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Sadko (musical tableau)
Encyclopedia
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
wrote his "musical tableau" Sadko, Op. 5, in 1867 but revised the work in 1869 and 1892. It has sometimes been called the first symphonic poem
written in Russia. It was first performed in 1867 at a concert of the Russian Musical Society
(RMS), conducted by Mily Balakirev
.
was a legendary hero
of a Russian bylina
(epic tale) with the same name. A merchant and gusli musician from Novgorod, he is transported to the realm of the Sea King. There, he is to provide music to accompany the dance at the marriage of the King's daughter. The dancing grows so frenzied that the surface of the sea billows and surges, threatening to founder the ships on it. To calm the sea, Sadko smashes his gusli. The storm dissipates and he reappears on the shore.
Mily Balakirev, leader of the Russian nationalist
music group "The Five
," was long fascinated with Anton Rubinstein
's Europeanising Ocean Symphony and wanted to create a more specifically Russian alternative. Music critic Vladimir Stasov suggested the legend of Sadko and wrote a program for this work, giving it to Balakirev in 1861. At first Balakirev relayed the program to Modest Mussorgsky
, who did nothing with it. (Mussorgsky's comment to Balakirev on hearing Rubinstein's Ocean Symphony was "Oh Ocean, oh puddle"; he had much preferred Rubinstein's conducting of the work over the work itself.) Mussorgsky eventually offered the program to Rimsky-Korsakov, after he had long given up on it. Balakirev agreed, counting on the naval officer's love of the sea to help him produce results.
Instead of direct experience of the sea, Rimsky-Korsakov fell back on Franz Liszt
's symphonic poem Ce Qu'on entend sur la montagne for inspiration. Acting as bookends to the middle of the work are two sketches of the calm, gently rippling sea. While Rimsky-Korsakov took the harmonic and modulatory basis of these sections from the opening of Liszt's Montagne, he admitted the chord
passage closing these sections were purely his own. The central section comprises music portraying Sadko's underwater journey, the feast of the Sea King and the Russian dance that leads the work to its climax. Typical of Rimsky's modesty and self-criticism, he offers several influences for this section: Mikhail Glinka
's Ruslan and Lyudmila
, Balakirev's "Song of the Goldfish," Alexander Dargomyzhsky
's Russalka and Liszt's Mephisto Waltz No. 1
. Rimsky-Korsakov chose the principal tonalities of the piece—D-flat major, D major
and D flat major—specifically to please Balakirev, "who had an exclusive prediliction for them in those days."
Rimsky-Korsakov began the work in June 1867 during a three-week holiday at his brother's summer villa in Tervaïoki, near Vyborg
. A month's naval cruise in the Gulf of Finland proved only a temporary interruption; by October 12, he was finished. He wrote Mussorgsky that he was satisfied with it and that it was the best thing he had composed to date, but that he was weak from the intense strain of composition and needed to rest.
Rimsky-Korsakov felt that several factors combined to make the piece a success—the originality of his task; the form that resulted; the freshness of the dance tune and the singing theme with its Russian characteristics; and the orchestration, "caught as by a miracle, despite my imposing ignorance in the realm of orchestration." While he remained pleased with Sadko's form, Rimsky-Korsakov remained discontented with its brevity and sparseness, adding that writing the work in a broader format would have been more appropriate for Stasov's program. He attributed this extreme conciseness to his lack of compositional experience. Nevertheless, Balakirev was pleased with the work, paying Sadko a combination of patronization and encouraging admiration. He conducted its premiere that December.
wrote on the day of that concert, "In this new version, where many slips of orchestration have been righted and the former effects have been perfected, Sadko is a delight. The public greeted the piece enthusiastically and called Korsinka out three times."
performed an orchestral work by Rimsky-Korsakov for the RMS. Four years later, Azanchevsky asked Nápravník several times to conduct the symphonic suite Antar
. Nápravník finally refused, telling Azanchevsky with apparent disdain that Rimsky-Korsakov "might as well conduct it himself.")
In 1892, Rimsky-Korsakov reorchestrated Sadko. This was the last of his early works that he revised. "With this revision I settled accounts with the past," he wrote in his autobiography. "In this way, not a single larger work of mine of the period antedating May Night remained unrevised" (italics Rimsky-Korsakov).
