Book Description

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PART II RIMSKY-KORSAKOF AS OPERATIC COMPOSER In the present volume it will not be possible to give more than a brief survey of Rimsky-Korsakof' s operatic activity and output. The reader who has perused the foregoing narrative of the composer's life and work will doubtless have gathered that the literary subject- matter alone of these fifteen operas would provide material for quite a lengthy tome, and he is assured that their musical content is at least deserving of an equally extended treatment. For the present occasion it must needs suffice to pass in review the general characteristics of the wonderful operatic treasury left by Rimsky-Korsakof to the world. Without some knowledge of his forerunners it is impossible to appreciate the full significance of his works. They may be said to derive from three sources. Glinka's legacy to the theatre consists of two epoch- making works. The first, A Life for the Tsar, is historical, being founded on an episode which is supposed to have occurred at the time of the inauguration of the Romanof dynasty. The second, Russian and Ludmilla, takes for its text the substance of See operatic synopses, p. 111. Pushkin's early poem of that name, and is fantastic in character. A Life for the Tsar gave its composer an opportunity of introducing folk-song and melody of a national character; in Russlan and Ludmilla Glinka became, as it were, a musical imperialist, and drew material from a variety of territorial sources, from Finland on the one hand, from Turkey and Persia on the other. These two operas have had an influence upon subsequent Russian music that it would be difficult to over-estimate. The output of Rimsky-Korsakof, a fairly prolific operatic composer, affords excellent material for the tracing of Glinka's i...