Scheherazade, Op. 35 - Leopold Stokowski

 

Scheherazade, Op. 35

Rimsky-Korsakoff

Scheherazade, Op. 35

Leopold Stokowski conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra of London

Manoug Parisian, Violin Solo

RCA Victor LM 1732 Tone Poem

Red Seal Records

Recorded in England

1951

From the back cover: In one sense Russian music was born, and died, with Nicolas Andreievitch Rimsky-Korsakoff. Before his ascendancy there had been no national heritage for Savic composers. Rimsky hoisted high a new standard. After his passing it went down with the way of life it had graced. The proud nationalism Rimsky had implanted in the musical firmament shone brightly buy briefly, meteor that it was, and passed into history.

Ironically, Rimsky is today billed in the Soviet Union as a hero of communist culture. He must have turned over in his grave on the 18th of March, 1944, when the Kremlin keepers of "the people's music" took time out from World War II to install him in their Pantheon. The calendar-conscious commissariat pointed up the centennial of Rimsky's birth with the unveiling of a huge statue in Leningrad, a handsome edition of his complete works, and a "scientific but popular" film depicting hi dedication to Marxism. This in the memory of a man who had copiously set down his admiration for the United States, her people and her political philosophy, and whose personal hero was Abraham Lincoln.

Moreover, it is a further irony that the spirit and substance of Rimsky's resplendent nationalism was essentially a by-product of the Czarist's government service. On the 8th of June, 1861, when the composer was seventeen and himself a cadet in the Imperial Navy, he was introduced to the twenty-five-year-pld Balakireff, who was to prove a decisive force in his musical life. The same Balakireff at one point sustained his career by working as a clerk in the imperial railway system. In or about to be in the Balakireef group, to which Rimsky became heir apparent while still in uniform, were Moussorgsky, an employee of the department of forestry; Borodin, a faculty member of the imperial academy of medicine; and Cui, an army engineer. In years past Dargomysky had been with the department of justice. And if Glinka had not been wealthy and Tchaikovsky provided for, they would likely have been public servants.

Rimsky, as the scion of an aristocratic family with a distinguished ancestry of high brass, donned his uniform as a matter of course. As with his later French counterpart, Albert Roussel, it was the song of the sirens, not the muse's smile; that beckoned most compellingly. Rimsky was drawn to the sea; the salon could wait. And wait it did, although the burgeoning composer never once lost touch with his amateur coterie at home.

But it was not until he was fully twenty-seven that Rimsky began to study the syntax of the musical language systematically and in earnest. And even then, in circumstances without parallel in the career of any other master, he had to teach himself in secrecy. Back in St. Petersburg, where he had been spending an hour or two a day at his naval duties and playing the dilettante full-time, he suddenly found himself, through the accession of a friend's friend, offered a professorship in composition at the Conservatory. It was all a misunderstanding; the new director had no idea Rimsky was ignorant of technical facilities. No matter, Rimsky took the job. Whereupon, without letting on, he plunged at once into the deepest mysteries of his chosen craft, somehow managed to keep himself abreast of his students. The hoax was indefensible, but Rimsky carried it off brilliantly. He not only justified he self-confidence; he later earned, strictly on merit, the directorship of the same institution. He also achieved an eminence as a pedagogue which stands to this day.

Clearly the most popular and enduring of Rimsky's many musical excursions into the exotic is Scheherazade, a symphonic suite after the Arabian Nights catalogued as Opus 35. A product of the composer's maturity, the work was roughed out in St. Petersburg in the spring of 1888, and finished that summer in a retreat at Nezhgovitzi on Lake Cherementz. The entire score seems to have been polished to perfection in less than a month; the movements are dated July 4th, 11th, 16th and 26th, respectively. It is inscribed to Vladimir Stassov, the astute critic who is remembered for having coined the omnibus label of Koushka – The Mighty Five – to describe Rimsky and his like-minded contemporaries. the premiére was given on the ensuing December 15th.

A prefatory note in the original score of Scheherazade reads simply thus: "The Sultan Schahriar, persuaded of the falseness and faithlessness of women, has sworn to put to death each one of his wives after the first night.

But the Sultana Scheherazade saved her life by inserting him in tales which she told him during one thousand and one nights. Pricked by curiosity, the Sultan put off his wife's execution from day to day, and at last gave up entirely his bloody plan. Many marvels were told Schahriar by the Sultana Scheherazade. For her stories the Sultana borrowed from poets their verses, from folk songs their words; and she strung together tales and adventures."

Rimsky has written that he had in mind such "unconnected episodes" as "the fantastic narrative of Prince Kalender, the Prince and the Princess, the Bagdad festival and the ship dashing against the rock with the bronze rider upon it." He also spoke of the solo violin as "delineating Scheherazade herself telling her wondrous tales to the stern Sultan." But in later years Rimsky was impelled to forswear any intentions of a specific program, and even to do away with those hints of one which had lain in the movement designations: "In composing Scheherazade I meant these hints to direct buy slightly the hearer's fancy on the path which my own fancy had traveled, and to leave more minute and particular conceptions to the will and mood of each listener. All I had desired was that the hearer, if he liked 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..." If the composer's lament was belated, and unavailing, yet there has been no shortage of listeners who "like his piece" whether because of, or despite, its altogether unlikely plot. – James Lyons.

Band 1 First Movement: The Sea and the Vessel of Sinbad.

Band 2 Second Movement: The Tale of the Prince Kalender.

Band 3 Third Movement: The Young Prince and the Young Princess

Band 4 Fourth Movement: Festival at Bagdad. The Sea. The Vessel Is Wrecked