For this week of Russian Composers, I decided to focus on Russian music that has a fascination with the “fantastic”, with magic and Romantic folk tales and other cultures, and how that influenced orchestral writing. The forefront of this style of orchestral music was Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who ironically developed this Russian style through works that were about places other than Russia. For this suite, he was inspired by tales from One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, and used its framing narrative to connect four symphonic poems of contrasting character. Scheherezade, the main character of the tale, is represented by the solo violin and a delicate wavering theme. Originally, Rimsky-Korsakov was going to go with more abstract titles for each movement [“Prelude”, “Ballade”, “Adagio” and “Finale” respectively] but his musical colleagues suggested he keep some hints of the program. So, each movement in a way “tells the story” of a different tale, all strung together by Scheherezade’s theme. The frame narrative is about a Sultan, a misogynist whose distrust and hatred of women leads him to kill every woman he marries after their first night together. Scheherezade is chosen to be the next bride, so in order to escape this violent fate, she tells him a story, ending on a cliff hanger just as the sun comes up, leading him to keep her alive so he can hear the rest of the tale the next night. She does this every night, for a thousand more nights, until in the end the Sultan recants his vow for he has truly fallen in love with Scheherezade. It is a really dark and disturbing story, but we have to remember that it is ancient Middle Eastern poetry. The work opens with a bold and growling theme from the brass, the Sultan’s theme, which acts as the curtain raiser, before Scheherezade is introduced by the solo violin. Her theme bleeds into the first story, Sinbad’s ship. Both themes are morphed around a gentle swaying pattern in the orchestra, like waves in the sea. The music here is gorgeous, constantly modulating on an ‘octatonic scale’ which gives off this feeling of wonder and discovery. At the end, Scheherezade’s theme returns, slightly varied in a short cadenza that acts as a recitative toward the next tale, the Kalandar Prince, which is a set of variations, mostly focusing on taking the melody through different moods and orchestrations. It builds up in intensity, and ending in a thunderous coda, it takes us right into the third movement, the young Prince and Princess, a lusciously written love duet. The last movement, the Festival in Baghdad, opens with another Scheherezade cadenza before breaking out in a rowdy dance, which starts to incorporate ideas from earlier in the suite. It ends with a great crash, the sinking of Sinbad’s ship, and then we drift out of the reverie into “real life”, where the Sultan’s theme is transformed, and Scheherezade sighs in peace, now free from the threat of death.
