Sheherazade

A world of fairytale. This is the picture frame within which the three - Pochettina, Tone Tinytone and Arietta - traveled for the first time this "season". An exotic world sonorously outlined by Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov. It is probably useless to mention the fact that Mr. Korsakov had founded his work on the famous A Thousand and One Nights. He initially didn't want to give a name to each part, because he didn't want to attach himself to one of them in particular, but he eventually gave each partition a title.
This is how the next titles appeared: The Sea and Sindbad's Ship, Prince Kalender, The Young Prince and the Young Princess and Festival at Bagdad. The Sea.The Shipwreck against a rock.

Even so, the names of the fragments are quite vague so as not to make reference to a certain part of the book. In order to actually understand the play, Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov put down at the beginning of the symphonic suite a few lines in which he briefly explained the subject. And this was probably done to make us also understand the fact that there are two characters that reappear under different forms throughout all the four parts: Scheherazade and the Sultan.

Translated by: Cristina Neculai
MA student, MTTLC, Bucharest University