Paul Archibald Sounding Out

Fairy tales have stimulated generations of composers to write some of their finest music. With a rich source of characters that includes dragons, dwarfs, elves, fairies, giants, gnomes, goblins, monsters, talking animals, trolls, unicorns, witches and wizards, it’s no wonder these stories have captivated the imaginations of compsers and audiences alike.

Engelbert Humperdinck (1854-1921)
Hansel and Gretel
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
Sir Georg Solti (conductor)

Franz Schubert (1997-1928)
The Earl King
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (baritone)
Gerald Moore (piano)

Nikolai Rimsky Korsakoff (1844-1908)
Scheherazade
New York Philharmonic Orchestra
Alan Gilbert (conductor)

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)
Cinderella: Cinderella’s Departure for the Ball
Moscow RTV Symphony Orchestra
Gennady Rozhdestventsky (conductor)

Originally conceived as a small-scale vocal entertainment for children, Hansel and Gretel resonates with both adults and children, and has become one of the most successful fairy-tale operas ever created. The composer, Engelbert Humperdinck, was a protégé of Richard Wagner’s, and the opera’s score is flavoured with the sophisticated musical lessons he learned from his idol while maintaining a charm and a light touch that were entirely Humperdinck’s own. The opera acknowledges the darker features present in the Brothers Grimm version of the familiar folk tale, yet presents them within a frame of grace and humor. Engelbert Humperdinck began his career as an assistant to Richard Wagner in Bayreuth in a variety of capacities, including tutoring Wagner’s son Siegfried in music and composition. Hansel and Gretel was Humperdinck’s first complete opera and remains the foundation of his reputation.

The Earl King is a song setting written in 1815 and based on a 1782 poem of the same name by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The song packs a remarkable amount of tension and drama into a mere four minutes and all the more impressive as Schubert was only 18 years old when he composed it. Inspired in part by his friendship with a number of talented singers, Schubert produced some 600 art songs during the course of his brief career and The Earl King is by far the best known of these. The poem that provides its text, like many of the supernatural tales that dominated literature in the Romantic era, has its roots in a Scandinavian folktale. Goethe’s poem tells the story of a boy riding home on horseback in his father’s arms. He is frightened when he is courted by the Earl King, a powerful and creepy supernatural being. The boy’s father, however, cannot see or hear the creature and tells the boy that his imagination is playing tricks on him. The boy grows increasingly terrified by what he hears from the Earl King, but his father tells him that the things he thinks he sees and hears are only the sights and sounds of nature on a dark and stormy night. When the Earl King eventually seizes the boy, the father spurs on his horse, but when he arrives home his son is dead.

Scheherazade was inspired by the collection of largely Middle Eastern and Indian tales known as The Thousand and One Nights (or The Arabian Nights). The piece evokes an image of Scheherazade , the young wife of the sultan Schahriar, telling tales to her husband to forestall his plan to kill her. Scheherazade derives its themes from the evocative stories of characters, such as Sindbad the Sailor and the woodcutter Ali Baba, that became widely known in Europe during the 1800s. Rimsky-Korsakov, renowned as a virtuoso of orchestral coloration, recognized in these tales an ideal realm in which to give free rein to his abilities. Colourful and highly varied in mood, Scheherazade was completed in 1888, and premiered on November 3rd of the same year in Saint Petersburg with Rimsky-Korsakoff himself conducting.

Tales are a major inspiration for Prokofiev’s works. Commissioned in 1940 for a ballet, Cinderella took five years to be presented to the public because of the Second World War. The musical composition perfectly highlights each character’s role in the tale and creates a symbiosis with classical ballet. Following the successful production of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet at the Kirov in Leningrad n 1940, Prokofiev joined forces with Nikolai Volkov who provided the scenario for Cinderella. The first two acts were completed in piano score by June of 1941, but with the German invasion on June 22, Prokofiev laid aside the ballet to begin work on something that would reflect Russia’s struggle against the Nazi onslaught. This was to become his huge, four-hour opera War and Peace. Prokofiev resumed work on Cinderella two years later, in mid-1943, and expected that it would be performed by the Kirov company, but in the end was first performed by the Bolshoi in Moscow on November 21, 1945. Soon after the highly successful premiere, Prokofiev drew from the full score nineteen numbers arranged into three suites that soon found their way into the orchestral repertory as his Op. 107, 108, and 109.