Program Notes: Stravinsky The Firebird (2023)

NIKOLAI RIMSKY-KORSAKOV 
“The Three Wonders” from The Tale of Tsar Saltan, Op. 57 
BORN: March 18, 1844, Tikhvin, Russia 
DIED: June 21, 1908, Liubensk, Russia 
WORK COMPOSED: 1899 
WORLD PREMIERE: December 16, 1899, in Saint Petersburg, Russia 

What to Listen For: 

• A trumpet and snare drum fanfare introduces and punctuates each “Wonder,” which range from the playful and mysterious to the lush and triumphant. 

A trumpet and snare drum fanfare introduces and punctuates each “Wonder,” which range from the playful and mysterious to the lush and triumphant. 

In his autobiography, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov remembered that as a child, “I fell in love with the sea ... without ever having seen it.” As a teenage naval cadet, Rimsky-Korsakov admired his uncle, a respected admiral and a favorite of Tsar Nicholas I. Letters from his much older brother — an accomplished naval officer and explorer — stoked a fascination with voyaging to distant lands. 

As an adult, Rimsky-Korsakov sought to create a distinctly Russian musical tradition. After his stint in the navy, he collected and compiled Russian folk songs as a matter of national pride and artistic research. The composer also drew from fairy tales as inspiration for a series of popular operas, including The Tale of Tsar Saltan. 

The complete and fancifully cumbersome title of the opera, The Tale of Tsar Saltan, of his Son the Renowned and Mighty Bogatïr Prince Guidon Saltanovich, and of the Beautiful Swan-Princess only hints at a convoluted, fantastical plot: scheming sisters fool Tsar Saltan into banishing his queen and princeling into the sea. Sealed shut in a barrel, castaway mother and son land on an uncharted magical island. 

A trumpet fanfare announces the first wonder, a magic squirrel prying emeralds from golden-shelled nuts. Heard in a capering tune led by the flutes and xylophone, this charming creature sings a rustic fertility hymn, “Vo sadu li, v ogorode” (“In the grove or in the garden”). Floating triplets — three notes played in the time of two — and rising scales in the harp depict the next wonder: a receding tidal flood that leaves in its wake a platoon of gold-helmeted warriors. A soaring melody in the strings unveils the final wonder, the iridescent Swan-Princess. 

Conceived as a tableau for the final act of The Tale of Tsar Saltan, “The Three Wonders” is the third of three “Musical Pictures,” a suite that debuted almost a year before the opera’s premiere on October 21, 1900. Like the opera’s prince and his mother, the “Musical Pictures” manuscript suffered a storm-tossed fate. In 1907, Rimsky Korsakov presented the hand-written score as a gift to a student — Igor Stravinsky — whose home was looted and papers cast to the winds during the 1917 Russian Revolution. 

DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH 
Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major, Op. 107 
BORN: September 25, 1906, in Saint Petersburg, Russia 
DIED: August 9, 1975, in Moscow, USSR 
WORK COMPOSED: 1959 
WORLD PREMIERE: October 4, 1959, in Leningrad, USSR 
NOTEWORTHY SEATTLE SYMPHONY PERFORMANCE: December 7, 2010, with Yo-Yo Ma on cello and Gerard Schwarz conducting. 

What to Listen For: 

• The absence of trumpets, trombones and tuba helps emphasize the cello and showcases important solos for horn.  

• The second and fourth movements are conjoined by a searing cadenza — a solo designed to showcase the cellist’s virtuosity and emotional expressiveness. 

When he was 9, Dmitri Shostakovich saw his first opera, The Tale of Tsar Saltan, and liked it. But he was also intimidated, worrying that learning music would be “too hard to grasp.” Yet when Shostakovich started piano lessons a few months later, he recalled, “things then went ahead very fast. It turned out that I had perfect pitch and learned music very quickly.” 

Admitted to the Petrograd (formerly Saint Petersburg) Conservatory at the age of 13, the teenage prodigy studied under two of Rimsky-Korsakov’s former prize pupils. Eager to push against musical tradition, the young student found Maximilian Steinberg old-fashioned and inflexible. Alexander Glazunov was baffled by Shostakovich’s graduation piece, Symphony No. 1 (1924–1925), declaring, “Of course the work shows great talent, but I don’t understand it.” 

From the 1930s to the 1950s, Shostakovich fell in and out of favor multiple times with fellow Soviet composers and government leaders (most terrifyingly, Stalin). By the time he composed his Cello Concerto No. 1 in 1959, the composer had been “rehabilitated,” and became an acceptable, esteemed figure in the USSR. He could write works for his friends — in this case Mstislav Rostropovich (who mastered the entire concerto in four days) — without placing anyone at risk. 