Rimsky-Korsakov conducted Sadko several times in Russia during his career, as well as in Brussels in March 1900. Arthur Nikisch
conducted it in the composer's presence in a Paris
concert given in May 1907.
and the whole-tone scale before Rimsky-Korsakov composed Sadko. Glinka had used the whole-tone scale in Ruslan and Lyudmila as the leitmotif
of the evil dwarf Chernomor. "The Five" continued using this "artificial" harmony as a musical code for the fantastic, for the demonic, and for black magic. To this code Rimsky added the octatonic scale
in Sadko. This was a device he adapted from Liszt. In it, semitone
s alternate with whole tones, and the harmonic functions are comparable to those of the whole-tone scale. Once Rimsky-Korsakov discovered this functional parallel, he used the octatonic scale as an alternative to the whole-tone scale in the musical portrayal of fantastic subjects. This held true not only for Sadko but later for his symphonic poem Skazka ("The Tale") and the many scenes depicting magical happenings in his fairy-tale operas.
arranged the original version of Sadko for piano four-hands.Rimsky-Korsakov, 87.. Jurgenson published this arrangement the following year, in conjunction with the orchestral score.
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov was a Russian composer, and a member of the group of composers known as The Five.The Five, also known as The Mighty Handful or The Mighty Coterie, refers to a circle of composers who met in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in the years 1856–1870: Mily Balakirev , César...
wrote his "musical tableau" Sadko, Op. 5, in 1867 but revised the work in 1869 and 1892. It has sometimes been called the first symphonic poem
Symphonic poem
A symphonic poem or tone poem is a piece of orchestral music in a single continuous section in which the content of a poem, a story or novel, a painting, a landscape or another source is illustrated or evoked. The term was first applied by Hungarian composer Franz Liszt to his 13 works in this vein...
written in Russia. It was first performed in 1867 at a concert of the Russian Musical Society
Russian Musical Society
The Russian Musical Society was an organisation founded in 1859 by the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna and her protégé, pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein, with the intent of raising the standard of music in the country and disseminating musical education.Rubinstein and the Grand Duchess's...
(RMS), conducted by Mily Balakirev
Mily Balakirev
Mily Alexeyevich Balakirev ,Russia was still using old style dates in the 19th century, and information sources used in the article sometimes report dates as old style rather than new style. Dates in the article are taken verbatim from the source and therefore are in the same style as the source...
.
Scenario
SadkoSadko
Sadko is a Russian medieval epic . The title character is an adventurer, merchant and gusli musician from Novgorod.-Synopsis:Sadko played the gusli on the shores of a lake. The Sea Tsar enjoyed his music, and offered to help him...
was a legendary hero
Hero
A hero , in Greek mythology and folklore, was originally a demigod, their cult being one of the most distinctive features of ancient Greek religion...
of a Russian bylina
Bylina
Bylina or Bylyna is a traditional Russian oral epic narrative poem. Byliny singers loosely utilize historical fact greatly embellished with fantasy or hyperbole to create their songs...
(epic tale) with the same name. A merchant and gusli musician from Novgorod, he is transported to the realm of the Sea King. There, he is to provide music to accompany the dance at the marriage of the King's daughter. The dancing grows so frenzied that the surface of the sea billows and surges, threatening to founder the ships on it. To calm the sea, Sadko smashes his gusli. The storm dissipates and he reappears on the shore.
Composition
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
music group "The Five
The Five
The Five, also known as The Mighty Handful or The Mighty Coterie , refers to a circle of composers who met in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in the years 1856–1870: Mily Balakirev , César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Borodin...
," was long fascinated with Anton Rubinstein
Anton Rubinstein
Anton Grigorevich Rubinstein was a Russian-Jewish pianist, composer and conductor. As a pianist he was regarded as a rival of Franz Liszt, and he ranks amongst the great keyboard virtuosos...
's Europeanising Ocean Symphony and wanted to create a more specifically Russian alternative. Music critic Vladimir Stasov suggested the legend of Sadko and wrote a program for this work, giving it to Balakirev in 1861. At first Balakirev relayed the program to Modest Mussorgsky
Modest Mussorgsky
Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky was a Russian composer, one of the group known as 'The Five'. He was an innovator of Russian music in the romantic period...
, who did nothing with it. (Mussorgsky's comment to Balakirev on hearing Rubinstein's Ocean Symphony was "Oh Ocean, oh puddle"; he had much preferred Rubinstein's conducting of the work over the work itself.) Mussorgsky eventually offered the program to Rimsky-Korsakov, after he had long given up on it. Balakirev agreed, counting on the naval officer's love of the sea to help him produce results.
