RIMSKY-KORSAKOV
NIKOLAI RIMSKY-KORSAKOV
(1844–1908)
The Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra – Capriccio Espagnol
Congress Theatre, Eastbourne, 1996
In musical terms a capriccio, like the French caprice, is essentially a work of whim or fancy. Written in a lively tempo with bright flashes of orchestral colour throughout, Rimsky-Korsakov’s suite for orchestra, opus 34 (1887) is based on original themes with a Spanish flavour, and is rare among his ‘non-Russian’ works for having derived its inspiration from the west rather than the east.
His reputation currently rests on such purely orchestral works as this, along with those other concert favourites Scheherazade and Flight of the Bumblebee, though it was in fact the fifteen operas he wrote, mostly based on Russian folk tales, that in his own time made him the equivalent of Wagner in Germany and Verdi in Italy. If today his music is regarded as not quite in the same league as that of Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky, this could simply represent an academic prejudice against his deceptive facility for melody and the ingenuous charm of his lush orchestrations.
He was born Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov in Tikhvin near Novgorod into an aristocratic Russian family. Early piano lessons revealed that he had perfect pitch, but a musical career was not envisaged for him as, a lively and mischievous lad, he was determined to follow his much-loved older brother into the navy. In 1856 he duly entered the corps of naval cadets at St Petersburg, but the turning point came when his piano teacher Canillé introduced him to Mily Balakirev, the most colourful – and only professional – member of the moguchaya kuchka, the so-called ‘Mighty Handful’ of composers engaged in creating a distinctive school of Russian music. The group already included Cui, Borodin and Mussorgsky, but the four became the five with Rimsky soon proving himself to be the most gifted and energetic amateur of the lot.
Under Balakirev’s urging, Rimsky completed his first symphony before the age of 21 – one of the earliest home-grown works in the form – and a second soon followed. In 1868 a visit to the country with Borodin unlocked a new source of inspiration through contemplation of the countryside and the lively peasant dances of the area which found its expression in his first opera, The Maid of Pskov.
In 1871, while still officially a naval officer, Rimsky became professor of practical composition and instrumentation at St Petersburg Conservatory It was an anomalous posting as Rimsky himself was still largely ignorant of musical theory in an academic sense. Yet with the keen application that was to be the hallmark of the rest of his life as a composer, he taught himself harmony and counterpoint, just managing to keep one step ahead of the students. To understand orchestration he taught himself how to play a wide variety of instruments, and his later book on the subject became highly regarded.
By the mid-1870s his style had become established, his editing of 100 Russian Folksongs had led him to a deeper understanding of nationalistic works, and his operas of that period – Gogol’s May Night and The Snow Maiden – are among his most characteristic.
After Mussorgsky’s death in 1881, Rimsky systematically orchestrated his famously chaotic works, including the opera Boris Godunov, by smoothing out the original rough-hewn harmonies into a more conventional, and therefore acceptable, form. He provided the same service for Borodin’s Prince Igor later, completing the work with his own pupil Glazunov. These efforts on behalf of his former colleagues have not always been appreciated and the form these days is to go back to the originals; but at least Rimsky’s work enabled the pieces to be heard by a wider audience than would otherwise have been the case. Around this time too he was completing some of his own most famous works – Scheherazade and Russian Easter Overture were both finished in 1888.
For a time he was laid low by a neurasthenic illness brought on by overwork – apart from his professorship he was also inspector of naval bands and was continuing to compose his own work while arranging that of others – but in the mid-1890s his output picked up again, with the operas Mozart and Salieri, The Tsar’s Bride and The Legend of Tsar Saltan. By now the most famous of ‘The Five’, and seen as a pillar of the establishment, Rimsky’s support of the revolutionary students in 1905 came as a surprise to the authorities, and he was turfed out of his Conservatory post. But his favourite pupil Glazunov resigned in protest, and on his own reinstatement as director, he promptly had his master recalled. Rimsky’s own response was the satirical opera Le Coq d’Or, about a moronic tsar and his equally stupid officials, but it was a work he was never to see staged. He died of angina in June 1908.
