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WHAT IS RUSSIAN MUSIC?
Russian music, especially the best nineteenth-century
Russian music, has strongly marked national features
which make it something special and apart.
Glinka was the first Russian composer of genius. He was
followed by a group of composers known as “The Five”.
The leader of this group was Balakirev, and the others
were Mussorgsky, Borodin, Cui and Rimsky-Korsakov. Their
genius was oriented in a thoroughly national direction.
Tchaikovsky’s music was no less Russian in character
than theirs, but in a different way, standing closer to
that of the West.
The Russian national masters found inspiration in their
surroundings, in their country’s scenery, history,
legends, and everyday life – in those provinces of
reality and fancy that were Russia’s own, in all that
had come to her from the East.
The Russian masters’ freedom from preconceptions opened
the way to all sorts of curious triumphs. They gave the
world a wealth not only of splendid music, but of music
of a kind that no other composers were thinking of
turning out at the time.
Alexander BORODIN (1833 – 1887) “Prince Igor” -
Overture
It was a peculiarity of the Russian nineteenth
century nationalist composers that so many of them had
professions outside music. Borodin was a medical man and
a distinguished Professor of Chemistry, holding many
official posts. He founded a School of Medicine for
Women.
Always keenly musical, his artistic activity took a leap
forward when, in his late twenties, he met Balakirev and
became a member of “The Five”.
It is a pity that he found himself unable to break away
from his official duties, because his musical gifts were
remarkable: a fascinating vein of melody, enhanced by
picturesque harmony and orchestration. The complete list
of his works runs to only twenty-one.
He himself wrote: In winter I can only compose when I am
too unwell to give my lectures. So my friends, reversing
the usual custom, never say to me, “I hope you are well”
but “I do hope you are ill”. At Christmas I had
influenza, so I stayed at home and wrote the
Thanksgiving Chorus in the last act of Igor.
Borodin began work on Prince Igor in the spring of 1869.
Eighteen years later, when he died with tragic
suddenness at a musical party he was giving in his own
house, his score was still in a sadly unfinished state.
The opera was completed by Rimsky-Korsakov and his pupil
Glazunov, and three years after Borodin’s death it
received its first performance. Although a rambling
epic, it has a fantastic, voluptuous, half-Oriental
atmosphere and is full of glorious music.
Borodin never wrote down the overture, but Glazunov
heard him play it frequently. As all the principal
themes appear later in the opera itself, it was an easy
matter for Glazunov to orchestrate it according to
Borodin’s wishes.
TCHAIKOVSKY, Peter Ilyitch (1840 – 1893) “The
Nutcracker” ballet - Suite
Tchaikovsky began life as a civil servant. At 23 he
gave up his official position and, in poverty, devoted
himself entirely to music. He studied at the
Conservatory of St. Petersburg under the composer and
pianist, Anton Rubinstein, to whose moral and practical
support he was long indebted.
When nearing his thirties he came under the influence of
Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov. The sensitivity and
excitability of his temperament, as freely expressed in
his music, are typically Russian, but he had no strong
national aspirations, nor did he seek to use national
folk tune as his material.
Tchaikovsky’s symphonies have been critcized for their
formal deficiencies, but nothing that has been said in
criticism of his symphonic music applies to his ballets.
The classical ballet, with its small, clearly defined
units, and its emphasis on melody and strong rhythmic
variety, was ideally suited to the lyrical side of the
composer’s genius. His lighter music, influenced by
Gounod, Bizet, Delibes and Massenet, gives guileless and
unalloyed pleasure. His great melodic gift was combined
with a wonderful flair for orchestration. He is unique
in that no other composer has succeeded so often, and so
completely, by means of sheer melody.
After “Swan Lake”, Tchaikovsky’s ballet “The Sleeping
Beauty” was first performed in St. Petersburg in 1890
and the Tsar remarked that it was “very nice”.
Tchaikovsky himself was dissatisfied with “The
Nutcracker” which followed two years later and received
a cool reception.
The story of the ballet is drawn from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s
tale, “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King”. The
Nutcracker, which first appears at a Christmas party in
the house of two children, Franz and his sister Clara,
is later transformed into a handsome prince who takes
them on a visit to the Kingdom of Sweets. Here the
children meet the Sugar Plum Fairy (in whose dance
Tchaikovsky uses the celesta – a novelty instrument at
that time). A series of character dances follows,
including a Russian trepak and dances celebrating
Arabian coffee and Chinese tea.
