Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, Op. 35

A Naval Officer Who Captured the Thousand and One Nights in Sound

Composer

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908)

Work

Symphonic Suite “Scheherazade,” Op. 35

Key

E minor

Movements

Four movements
I. The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship — Largo e maestoso (E minor)
II. The Story of the Kalendar Prince — Lento (B minor)
III. The Young Prince and the Young Princess — Andantino quasi allegretto (G major)
IV. Festival at Baghdad — The Sea — The Ship Goes to Pieces on a Rock Surmounted by a Bronze Warrior — Allegro molto (E minor)

Instrumentation

2 flutes (doubling piccolo), 2 oboes (doubling cor anglais), 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drum, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, tambourine, harp, strings

Duration

Approximately 45 minutes

Premiere

28 October 1888, St Petersburg
Conductor: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Summer 1888. A country house on the outskirts of St Petersburg. A forty-four-year-old man set his pen to manuscript paper. He began on 4 June and finished on 7 August — two months to transfer every night of the Arabian tales into orchestral sound. The curious thing was this man’s background. A conservatory diploma? He had none. What he did have was a commission from the Imperial Russian Navy. What follows is the story of how the only great composer to have actually crossed an ocean came to write the most brilliantly coloured orchestral suite in the repertoire — and a movement-by-movement guide to hearing it at its fullest.

The Composer on a Warship — A Naval Cadet Who Dreamed of Symphonies While Crossing the Atlantic

The twelve-year-old who walked through the gates of the Naval College in St Petersburg in 1856 was called Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. His elder brother Voin — twenty-two years his senior — served as a naval navigator, and young Nikolai had fallen in love with the sea long before he ever saw it, through Voin’s tales of distant voyages.

While teaching himself piano and cello at the college, the cadet had a fateful encounter in 1861. He was introduced to Mily Balakirev — a firebrand who championed a radical idea: that Russians should forge their own musical language through self-study rather than imitating Western European models. Balakirev spotted the young sailor’s talent instantly and began teaching him composition on the spot.

Then, in the autumn of 1862, Nikolai shipped out. He boarded the clipper Almaz for a three-year voyage around the world: across the Atlantic to New York harbour, through the Mediterranean, past horizons he had only imagined. Balakirev refused to let geography interrupt the lessons. He sent letters to the ship’s cabin, guiding the young man through the construction of symphonic movements by post. Picture an eighteen-year-old midshipman on deck, sea spray on his face, manuscript paper spread before him — has the history of classical music ever produced a more romantic classroom?

The Amateurs’ Revolt — How “The Mighty Handful” Shook Russian Music

Rimsky-Korsakov returned to Russia in 1865 and joined forces with Balakirev, Mussorgsky, Borodin, and Cui to form one of music history’s most consequential alliances. The critic Vladimir Stasov dubbed them “The Mighty Handful” (Moguchaya kuchka) in 1867 — originally a backhanded compliment. That the five embraced the nickname with pride tells you everything about their temperament.

Consider the group’s day jobs. Borodin was a chemistry professor. Cui was a military engineer. Mussorgsky had served in the Imperial Guard. Rimsky-Korsakov was a serving naval officer. The only full-time musician among them was Balakirev himself. Five amateurs had raised a flag of rebellion against the conservatory-trained establishment that dominated Russian musical life. Their shared ambition was straightforward: instead of copying Western European forms, they would build a musical language from Russian folk melodies, church modes, and the rhythms of their own soil. Scheherazade would become the ultimate proof that their ambition was no pipe dream.

There is a delicious irony here. This self-taught “amateur” naval officer eventually became Russia’s most rigorous music educator. Perhaps the very absence of formal training drove him harder. When the St Petersburg Conservatory invited him to join the faculty in 1871, Rimsky-Korsakov embarked on a gruelling course of private study — counterpoint, harmony, fugue — learning from scratch even as he stood before his students. His memoirs contain a confession of almost brazen honesty:

“When I accepted the professorship, I knew better than any of my students that I had never systematically studied harmony.”

This same man would later write Principles of Orchestration, a treatise edited and published posthumously by his son-in-law Maximilian Steinberg. It remains the bible of orchestral writing to this day. From self-taught sailor to author of the definitive textbook — that trajectory is a drama in its own right.

The Summer of 1888 — Borodin’s Empty Chair and an Explosion of Creative Energy

In 1887, Borodin died suddenly. Rimsky-Korsakov threw himself into completing and editing his friend’s unfinished opera Prince Igor — painstaking, selfless work that gave him deep satisfaction, but all the while his own music was simmering beneath the surface.