Moscow State Symphony Orchestra – Scheherazade
Eden Court, 1997
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov is generally regarded as the most brilliant orchestrator of the last century, second only to Berlioz. His Scheherazade Suite, op 35 is one of the last purely orchestral works he produced before the premiere of Wagner’s Ring cycle at St Petersburg in 1889 so impressed him that he devoted the last twenty years of his life to composing operas.
He worked on the suite over the summer of 1888 at Nyezhgovitsky, on the shores of the Cheryemenyetskoye Lake. The sparkling nature of the piece may be ascribed in part to Rimsky’s own optimistic mood, as that winter work had proceeded well on the orchestration of his recently deceased friend Borodin’s opera Prince Igor and in January his wife, the composer Nadezhda Purgold, had presented him with a daughter. The composition of his next work, the Easter Overture, actually overlaps with his final days’ work on Scheherazade.
The published score carried a brief background note on the Arabian Nights themselves: “Convinced of the unfaithfulness of women, the Sultan Schakhriar determined to put to death each of his wives after the first night. But his new bride Scheherazade saved her life for a thousand and one nights by telling him stories that so piqued his curiosity, he kept putting off the fateful dawn of her execution. Eventually, he renounced his bloody vow…”
At first the composer simply numbered the four movements, and at one stage considered naming them after the parts of a conventional symphony: Prelude, Ballade, Adagio and Finale. The titles which have come down to us were added for the first performance, though Rimsky himself later regretted having been so specific. In his autobiography, My Musical Life, he declared that the various themes and ideas which recur throughout the piece are not meant to depict any particular story; rather they are musical motifs designed to bind the work together in conventional symphonic style.
For instance, the stern theme which opens the work intended by the composer as a sketch of Scheherazade’s husband is echoed in The Prince of Kalendar’s Tale, though the Sultan himself cannot play any part in that story. Similarly, the main theme of the Prince’s Tale, and the Princess’s theme in the third movement, reappear in the fourth as secondary themes delineating the Baghdad Festival, now in slightly altered form and at a quicker tempo – although there is nothing in the Arabian Nights stories to indicate that those characters took part in the Festival. “In this way,” Rimsky wrote, “I intended to create an orchestral suite of four movements which were closely linked by their group of themes and motifs, but overall depicting a kind of kaleidoscope of images from the fairy tale and scenes of an oriental nature.” He ultimately left it to the listener’s fancy to ascribe particular notions to the various sequences.
The suite’s two main themes are announced in the opening bars of the first movement. First the dread Sultan is depicted in loud, menacing brass, then Scheherazade shimmers in on rich harp arpeggios supporting a solo violin. She begins to weave her first tale, about a ship and the changing moods of the sea.
Scheherazade’s own theme opens the second movement, which tells several stories about the Prince of Kalendar, represented by the bassoon. They go through many changes of mood, from the pathetic to the bombastic. Then new material of a more aggressive nature, rung out on the brass, is given conventional symphonic development, the only time in the suite such a device is used.
The third movement represents a romantic idyll between the Prince and Princess. The Prince is represented by violins, the Princess by clarinet and soft percussion, as if tiny bells or cymbals on her clothes were chiming in the soft evening breeze. Their gentle, simple but ravishing melodies intertwine, then resolve once more into the Scheherazade theme, as if the luckless Sultana herself were wistfully contemplating the kind of innocent, tender love she herself may never know.
In the Finale, the Baghdad Festival is depicted in all its colour, bustle and brilliance. Suddenly the scene cuts to the storm-tossed sea, and the whole orchestra joins in to hurl the ship onto the rocks. At last, the Scheherazade theme returns to end the story.
