- Biography
- Dance of the Tumblers
- Capriccio Espagnol
- Russian Easter Festival Overture
- Scheherazade
- The Flight of the Bumblebee
- The Golden Cockerel
Biography
Often very much underrated, Rimsky-Korsakov not only wrote many very fine and now popular works but he played an extremely important role in the development and history of Russian music.
Many of the famous Russian composers were taught by him and his extraordinary talent for orchestration is undeniable.
He came from a musical family and like most children of the day started learning the piano at quite an early age, when it was soon discovered that he possessed the rare gift of having perfect pitch.
No one really took much notice of any talent that he displayed and he was sent off to naval college in St Petersburg, where he mixed with a number of people who were interested in music.
His enthusiasm and enjoyment of music grew to the point that he moved into a circle of illustrious composers and began writing seriously himself: the other members of this clique were Cui, Borodin, Balakirev and Mussorgsky, and they became known as ‘The Five’.
Rimsky became close friends with Mussorgsky and the two encouraged each other and bounced ideas around to their mutual benefit.
Rimsky wrote nothing of any great stature during these early years and was regarded by many purely as a talented amateur, but he was gaining knowledge and developing his compositional technique all the while.
In 1871 his real talent was recognised and he was made a professor at the St Petersburg Conservatory (although he later admitted that he was only a few pages ahead of his students when it came to harmony and counterpoint!) and in 1873 he was also given quite a prestigious job in the navy as the Inspector of Military Bands.
Rimsky shared a flat with Mussorgsky, and as the latter was a chronic alcoholic life was invariably difficult.
When eventually his flat-mate died in 1881, Rimsky carried on with the task of orchestrating Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov, and this is quite often the version that is performed today.
The years rolled by, and Rimsky wrote three works in 1888 that have now become the most popular of his output – Capriccio Espagnol, Sheherazade and the Russian Easter Festival Overture.
He carried on writing operas and he eventually became regarded as the leading creative force in Russia at the time.
Nowadays, however, apart from the orchestral pieces already mentioned, most people know Rimsky-Korsakov for his amusing little piece The Flight of the Bumblebee, which has since been transcribed for almost every instrument imaginable as a showpiece of extraordinary virtuosity.
Rimsky wrote an enormous amount of music, but we rarely get to hear very much of it due to the preoccupation with the two or three favourites from among the works of Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Rachmaninov – the great Russian school of composers.
Dance of the Tumblers
**The Snow Maiden: ‘Dance of the Tumblers’ **
1882, Orchestral
The Dance of The Tumblers is taken from Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1882 opera ‘The Snow Maiden’, which tells the story of the legendary Snow Maiden – the daughter of Fairy Spring and King Frost. In the opera, she is wooed in vain by the Sun God.
Capriccio Espagnol
Capriccio Espagnol: Alborada
1887, Orchestral
Rimsky-Korsakov loved orchestral colour, and used it like a great painter would exploit a canvas. ,He had a gift for composition that had been refined by years of patient self-analysis and study. He was much admired by the likes of Tchaikovsky who once wrote to Rimsky-Korsakov saying:
‘I do not know how to express all my respect for your artistic temperament. I am a mere artisan in music, but you will be an artist in the fullest sense of the word.’
This was high praise indeed, especially when one considers that Rimsky was only in his early twenties at the time.
His Capriccio Espagnol stems from sketches written down in 1886 for a work for violin and orchestra based on numerous Spanish themes. A year later, however, he changed his mind completely, and decided to make the work a display piece for the entire orchestra – the end result being a five-part collection. At its first performance in October 1887 it was an undeniable success, with the audience demanding a complete encore, even though the work was fairly lengthy. Once again, Tchaikovsky wrote to the now thirty-year-old composer, saying:
‘Your Spanish Caprice is a colossal masterpiece of instrumentation, and you may regard yourself as the greatest master of the present day.’
