ExclusiveRimsky-Korsakow: Scheherazade, Op. 35 - I. The Sea and Sinbad's Ship

【Classical music and nature 古典音樂小站】Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakow: Scheherazade, Op. 35 - I. The Sea and Sinbad's Ship. 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.

Here is a very old but beautiful recording of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade.

There is a touching story of how these compositions came to be:

The composer Rimsky-Korsakov was a good friend of the famous Russian composer Alexander Borodin. On 27 February 1887, Alexander Borodin was attending a party when, after dancing a waltz, he dropped dead of a heart attack. The sudden death of the 53-year-old composer sent shockwaves through Russian musical circles, of which Borodin was one of the leading lights.

The loss was particularly hard for his friend and fellow composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Almost immediately, Rimsky-Korsakov went to Borodin's apartment to save his music. There he found his unfinished masterpiece, the opera Prince Igor. Wishing to save Borodin's crowning achievement from oblivion, Rimsky-Korsakov decided to complete it.

And so, deep in the winter of 1888, Rimsky-Korsakov set to work on Prince Igor. Borodin's epic opera, set long ago in the wild Russian steppes, was filled with striking, exotic music that must have captured Rimsky-Korsakov's imagination. He soon conceived the idea of composing an orchestral suite full of his own exotic melodies. His theme: The Thousand and One Nights.

The Thousand and One Nights (or, more colloquially, The Arabian Nights) has a history as storied as the stories themselves. Indian, Persian and Arabic sources have been suggested for individual stories, and the first references to collections of 'One Thousand and One Nights' can be found in documents dating from the 10th century. The earliest surviving manuscript is from 14th-century Syria, which Antoine Galland freely adapted to create a French version, bringing the Nights to Europe for the first time in the early 18th century. It was probably a translation of Galland's version that inspired Rimsky-Korsakov.

As is well known, the individual stories of The Nights are united by a common framework: the cruel Sultan Shahryar, convinced of the infidelity of all women, takes a new bride each night, only to have them executed at dawn, until one, Scheherazade, saves herself and wins his heart by telling stories, each night ending in the middle of a story. Rimsky-Korsakov named his suite after her. In his memoirs, he recalled how he composed it:

“The program I had been guided by in composing Scheherazade consisted of separate, unconnected episodes and pictures from The Arabian Nights, scattered through all four movements of my suite: the sea and Sinbad’s ship, the fantastic narrative of the Prince Kalandar, the Prince and the Princess, the Baghdad festival and the ship dashing against the rock with the bronze rider upon it…I meant these hints to direct but slightly the hearer’s fancy…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 and not merely four pieces played one after the other…”

The landscape was shot by Simone Schlegel in Switzerland and edited by Wenjing Ma.



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