Sheherazade, Symphonic Suite, Opus 35 

During the winter of 1887-88, Rimsky-Korsakov was engaged in one of his many generous acts of pious devotion to a deceased Russian master: he was orchestrating the opera Prince Igor, left unfinished at the death of its composer, Alexander Borodin. A few excerpts played in concert—among them the overture and the famous Polovtsian Dances—demonstrated the effectiveness of the work. He had to put off original composition while engaged in this labor of love, but he did manage to conceive two new orchestral pieces, the working out of which was to be left to the following summer, spent on an estate in Nyezhgovitzy, near Looga. Both of them turned out to be among his best-known compositions. One was based on episodes from The Arabian Nights, the other on themes from the obikhod, a collection of the most frequently used canticles of the Russian Orthodox Church. Both were finished that summer: the first was Scheherazade, Opus 35, and the second was the overture Svetliy prazdnik (The bright holiday), generally known in English as the Russian Easter Overture. As it happens, they were very nearly the last purely orchestral works Rimsky was to write; for the remaining two decades of his life he devoted his attentions almost totally to operatic composition. Moreover they are the last works that he composed with virtually no Wagnerian influence. There was a sudden dramatic change in Rimsky’s style the following winter, when he was bowled over by a performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen given in St. Petersburg by a German company under the direction of Karl Muck (later to be music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra), and Rimsky’s next opera, Mlada, revealed the composer to have been converted into quite the thoroughgoing Wagnerian. (Over a period of years he did work his way back to a musical language of his own; his last and best-known opera, Le Coq d’or, shows few traces of his Wagnerian fling.) 

The massive collection of tales known as The Arabian Nights or The Thousand-and-One Nights is built on a framework reflected in the orchestral score of Rimsky-Korsakov’s musical treatment: the Sultan Shakhryar, discovering his wife’s infidelity and convinced of the inconstancy and faithlessness of all women, has sworn henceforth to marry repeatedly in rapid sequence, putting each wife to death after the first night in order to avoid another betrayal. To put an end to this bloodbath, Scheherazade, the daughter of the Sultan’s most trusted adviser, seeks to become his wife (even though she had been exempted from this fatal rank because of her father’s position at the court). She saves her life after her wedding night by telling a story that captures the Sultan’s interest, breaking it off just at dawn, with the promise of continuing it the next night. Each night, as she continues, her story puts out roots and branches, becoming an intricate network of tales, some told by characters within other tales, so that at no point do all the stories in progress come to their conclusion. Each day at dawn the Sultan puts off her execution for another day in order to hear the end of the story first. Gradually her seemingly artless and endless series of colorful fairy tales softens the cruel heart of the Sultan, and at the end of one thousand-and-one nights he abandons his sanguinary design and accepts Scheherazade as his one, permanent, loving wife. 

Of course, The Arabian Nights is much too long a work and much too intricate—in its complex network of tales-within-tales—simply to be translated into music as a storytelling program. Analysts and program annotators have expended a great deal of ingenuity in attempts to identify precisely which tales Rimsky-Korsakov had in mind, especially since the traditional movement titles are not especially specific: the introduction purports to represent the stern Sultan Shakhryar (in the opening unison phrase) and Scheherazade the storyteller (in the solo violin); the remainder of the first movement is identified with the sea and the ship of Sinbad the sailor; the second movement is the tale of the Prince Kalendar; the third is simply “The Prince and the Princess”; and the finale is a festival at Baghdad and a shipwreck (quite a combination for a single movement!). But it is vain to seek for specific stories as the inspiration for this music. There is, for example, more than one Prince Kalendar with a story to tell in The Arabian Nights, and, as the composer himself noted, he did not by any means reserve the very first theme—the so-called “Sultan’s theme”—for that grim personage, but rather wove it into the entire fabric of the score without regard to the details of storytelling. It becomes the rolling ocean beneath Sinbad’s ship in the first movement, and it appears as an element in the Prince Kalendar’s tale, where the Sultan himself does not appear at all. 

Even so, the theme presented first (and most often) by the solo violin quite clearly represents Scheherazade herself, telling her colorful tales and here and there inserting her warmhearted personality into them. But the composer, after first specifying the traditional titles, wrote in his memoirs, My Musical Life, that he had actually removed all hints as to the subject matter of the tales from a later edition of the score. He added that, in composing Scheherazade, 

I meant these hints to direct but 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. 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 and composed on the basis of themes common to all the four movements. Why then, if that be the case, does my suite bear the name, precisely, of Scheherazade? Because this name and the title The Arabian Nights connote in everybody’s mind the East and fairy-tale wonders; besides, certain details of the musical exposition hint at the fact that all of these are various tales of some one person (which happens to be Scheherazade) entertaining therewith her stern husband. 

STEVEN LEDBETTER

Steven Ledbetter, a freelance writer and lecturer on music, was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1998.