Instead of direct experience of the sea, Rimsky-Korsakov fell back on Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt ; ), was a 19th-century Hungarian composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher.Liszt became renowned in Europe during the nineteenth century for his virtuosic skill as a pianist. He was said by his contemporaries to have been the most technically advanced pianist of his age...
's symphonic poem Ce Qu'on entend sur la montagne for inspiration. Acting as bookends to the middle of the work are two sketches of the calm, gently rippling sea. While Rimsky-Korsakov took the harmonic and modulatory basis of these sections from the opening of Liszt's Montagne, he admitted the chord
Chord (music)
A chord in music is any harmonic set of two–three or more notes that is heard as if sounding simultaneously. These need not actually be played together: arpeggios and broken chords may for many practical and theoretical purposes be understood as chords...
passage closing these sections were purely his own. The central section comprises music portraying Sadko's underwater journey, the feast of the Sea King and the Russian dance that leads the work to its climax. Typical of Rimsky's modesty and self-criticism, he offers several influences for this section: Mikhail Glinka
Mikhail Glinka
Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka , was the first Russian composer to gain wide recognition within his own country, and is often regarded as the father of Russian classical music...
's Ruslan and Lyudmila
Ruslan and Lyudmila
Ruslan and Lyudmila is an opera in five acts composed by Mikhail Glinka between 1837 and 1842. The opera is based on the 1820 poem of the same name by Alexander Pushkin. The Russian libretto was written by Valerian Shirkov, Nestor Kukolnik and N. A. Markevich, among others...
, Balakirev's "Song of the Goldfish," Alexander Dargomyzhsky
Alexander Dargomyzhsky
Alexander Sergeyevich Dargomyzhsky was a 19th century Russian composer. He bridged the gap in Russian opera composition between Mikhail Glinka and the later generation of The Five and Tchaikovsky....
's Russalka and Liszt's Mephisto Waltz No. 1
Mephisto Waltzes
The Mephisto Waltzes are four waltzes composed by Franz Liszt in 1859-62, 1880–81, 1883 and 1885. Nos. 1-2 were composed for orchestra, later arranged for piano, piano duet and two pianos, whereas 3 and 4 were written for piano only...
. Rimsky-Korsakov chose the principal tonalities of the piece—D-flat major, D major
D major
D major is a major scale based on D, consisting of the pitches D, E, F, G, A, B, and C. Its key signature consists of two sharps. Its relative minor is B minor and its parallel minor is D minor....
and D flat major—specifically to please Balakirev, "who had an exclusive prediliction for them in those days."
Rimsky-Korsakov began the work in June 1867 during a three-week holiday at his brother's summer villa in Tervaïoki, near Vyborg
Vyborg
Vyborg is a town in Leningrad Oblast, Russia, situated on the Karelian Isthmus near the head of the Bay of Vyborg, to the northwest of St. Petersburg and south from Russia's border with Finland, where the Saimaa Canal enters the Gulf of Finland...
. A month's naval cruise in the Gulf of Finland proved only a temporary interruption; by October 12, he was finished. He wrote Mussorgsky that he was satisfied with it and that it was the best thing he had composed to date, but that he was weak from the intense strain of composition and needed to rest.
Rimsky-Korsakov felt that several factors combined to make the piece a success—the originality of his task; the form that resulted; the freshness of the dance tune and the singing theme with its Russian characteristics; and the orchestration, "caught as by a miracle, despite my imposing ignorance in the realm of orchestration." While he remained pleased with Sadko's form, Rimsky-Korsakov remained discontented with its brevity and sparseness, adding that writing the work in a broader format would have been more appropriate for Stasov's program. He attributed this extreme conciseness to his lack of compositional experience. Nevertheless, Balakirev was pleased with the work, paying Sadko a combination of patronization and encouraging admiration. He conducted its premiere that December.
Reaction
After an encore performance of Sadko at the RMS under Balakirev in 1868, one critic accused Rimsky-Korsakov of imitating Glinka's Kamarinskaya. This reaction led Mussorgsky to create his magazine Classicist, in which he ridiculed the critic of the "rueful countenance." At Balakirev's behest Rimsky-Korsakov revised the score for a November 1869 concert. Alexander BorodinAlexander Borodin
Alexander Porfiryevich Borodin was a Russian Romantic composer and chemist of Georgian–Russian parentage. He was a member of the group of composers called The Five , who were dedicated to producing a specifically Russian kind of art music...
wrote on the day of that concert, "In this new version, where many slips of orchestration have been righted and the former effects have been perfected, Sadko is a delight. The public greeted the piece enthusiastically and called Korsinka out three times."
