Overture to ‘Ruslan and Lyudmila’

Program notes

About the Work

Mikhail Glinka is often regarded as the founder of Russian classical music, and with some justice: before him, Russia’s concert life and opera houses were dominated by imported Italian, French and German music, and it was Glinka who first showed that a Russian composer could speak with a national voice while commanding the full technique of the European tradition. His first opera, A Life for the Tsar (1836), made him famous. His second, Ruslan and Lyudmila, took him the better part of five years and reached the stage of the Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre in St Petersburg in late 1842.

The opera is based on the early narrative poem by Alexander Pushkin, a fairy-tale romance in which the knight Ruslan must rescue his bride Lyudmila, snatched away on their wedding night by the evil dwarf-sorcerer Chernomor. It is a sprawling, magical, episodic work, full of enchanted gardens, a giant disembodied head and oriental dances, and at its premiere it was coolly received. Yet its musical influence was immense. The composers who came after Glinka, among them Balakirev, Borodin, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, treated Ruslan as a treasure-house, and its fantastical harmonies and orchestral colours echo through a century of Russian music.

The opera itself is rarely staged outside Russia, but its overture has become one of the most popular curtain-raisers in the orchestral repertoire: five minutes of sheer exhilaration, and a test of any string section’s nerve.

What to Listen For

The overture opens with a blaze: hammered full-orchestra chords, and then the violins set off on a scurrying, breathless theme at a Presto tempo that allows no rest. Listen to the strings here: this is famously one of the most exposed and treacherous passages in the orchestral literature, and a great orchestra makes it sound like quicksilver rather than hard work.

The contrast comes with a broad, warm second melody, sung out by the lower strings, a tune drawn from the opera itself. After the development, which tosses fragments of the main theme around the orchestra, listen near the end for something strange: in the bass, the low instruments intone a slow descent in whole tones, an eerie, rootless scale that was startlingly new in the 1840s and represents the sorcerer Chernomor’s dark magic. It is only a moment, a shadow crossing the stage, before the music bursts back into daylight and races to a triumphant finish.