PS
The concert programmes Proscenium produced came in two main varieties: those with basic biographical notes as represented by the first piece here, and others which went into more technical detail about the specific works the audience were going to be hearing that night (or had heard, depending on when they got round to consulting the programme, assuming they ever did). I usually stuck to the first category, but as time went on and money grew tighter and we had to start bringing more of these commissions in house – and, frankly, I became more familiar with the repertoire – I started to undertake some of the more ‘technical’ deconstructions as well.
Scheherazade had long been a great personal favourite, so I was happy to give my own best interpretation of it, while being careful, of course, to do my research among the right encyclopaedias to make sure I wouldn’t be wandering too far off the generally accepted track. The programme titles for the four movements had always seemed so fitting to me that I was surprised to find the composer himself later came to regret having added them.
Having said that, if I had really been more confident about my musical knowledge, I would probably not have put myself in the same boat as my audience by carefully explaining the meaning of words like ‘capriccio’. It was as much to convince myself I knew what I was talking about as it was to ensure I was starting from a point of factful reality before trying to explain how the music worked its magic. As if this is what a concert-going public was likely to want from a programme note anyway! A moment’s thought would suggest the majority of them would be at least as capable as I was of making their own interpretations thank you very much, with, in many cases, far more technical understanding than I could bring to bear. But at least I could research the life and give a few biographical details and perspectives which they might not have been aware of, and besides, I was keen to learn myself. So I took the trouble to find out.
As I explored the classical repertoire, one curious and interesting fact emerged. It seemed that it was often the case with these superstar composers that the pieces by which they are best known to the lay public are rarely their best pieces overall. Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture only seems to get more meretricious and bombastic every time you hear it, but the melodies he contrived for the three big ballets, with particular reference to the ‘Grand Pas de Deux’ from The Nutcracker, for instance, repay endless attention. Similarly, Rimsky’s (look at me, chummily leaving off the bit after the hyphen) Flight of the Bumblebee may seem impenetrably skilful from the POV of a person who couldn’t move their fingers that fast just tapping their thigh, let alone making sure they landed on the right keys on a flute, but compared to the rich exoticism of Scheherazade and the plangent sonorities of ‘Song of India’ from Sadko, the Bumblebee piece is a mere bagatelle. (Can I say ‘rich exoticism and plangent sonorities’? It’s the sort of vocabulary the real music maestros who frequently wrote our programme notes regularly employed. But it’s like restaurant critics trying to describe in words what only their tongues and palates and stomachs could know. There are no words really. Like Golding’s free will in his novel Free Fall, it can’t be properly discussed or debated, only experienced, like the taste of potatoes. The only thing to do with food is eat it. In the same way, good music can only be enjoyed in awestruck silence.)
So why write biography at all? While it might be interesting to know when and where a composer was born, and a few details about how they lived their lives, none of it is really vital to the appreciation of their life’s work. Any connection or claims to recognise some kind of influence are generally specious at best. And it’s not as if music, that most elusive of all the art forms, can contain any concrete ideas anyway. At the end of Ken Russell’s Mahler, the composer asks his wife Alma, who had been copying his scores for him, whether she had ‘recognised’ herself in the ‘love theme’ he had woven into his 6th Symphony. Certainly the melody he’s talking about is soaringly romantic, but give a girl a break, Gustav! For all she knew, he could merely have been expressing (again) his love of God in nature, or reflecting on the beauty of his children, or simply recording a passion for oysters. Music doesn’t say anything, it’s just there, like the taste of potatoes.
On the other hand, some biographical details can be a lot more germane than others. Listening to his 9th Symphony, for instance, you could never guess Beethoven was deaf when he wrote it. The tremendous, uplifting confidence of the music certainly doesn’t give any inkling. So does knowing about the physical limitations the composer was labouring under affect the quality of the music? Absolutely not. But does it increase your admiration for the man? Darn tootin’ it does, which is why that fact, for one, is worth knowing, recording, and passing on.