Despite the initially poor response to the ballet, the
Nutcracker Suite arranged by Tchaikovsky was extremely
popular when performed in the concert hall, and it still
is:
1. Miniature Overture
2. March (The children at play)
3. Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy
4. Russian Dance (Trepak)
5. Arabian Dance
6. Chinese Dance
7. Dance of the Mirlitons (Reed-Pipes)
8. Waltz of the Flowers
Sergei PROKOFIEV (1891 – 1953) “The Love of Three
Oranges” - March
Prokofiev studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory
with Liadov and Rimsky-Korsakov and he first became
widely known as a brilliant pianist.
The spirit of musical fun was an important element in
Prokofiev’s personality.
He was enormously clever and witty, as well as prolific
and he had considerable dramatic sense.
One of the first works of Prokofiev to make an
impression outside of Russia was “The Love of Three
Oranges”, a fantastic opera, based on a farcical tale by
Carlo Gozzi, premiered in Chicago in 1921.
The story of the opera is similar – but no means as
subtle – as “Alice in Wonderland”.
The King of Clubs, dressed as a playing card, is
informed by the court doctors that his son cannot be
cured of an illness unless he can be made to laugh.
Having failed miserably to effect such a cure, the Court
Jester stages an entertainment in the great hall of the
palace. The March heralds a battle of ‘Monsters’, and a
struggle between
a crowd of drunkards and gluttons fighting over food and
drink; all to no avail – the Prince does not laugh. Only
when Fata Morgana, an ugly witch, falls over and
performs an involuntary somersault does the Prince break
into laughter. The witch is incensed and curses the
Prince, condemning him to fall in love with three
oranges, which he will have to pursue to the ends of the
earth.
Nikolai Andreivitch RIMSKY-KORSAKOV (1844 – 1908)
“Scheherazade”
Like almost all the principal Russian composers of
the nineteenth century Rimsky-Korsakov began as an
amateur who wrote music in his spare time. His early
manhood was spent as an officer in the navy. The
qualities of his First Symphony and of the symphonic
poem “Sadko” (an orchestral setting of a legend of the
sea; 1867), led to his being offered, at the age of 27,
the post of professor of composition at the Conservatory
of St. Petersburg. He accepted the professorship,
contriving to keep just ahead of his pupils and after
much hard work he made himself a master of musical art.
He poured forth a succession of songs and operas which
are like a brilliant picture-book of Russian legend and
history.
He was a strong nationalist and a devoted student of the
folk tune of his native country. He was urged by a
powerful dramatic impulse, with much rhythmic force and
a vivid sense of orchestral colour. (The last
characteristic allies him with Berlioz, and Rimsky’s
treatise on instrumentation is, like that of Berlioz, a
classic).
These qualities are exemplified in his brilliant score
“Scheherazade” (1888), a musical illustration of four of
the tales from the Arabian Nights. The orchestral score
is prefaced as follows:
The Sultan Shahriar, convinced of the falsehood and
inconstancy of all women, had sworn an oath to put to
death each of his wives after the first night. However,
the Sultana Scheherazade saved her life by arousing his
interest in the tales which she told during 1001 nights.
Driven by curiosity, the Sultan postponed her execution
from day to day and at last abandoned his sanguinary
design. Scheherazade told miraculous stories to the
Sultan. For her tales she borrowed verses from the poets
and words from folk-songs, combining fairy-tales with
adventure.
The composer wrote in his autobiography, “My Musical
Life”:
The four movements of the orchestral suite are closely
knit by the relationship of its themes and motives, yet
which present, as it were, a kaleidoscope of fairy-tale
images and patterns of Oriental character.
The movements are headed:
1. The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship,
2. The fantastic narrative of the Calender Prince,
3. The Young Prince and the Young Princess.
4. The Festival at Baghdad – The Sea – The Shipwreck,
with the ship dashing against the rock with the bronze
warrior on it.
Unifying the episodes is the solo violin, symbolising
the bewitching voice of Scheherazade herself. In this
evening’s performance the violin solos are played by
Eric NIXON and Sue BLUNDEN
“Scheherazade” is a work spun from a handful of themes
which often relate to each other and which respond to
melodic growth and rhythmic alteration. Early passion
for the sea – acquired before he actually saw it – finds
expression in much of Rimsky-Korsakov’s music; here, in
the accompanying figures of the first movement and the
stormy passages of the last. As Inspector of Bands of
the Navy Department during his earlier naval career, he
had familiarised himself with the potential qualities of
brass and woodwind instruments. The dialogue between
trombone and muted trumpet in the second movement is a
striking example of his technique in which he,
vigorously and imaginatively, sets individual sounds
(wind solos, harp, percussion, and solo violin) against
the shifting textures of his orchestral background.
I shall end by quoting the composer again:
All I desire it that the listener, if he likes my piece
as symphonic music, should carry away the impression
that it is beyond doubt an Oriental narrative of some
numerous and varied fairy-tale wonders and not merely
four pieces played one after the other and composed on
the basis of themes common to all movements.
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