The five movements, to be played without any breaks, opens with a morning serenade for the whole orchestra that leads into an Andante of variations around a theme for the French horn. The third section is almost a repetition of the first, but with an altered orchestration, whilst the following movement, called Scene and Gypsy Song, introduces a series of cadenzas for various instruments, before the Gypsy song is heard on a harp. The finale is based on a southern Spanish dance traditionally played on guitar, and closes with a coda from the first movement.
Russian Easter Festival Overture
1888, Overtures
In Russian, the Easter period is referred to as ‘The Bright Holiday’, and when Rimsky-Korsakov designed his overture he planned it to be a carefully calculated explosion of orchestral colour which, he felt, would reflect popular Russian feelings on this important Christian feast. He wished to capture somehow the solemn pageantry of Christian ritual mixed with the ancient pagan memories celebrating the rebirth of nature. Rimsky took his melodies from a collection of best-known canticles of the Greek Orthodox Church and began his composition in early 1888, completing it in the summer of the same year.
In order to fully appreciate his overture, Rimsky felt that the listener must have attended at least once an Easter morning service in a great orthodox cathedral:
’. . . thronged with people from every walk of life, with several priests conducting the cathedral service.’
His main theme is based on the biblical passage concerning Isaiah’s prophecy of the resurrection of Christ, and is introduced by a unison of woodwinds before being picked up by trombones and, finally, a tuba. The orchestra swells suddenly to an almost blinding brilliance and then dims as suddenly before an allegro outburst of Easter rejoicing.
The composer accompanied his music with some text, partly from the New Testament, and partly from himself, in early printings of the work.
Scheherazade
Scheherazade: ‘The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship’
1888, Symphonies, Orchestral
A thousand years ago, a collection of stories were famous in Arabia and could be heard from the mouths of poets, beggars and professional story-tellers in the market-places of Egypt and Persia. These stories were known as ‘The Thousand and One Nights’ and their origins could be found in poetry and folklore. No one knows their exact origins. They were revived in the eighteenth century via a French adaptation in 1704.
This was Europe’s first glimpse of the now famous ‘Arabian Nights’, and the French version ran in instalments for fourteen years, bringing love-stories, legends, amusing stories, fables and parables to an eager public, who delighted in the additional poetry and songs that would accompany the text.
This, then, served as the inspiration for Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Scheherazade’ – the name of the story-teller – in which the composer seems to have re-created the stories in wonderful orchestral colour, the whole work coming over like some rich and jumbled dream.
The music was composed in the summer of 1888 and first performed the next season at St Petersburg. On the score, Rimsky put the following note:
‘The Sultan, persuaded of the falseness and faithlessness of all women, had sworn to put to death each of his wives after the first night. But the Sultana Scheherazade saved her life by arousing his interest in tales, which she told him during a thousand and one nights. Driven by curiosity, the Sultan put off his wife’s execution from day to day and at last gave up his bloody plan altogether. For her stories, she borrowed from poets their verses, from folksongs their words and she strung together fairy tales and adventures.’
Each of the four movements has a title from the ‘Nights’, the first being ‘The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship’, where the main theme of the Sultana’s voice is introduced on a solo violin.
The second, slow movement is ‘The Story of the Kalendar Prince’, while the third is probably musically the most interesting, being titled ‘The Young Prince and the Young Princess’.
The opening violin song suggests that the story is most definitely a romantic one and the woodwinds decorate the strings beautifully. Soon they are all joined by a harp, which draws the orchestra with it to produce an intensely rich and colourful musical display.
The finale, ‘Festival at Baghdad; The Sea; The Ship Goes to Pieces Against a Rock Surmounted by a Bronze Warrior’, combines all the events of the title with Scheherazade’s violin theme, the movement moving through confusion and fear and then eventually dying away like a passing dream.
The Flight of the Bumblebee
1900, Opera
An incredibly popular piece taken from the opera ‘The Legend of Tsar Saltan’, The Flight of the Bumblebee has been arranged for practically every instrument – even the tuba.
The Golden Cockerel
1909, Opera
One of the most frequently staged of Rimsky-Korsakov’s operas, The Golden Cockerel is a delightful fairy-tale about a lazy king who relies on a pet cockerel to warn him of any danger.