The Enchanted Lake

Anatoly Konstantinovich Liadov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on April 29, 1855, and died in Polinovka in the Novgorod District on August 16, 1914. The Enchanted Lake was composed in 1908. Its dedicatee, Nikolai Tcherepnin, conducted the Great Hall of the Conservatory Orchestra in the premiere on February 21, 1909, in St. Petersburg.

The score of The Enchanted Lake calls for 3 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, timpani, bass drum, celesta, harp, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses). 

Like most Russian composers just before and after 1900, Anatoly Liadov fell deeply under the spell of the German Richard Wagner (1813-1883). Liadov encountered Wagner’s operas early on through his father Konstantin Liadov, a conductor at St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater, who led the first Wagner opera to be staged in Russia—Lohengrin—in 1868, when Anatoly was 13. From various accounts we know that Anatoly, a mischievous theater brat, used to spend his free time as a teenager roaming around backstage and in the boxes, “where he had unrestricted access.”

Anatoly’s teacher at St. Petersburg Conservatory, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908), who became Liadov’s intimate friend, colleague, and lifelong mentor, was also a passionate Wagnerian. When Wagner’s Ring Cycle was performed to sold-out audiences in Russia for the first time in 1889, Rimsky sat in at every single rehearsal, “following them score in hand.” Rimsky took Wagner as a model for his last opera, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia, sometimes called the “Russian Parsifal.” Set in a bucolic magical wilderness near a fantastical shape-shifting lake in the “summer of the 6751st year of the creation of the world,” Kitezh blends Christian beliefs with nature worship and pantheism in a thoroughly Wagnerian dramatic and musical style. Rimsky said he wanted the orchestration to sound “à la Tristan,” but with a distinct Russian flavor. Kitezh was first staged in St. Petersburg in 1907, one year before Liadov began work on his The Enchanted Lake, the most Wagnerian of his few orchestral works.

Although no concrete documentation of a direct link between Kitezh and The Enchanted Lake exists, such a connection seems undeniable given the closeness of the two composers (they saw each other almost daily in St. Petersburg), and the similarity of the two works in subject manner and orchestration. One could even see The Enchanted Lake as a farewell tribute to Rimsky (and to his love for Wagner), since Rimsky died while Liadov was completing it, and the premiere took place exactly eight months to the day after Rimsky’s passing, conducted by another member of Rimsky’s posse, Nikolai Tcherepnin (1873-1945).

Despite Liadov’s well-documented reputation for laziness and procrastination, Rimsky believed deeply in his often wayward student, calling him “talented past telling.” Almost too talented for his own good, in fact, being a master of numerous trades: teacher (his students included Sergei Prokofiev), pianist, conductor, editor, and composer. Known for “loose living” and a short attention span, Liadov failed to capitalize on some important opportunities. Most famously, he was Ballets Russes impresario Serge Diaghilev’s first choice to write the score for the new ballet The Firebird, but never produced a note, leaving the door open for Igor Stravinsky, who never suffered from a lack of self-confidence. In a fond recollection, Stravinsky called Liadov “a darling man…sweet and charming,” and “the most progressive of the musicians of his generation.” Liadov championed the avant-garde music of Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), whose influence can be heard in the glacially slow harmonic rhythm, shimmering trills, and mystical atmosphere of The Enchanted Lake.

Liadov excelled in small forms. Stravinsky commented that “He composed little, because he worked slowly—one might say minutely, as if with a magnifying glass.” The longest of his compositions (Eight Russian Folk Songs for Orchestra) lasts less than 15 minutes. Most are much shorter. For piano he wrote numerous tiny mazurkas, bagatelles, preludes, and what he called “biryulki,” named after tiny carved wooden toys used in a Russian children’s game. Like other Russian composers of his era, Liadov was torn between Western models like Chopin, Liszt, and Schumann on the one hand and the Russian folk music tradition on the other. To a large extent, Liadov shared the nationalistic aesthetic views of the “Mighty Handful” composers (Rimsky, Balakirev, Cui, Borodin, Mussorgsky), and was even known as the group’s “sixth” junior member.

In the first decade of the 20th century, Liadov wrote his best-known orchestral works, all inspired by folk music and legend: Baba-Yaga (1904), Eight Russian Folk Songs for Orchestra (1906), The Enchanted Lake (1908), and Kikimora (1909). Liadov provided no explicit program for The Enchanted Lake, but it has been suggested that it could be a response to a painting by Russian landscape artist Arseny Meshchersky (1834-1902).

The actual lake Liadov had in mind was Lake Ilmen, south of St. Petersburg in the Novgorod region, where he spent many pleasant summers at an estate that belonged to his wealthy wife. “How purely picturesque it is—with bountiful stars over the mysteries in the depths,” he wrote. “But most important—it is uninhabited, without entreaties and complaints: only nature—cold, malevolent, but fantastic as a fairy tale. One must feel the change of colors, the chiaroscuro, the incessantly changeable stillness and seeming immobility.”

Set in a sedate 12/8 meter and at low dynamic levels throughout, the score opens with all the instruments (except timpani and harp) muted. The strings divide into nine different parts, sounding a deep D-flat major chord that resonates low and high, as if between the glimmering surface of a lake and its murky depths. Short figures from the harp, celesta, and flutes poke through the darkness, like sunbeams (or moonbeams?). Fragments of a melody emerge in the woodwinds, but remain unresolved. The harmony sways between chords of major and minor thirds, while in the distance we hear forest bird calls. In this impressionistic and dreamy miniature, Liadov achieves a hypnotic effect of timelessness, serenity, and fantastic enchantment.

“It is my ideal to find the supernatural in art,” Liadov once said. “Art is the realm of the unreal. Art is a fantasy, a fairy-tale, a dragon, a water-fairy, a wood-demon—give me something unreal and I shall be happy.”

Harlow Robinson 

Harlow Robinson is an author, lecturer, and Matthews Distinguished University Professor of History, Emeritus, at Northeastern University. His books include Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography and Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood’s Russians. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Boston Globe, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Cineaste, and Opera News, and he has written program notes for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, and Metropolitan Opera.

The first American performance of The Enchanted Lake was given by the Russian Symphony Orchestra on November 16, 1910, in New York City.

The first Boston Symphony Orchestra performance of The Enchanted Lake took place at New York’s Carnegie Hall on December 3, 1921, with Pierre Monteux conducting; Monteux led the first Symphony Hall performances in February 1922 on a program with Liadov’s Baba-Yaga and Kikimora.