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.

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 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

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.

INTERVAL

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.