Subsequent history
In 1871, RMS program director Mikhaíl Azanchevsky had Sadko programmed as part of an effort to recruit its composer onto the faculty of the St. Petersburg Conservatory. (This was also the only time conductor Eduard NápravníkEduard Nápravník
Eduard Francevič Nápravník was a Czech conductor and composer, who settled in Russia and is best known for his leading role in Russian musical life as the principal conductor of the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg for many decades...
performed an orchestral work by Rimsky-Korsakov for the RMS. Four years later, Azanchevsky asked Nápravník several times to conduct the symphonic suite Antar
Antar (Rimsky-Korsakov)
Antar is a composition for symphony orchestra in four movements by the Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. He wrote the piece in 1868 but revised the work in 1875 and 1891. He initially called this work his Second Symphony. He later reconsidered and called it a symphonic suite...
. Nápravník finally refused, telling Azanchevsky with apparent disdain that Rimsky-Korsakov "might as well conduct it himself.")
In 1892, Rimsky-Korsakov reorchestrated Sadko. This was the last of his early works that he revised. "With this revision I settled accounts with the past," he wrote in his autobiography. "In this way, not a single larger work of mine of the period antedating May Night remained unrevised" (italics Rimsky-Korsakov).
Rimsky-Korsakov conducted Sadko several times in Russia during his career, as well as in Brussels in March 1900. Arthur Nikisch
Arthur Nikisch
Arthur Nikisch ; 12 October 185523 January 1922) was a Hungarian conductor who performed internationally, holding posts in Boston, London and - most importantly - Berlin. He was considered an outstanding interpreter of the music of Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Liszt...
conducted it in the composer's presence in a Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
concert given in May 1907.
Harmonic explorations
"The Five" had already been using chromatic harmonyChromaticism
Chromaticism is a compositional technique interspersing the primary diatonic pitches and chords with other pitches of the chromatic scale. Chromaticism is in contrast or addition to tonality or diatonicism...
and the whole-tone scale before Rimsky-Korsakov composed Sadko. Glinka had used the whole-tone scale in Ruslan and Lyudmila as the leitmotif
Leitmotif
A leitmotif , sometimes written leit-motif, is a musical term , referring to a recurring theme, associated with a particular person, place, or idea. It is closely related to the musical idea of idée fixe...
of the evil dwarf Chernomor. "The Five" continued using this "artificial" harmony as a musical code for the fantastic, for the demonic, and for black magic. To this code Rimsky added the octatonic scale
Octatonic scale
An octatonic scale is any eight-note musical scale. Among the most famous of these is a scale in which the notes ascend in alternating intervals of a whole step and a half step, creating a symmetric scale...
in Sadko. This was a device he adapted from Liszt. In it, semitone
Semitone
A semitone, also called a half step or a half tone, is the smallest musical interval commonly used in Western tonal music, and it is considered the most dissonant when sounded harmonically....
s alternate with whole tones, and the harmonic functions are comparable to those of the whole-tone scale. Once Rimsky-Korsakov discovered this functional parallel, he used the octatonic scale as an alternative to the whole-tone scale in the musical portrayal of fantastic subjects. This held true not only for Sadko but later for his symphonic poem Skazka ("The Tale") and the many scenes depicting magical happenings in his fairy-tale operas.
Arrangements
In 1868, Rimsky-Korsakov's future wife Nadezhda Nikolayevna PurgoldNadezhda Rimskaya-Korsakova
Nadezhda Nikolayevna Rimskaya-Korsakova , 1848May 24, 1919) was a Russian pianist and composer as well as the wife of composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. She was also the mother of Russian musicologist Andrey Rimsky-Korsakov.-Early years:...
arranged the original version of Sadko for piano four-hands.Rimsky-Korsakov, 87.. Jurgenson published this arrangement the following year, in conjunction with the orchestral score.
Sources
- Brown, David, Mussorgsky: His Life and Works (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). ISBN 0-19-816587-0.
- Calvocoressi, M.D. and Gerand Abraham, Masters of Russian Music (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1944). ISBN n/a.
- Maes, Francis, tr. Pomerans, Arnold J. and Erica Pomerans, A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2002). ISBN 0-520-21815-9.
- Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, Letoppis Moyey Muzykalnoy Zhizni (St. Petersburg, 1909), published in English as My Musical Life (New York: Knopf, 1925, 3rd ed. 1942). ISBN n/a.