The Snow Maiden

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1052, 23 October 1959, Page 4

The Snow Maiden

F the fifteen operas written by Rimsky-Korsakov, none reflects more his pantheistic joy in nature than his third — The Snow Maiden (Snegurochka). This opera was his own favourite among his works, and the fact that he composed it in a mood of deep spiritual enjoyment is revealed in the many felicities of melodic invention. Snow Maiden in fact, goes far to prove Ernest Newman’s contention that "as a melodist pure and simple RimskyKorsakov reigns supreme." The first composer to write music for Ostrovsky’s fantastic play was Tchaikovsky the play being produced with the incidental music at Moscow in 1873. Rimsky-Korsakév read the text about the same time but was unimpressed; seven years later his eyes, he says, "were opened to its marvellous poetic beauty. "The more I thought about it the deeper I fell in love with Ostrovsky’s tale. My mild interest in ancient Russian customs and pagan pantheism flamed up. There seemed no better subject in the whole world than this, na more poetic figures than Snow Maiden, or Spring, no better realm than the gdom of the Berendeys with their marvellous no better religion and Philoscatty, 4 = gaa the worship of tee of 1880, Ritmskyaf the bao on a rough draft Maiden, finishing it on te gre se ne Oy

country estate, where everything (he tells us in his Memoirs) was in harmony with his pantheistic frame of mind and his passion for _the subject of Snegurochka. ie "A thick crooked knot or stump overgrown with moss, appeared to me the wood demon or his abode; the forest Volchinyets-a forbidden forest; the bare Kopytyets hillock-yYarilo’s mountain . . . It sometimes seemed to me that animals, birds, and even trees and flowers, know more of the magic and fantastic than human beings do; that they understand the language of nature far better! You will say’that all this was fearfully exaggerated and illogical, and yet it seems to me that it was all really so! I warmly believed in it all as a child would, like a dreamer surrendering himself to his fancies, and yet, strangely enough, in those minutes the world seemed to me nearer, more understandable, and I was somehow merged with it." Written thus as a labour of love, the composition flowed easily’ and

well; the following winter the orchestration was completed in St Petersburg, and in February, 1882, the opera had its premiere at the Maryinsky Theatre in the same city. Ostrovsky’s play was a Poetic version of an old Russian fairy tale, and the music with which Rimsky-Korsakov clothed the legend is typically Russian — deriving in some cases from folk songs which he had kn from early child-

herself, although beautiful, it is often cold at the heart; and the personages -even when intended to be_ real and not mythical-are little more than abstract formulae devoid of life and drama. Though cold, however, RimskyKorsakov’s music conquers by its brilliance, his sure sense of form creating a musical tale of unaffected beauty. "Rimsky-Korsakov," wrote Nicholas Slonimsky "has the advantage of a sober-minded professor over those among the moderns who conjure up all the elements of earth and heaven for crashing effects; he doses out his splashes of colour so that when a cymbal player flourishes his piatti in the air, we really see golden suns and hear golden thunder which we would not have seen had we had this cymbal insensitivising our eardrums for some time ... His splendid consistency we cannot ignore; and this consistency may teach modern know-it-alls what they are yet to acquire in their own works." The first complete broadcast of The Snow Maiden in this country will

programme (starting at 7.0 p.m.) on all YC stations on Sunday, November 1. There will be two brief intermissions during the course of the opera (at approximately 8.30 and 10.5) during which short folk tales will be broadcast, The performance to be heard 3s by the National Opera, Bels« gtade, conducted by Kreshimir Baranovich, ith Sofiya Yankovich singing th part of the