In June 1888 he retreated to a summer house — a dacha — near Nyezhgovitsy, outside Luga. There, in just two months, he composed the entirety of Scheherazade. The dates are inked clearly on the autograph score: begun 4 June, completed 7 August. That same year he also finished the Capriccio Espagnol and the Russian Easter Overture. It was the most blazingly productive summer of his life.

Why the Arabian Nights? Rimsky-Korsakov had been drawn to the exotic East his entire creative life. Antar, The Golden Cockerel, The Tsar’s Bride — orientalist masterworks fill his catalogue. Add to that a naval career that had physically carried him across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and the opening of Scheherazade starts to feel inevitable. Sinbad’s ship riding the first movement’s swells is no armchair fantasy. It is the salt wind and unending horizon that an eighteen-year-old midshipman absorbed through his skin aboard the Almaz, poured back out through the orchestra two decades later.

The Sultan and Scheherazade — The Musical Architecture of the Thousand and One Nights

Two keys unlock this entire work.

The first is the Sultan Shahriar’s theme: a heavy, imperious unison in the low brass and strings. It radiates authority and menace — the presence of a ruler who takes a new bride each night and has her executed at dawn.

The second is Scheherazade’s theme: a solo violin, sinuous and free, floating over gently arpeggiated harp. It is the voice of the storyteller who kept death at bay for a thousand and one nights through the sheer power of narrative.

These two motifs thread through all four movements. When the Sultan growls, Scheherazade answers with her violin. At the opening of each movement the solo violin returns with its arabesque melody — a signal that says, in effect, “Let me tell you tonight’s tale.” The harp shimmers beneath; a single violin unfurls an ornamental line; and the entire concert hall becomes a Persian palace after dark.

🎵 Recommended performance: hr-Sinfonieorchester, conducted by Alain Altinoglu — selected as the reference recording for this guide.

Four Nights, Four Worlds — A Movement-by-Movement Listening Guide

Movement I: The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship

The Sultan’s threatening brass opens the work, but the moment Scheherazade’s violin enters, we are transported — instantly — from the palace to the open ocean. The rocking motion the strings create is hypnotic and endlessly varied. Close your eyes and you can almost feel the deck shifting beneath your feet. Was it because the man who wrote this had spent three years at sea? The flute cuts across the upper register like a gull; the cellos pulse with the deep resonance of the ocean floor. These are textures that do not come from a library. They come from lived experience — salt air, creaking timber, the endless roll of the deep.

Movement II: The Story of the Kalendar Prince

An exotic bassoon solo opens the tale of the wandering prince. The movement is restless, episodic — a traveller’s yarn that drifts from quiet narration to sudden orchestral explosions. The moment when trombones and trumpets erupt into a battle scene arrives with startling force. Here is the brass writing of a man who spent years as Inspector of Naval Bands, someone who had heard hundreds of times, in the field, exactly which instrument blazes brightest at which dynamic in which register.

Movement III: The Young Prince and the Young Princess

The most lyrical movement — a love song, pure and unguarded. The strings sing a broad, noble theme for the prince; the woodwinds answer with a dancing, lightly ornamented melody for the princess. The two themes circle each other, approach, and finally merge. You could listen to this movement alone and feel the world had brightened. If orchestral music is new territory for you, start here.

Movement IV: Festival at Baghdad — The Sea — Shipwreck

The finale opens in a whirl of festive chaos. Themes from every preceding movement crash together in a carnival of colour — tambourine and snare drum conjuring an entire Eastern marketplace on the concert stage. But behind the revelry, a storm is gathering. The sea from the first movement returns, and this time it is not gentle. The ship strikes a cliff crowned by a bronze warrior, and the orchestra detonates in a shattering fortissimo.

Then — silence. And Scheherazade’s violin steals back in, quiet and alone. The thousand and one nights are over. The Sultan’s theme reappears, but softened, almost tender. The cruel monarch has been transformed by the storyteller’s voice. Hearing this ending, it is hard not to believe that music really can change a person.

Programme Music or Absolute Music? — The Composer’s Own Ambivalence

Here is a puzzle. Rimsky-Korsakov initially gave each movement an explicit title — “The Sea and Sinbad,” “The Kalendar Prince,” and so on. Then, for publication, he removed them all.

“I wanted the listener to receive the impression of an oriental narrative freely, simply as symphonic music with an Eastern colouring. I did not wish each movement to be tied to a specific story.”

Should we take him at his word? The Sultan and Scheherazade themes could hardly be more vividly characterised, yet he asks us not to connect them to the tale. Scholarly modesty? A desire to be judged by purely musical standards? Perhaps both. One thing is certain: whether you know the programme or not, the music works — absolutely and completely.