The cello opens the concerto with an insistent motive of G, E, B and B-flat. As those four notes elongate into an impassioned melody, variants of the motive pass to the strings and other instruments. After a series of taut exchanges between the soloist and orchestra, we hear an imploring solo by the clarinet followed by the horn. A second theme emerges; the cellist’s line becomes frenzied with emphatic, almost ugly triple stops of two C-sharps an octave apart clustered against a D. Scolded by interjections from the winds and horn, the cello duets with the horn and then both oboes. A single timpani hit prompts a hasty conclusion to the Allegretto. 

The second movement’s designation, Moderato, belies its haunting character. After a desolate hymn in the strings, the cello duets with the horn, and subsequently the clarinet heard in its lower, plummy chalumeau register. The strings briefly recall the opening; the cello continues the wistful lament, which is gradually amplified by the orchestra. A forthright horn solo yields to a macabre call-and-response between cello harmonics — silky, flute-like tones produced by gently touching the string — and a celesta sputtering like a worn-out music box. 

A Cadenza connects the slow movement to the finale. This brooding section braids fragments from the Allegretto into a hushed and anguished tour de force for the soloist. 

In the closing Allegro con moto, Shostakovich embedded a secret, sly jest that would have been likely fatal a few years earlier when Stalin was alive: a sarcastically mangled snippet of the dictator’s favorite song, “Suliko.” Returning to the opening theme, the music is boisterous, ending with a torrent of triple stops from the cellist and seven brusque strikes on the timpani. 

IGOR STRAVINSKY 
The Firebird (original 1910 version) 
BORN: June 17, 1882, in Oranienbaum, Russia 
DIED: April 6, 1971, in New York 
WORK COMPOSED: 1909-1910 
WORLD PREMIERE: June 25, 1910, in Paris, France 
FEATURED ON: Seattle Symphony Media’s November 2016 recording, Stravinsky: The Firebird; Nikolaev: The Sinewaveland, conducted by Ludovic Morlot. 

What to Listen For: 

• In The Firebird, Stravinsky balances muscular, rhythmically urgent melodic fragments with endearing tunes that evoke another great Russian composer, Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. 

In The Firebird, Stravinsky balances muscular, rhythmically urgent melodic fragments with endearing tunes that evoke another great Russian composer, Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. 

Igor Stravinsky showed scant promise as a young composer; decades later, he reflected how he had “ripened in ignorance” during his teenage years. At the age of 20, he and his amateurish piano pieces were rebuffed by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who kindly dispatched Stravinsky to one of his students for remedial studies in harmony and counterpoint. 

Stravinsky was fortunate. Rimsky-Korsakov had dismissed previous prospective students bluntly, including a then-unknown Sergei Diaghilev, whose compositions the master had deemed “worse than nonsensical.” Diaghilev stormed out, maniacally shouting threats and shaking his fist. When finally accepted by Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky found himself a supportive surrogate family as well as in competition with his teacher’s favorite (and son-in-law), Maximilian Steinberg. 

Stravinsky persisted, composing a symphony under his teacher’s watchful eye and two short dazzlingly opulent orchestral curtain-raisers. Diaghilev, by then an upstart ballet and opera impresario, was impressed, but not enough to make Stravinsky his first choice to write music for The Firebird — a ballet based on a potpourri of Russian folk tales and slated to premiere in Paris with the Ballets Russes. 

Diaghilev’s first four chosen composers refused The Firebird before he turned to Stravinsky. Although it sounds preposterous today, Rimsky-Korsakov believed — and his disciples were expected to agree — ballet was “a degenerate art” or at best, beneath the attention of a serious composer. But Rimsky-Korsakov had died the previous year. Free to find his own voice, Stravinsky accepted. 

Of his beloved teacher’s influence on The Firebird, Stravinsky confessed over a half century later, “I tried to surpass him.” He does so with kaleidoscopic juxtapositions of then-new and still sumptuous orchestral colors from the very beginning: a rumbling yet sinuous counterpoint molts into eerily sliding string harmonics and racing tremolo strings. 

Updating a technique from Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky depicts the resplendently plumed Firebird with rapid bursts of the piccolo, flute, oboe and clarinet: melodic phrases fly by fast enough to sound like a single instrument. 

Young Prince Ivan, the ballet’s hero, has his own theme in the horn. While glimpsing his destined bride, this anthemic folksong shyly intermingles with the courtly dance of the Thirteen Princesses. After triggering the eldritch Magic Carillon — an incandescent fusillade of rattling strings, harps, piano and celesta — the Prince is captured by the evil sorcerer Kastchei. Invoking the aid of the Firebird, Kastchei is vanquished, and the hero’s theme returns in triumph. 

Back in Saint Petersburg, The Firebird was judged by Rimsky-Korsakov’s coterie — including his son Andrei, the work’s dedicatee — as a betrayal. In Paris, the ballet’s rapturous success was not only sweet satisfaction for Diaghilev, but inaugurated Stravinsky’s reign as the most famous composer of the 20th century. 

All notes by Christopher DeLaurenti © 2023