ExclusiveRimsky-Korsakow: Scheherazade, Op. 35 - II. The Kalendar Prince

【Classical music and nature 古典音樂小站】Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakow: Scheherazade, Op. 35 - II. The Kalendar Prince. This beautiful piece was preserved by European Archive. It has Creative Commons license (Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universal) and is provided through www.musopen.org.

Scheherazade, Opus 35, is a symphonic poem written by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1888. The orchestral work, based on the Arabian Nights, is characterised by two features typical of Russian music and Rimsky-Korsakov's compositions in particular: colourful instrumentation and a widespread interest in all things oriental in the Russian Empire. The composition was first performed in St Petersburg on 28 October 1888 under Rimsky-Korsakov's baton.

Scheherazade consisted of a symphonic suite of four interrelated movements that formed a unified theme. It was written to create a sensation of fantasy tales from the Orient.

Rimsky-Korsakov originally intended to call the movements in Scheherazade "Prelude, Ballade, Adagio and Finale". However, after considering the opinions of others, as well as his own reluctance to have an overly definite programme, he settled on thematic headings based on the stories from The Arabian Nights.

The composer deliberately kept the titles vague so that they would not be associated with specific stories or voyages of Sinbad. In the epigraph to the finale, however, he refers to the adventures of Prince Ajib. In a later edition, Rimsky-Korsakov omitted the titles altogether, preferring instead that the listener hear his work simply as Oriental symphonic music, evoking a sense of fairy-tale adventure:

All I wished was that the listener, if he liked my piece as symphonic music, should take away the impression that it was undoubtedly an Oriental tale of some numerous and varied fairy-tale wonders, and not merely four pieces played in succession and composed on the basis of themes common to all four movements.

He went on to say that he'd kept the name Scheherazade because it evoked the fairytale wonders of the Arabian Nights and the East in general.

This video was captured by Christian Schlegel in Aeschiried, Switzerland and was edited by Wenjing Ma.






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