Principles of Orchestration — The Textbook Writer’s Own Demonstration

If you want to understand why Rimsky-Korsakov is called “the wizard of the orchestra,” Scheherazade is all the evidence you need. This is a man who literally wrote the textbook — and not from an ivory tower. From 1873 he served as Inspector of Naval Bands, a post that gave him hundreds of opportunities to hear every wind and brass instrument at close quarters, learning through direct, hands-on experience which colours each instrument yields in every register and dynamic.

In Scheherazade, that knowledge erupts. Flutes and clarinets dart through the texture like sprites; the oboe coils upward in the manner of a snake charmer’s pipe; brass enters only at precisely the right dramatic moment — battles and festivals — and with devastating impact. The percussion writing is masterly in its economy: a few strokes of tambourine and triangle are enough to conjure an entire Eastern atmosphere.

Pay particular attention to the string writing. In the first movement, a single rocking figure migrates from the violas to the cellos, then up into the violins, passing through the ensemble like a wave rolling through water. This kind of orchestral thinking was rare in Russian music of the period. It was the movement of the ocean as the naval officer had seen it with his own eyes, translated into the disposition of instruments across the stage. In the third movement, the violin and cello trade the prince’s and princess’s themes, using the natural timbral contrast between the two instruments to delineate character with exquisite subtlety.

Every instrument in the orchestra occupies its ideal position, doing exactly what it does best. This is textbook orchestration in the most literal sense — by the man who wrote the textbook, proving his own theory through his own art.

Posthumous Glory — The Ballets Russes Sets Paris Ablaze

Rimsky-Korsakov died on 21 June 1908. Barely two years later, on 4 June 1910, something extraordinary happened at the Palais Garnier in Paris. The choreographer Michel Fokine transformed Scheherazade into a ballet for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

The stage design was by Léon Bakst, and it detonated like a bomb. Saturated colour, sinuous pattern, an explosion of orientalist fantasy — Parisian high society had never seen anything like it. Nijinsky blazed across the stage as the Golden Slave; Ida Rubinstein’s Zobeide met her tragic end with a dagger. By the standards of 1910, the ballet’s sensuality verged on scandal.

The composer never saw it. But when his music was reborn as dance, Scheherazade transcended the concert hall and became a landmark of stage art. Bakst’s designs went on to influence the fashion world — the orientalist craze that swept Paris in the 1910s can be traced, in no small part, to this single production.

Fokine’s choreography broke with convention. Gone were the formalised positions of classical ballet; in their place came the fluid, liberated movement of Eastern dance. Nijinsky’s Golden Slave stunned audiences with great leaping traversals of the stage; Rubinstein’s Zobeide achieved an almost unbearable tragic beauty in her final moments. Contemporary Parisian critics described the production as “an unprecedented fusion of music, dance, and visual art into a single living organism.” It was Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral score — functioning not as mere accompaniment but as drama itself — that made such a fusion possible.

A Teacher’s Final Gift — The Name “Stravinsky”

That very same year, in that very same city, another historic premiere took place: Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird. Stravinsky had been a law student when, around 1902, he sought out Rimsky-Korsakov and asked for private lessons. The master agreed.

Two years after the teacher’s death, the pupil’s debut score shared a Parisian stage with the teacher’s ballet. Listen to the radiant orchestral colours of The Firebird and you will hear, instantly, where they came from. Stravinsky learned from Rimsky-Korsakov how to use the orchestra as a painter uses a palette. The fascinating twist is that Stravinsky later tried, quite deliberately, to break away from his teacher’s orchestral style — yet the shimmering colours of The Firebird and the woodwind writing of Petrushka betray the master’s influence at every turn. It was a legacy too powerful to refuse.

Three years after that, in 1913, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring brought Paris to the brink of riot. It was the Big Bang of twentieth-century music. And the man who lit the fuse was a self-taught naval officer who called himself a wizard of the orchestra.

Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition is the version the world knows best, but it was Rimsky-Korsakov who first edited, completed, and orchestrated several of Mussorgsky’s works, giving them to the world. He guarded his colleague’s legacy while handing his pupil the keys to the future. Has Russian music ever had a sturdier bridge between generations?

Follow the Score

The full score is freely available at IMSLP. View the Scheherazade, Op. 35 score on IMSLP

Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

Further Reading

• Mozart’s Twelve Variations on ‘Ah vous dirai-je, Maman’, K.265
• Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’, Op. 36
• Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major, Op. 100
• Saint-Saëns’s Symphony No. 3 in C minor ‘Organ’, Op. 78
• Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 in C major D. 944 ‘The Great’