The
Work
Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov based
Sheherazade
on the age-old tales contained in the collection The Thousand
and One Nights. For those who don't know, The Thousand
and One Nights is a collection of tales supposedly told by the Princess
Sheherazade. The story goes that the evil King Shahryar of Samarkand
took a new wife every day and each evening he would kill her. Princess
Sheherazade was able to avoid her execution by telling the king fabulous
tales that entranced him to the point that he could not bring himself to
kill her.
Rimsky-Korsakov's intent was
not to portray a story, but to write music that was "only" music.
The following is a statement from his autobiography: "The program
which guided me during the composition of Sheherazade was formed
of single, disconnected scenes or pictures from The Thousand and One
Nights distributed among all four movements: the sea and Sinbad's ship,
the fantastic tale of the Kalander Prince, the prince and the princess,
the celebration in Baghdad, the ship breaking up on the rocks with the
rider of iron. These pictures are joined together by the introductions
to the first, third, and fourth movements, and the intermezzo of the third
movement--four short sections for violin solo, which are associated with
Sheherazade, and at the same time are supposed to portray the way in which
she told her wondrous tales to the grim Sultan. In my suite, you
will look in vain for leitmotives that are always connected consistently
to one and the same poetic idea or concept. Rather, the supposed
leitmotives are nothing but purely musical material or motifs for symphonic
elaboration. These motifs, either successively or woven in with each
other, go through all four movements, but in such a way that they express
different ideas, events, and images. I wanted to compose a four-movement
orchestral suite based on the completely free treatment of musical material;
a suite that, on the one hand, would have an inner consistency because
of its common themes and motifs, but at the same time would present a kaleidoscopic
succession of images from fairy tales of oriental character."
Although it sounds contradictive,
Rimsky-Korsakov clearly states that Sheherazade is music for the
sake of music.
Click here to explore the musical
concepts contained within the fourth movement of Sheherazade.