeneutic approach while studying vocal and performing interpretations, in which a well-known musical work is fi lled with new semantic nuances, and performing creativity is interpreted conditionally as co-author activity, which helps to discover hidden semantic possibilities of the performed text.

Keywords: vocal and performing creativity, hermeneutics, musical text, poetic text,

P. Tchaikovsky