May Night Overture

Rimsky-Korsakov’s second work for the stage we owe in no small part to his wife Nadezhda who liked Nikolay Gogol’s story May Night so much that she persuaded him to make an opera out of it. He surely didn’t need much persuasion: Gogol’s tale of village life in the Ukraine, reverberating with song and dance at every turn, was an opera waiting to happen. For a composer as interested in Russian folk song as Rimsky-Korsakov was it must have been irresistible. Its first performance at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg in 1880 – with Igor Stravinsky’s father Fyodor in the principal bass role – was apparently no more than a modest success and the work has still not penetrated beyond the fringes of the repertoire.    The overture, however, has always been a favourite.

In writing the overture Rimsky wisely made no attempt to anticipate the plot, which is a both farcical and fantastical account of how, with a little supernatural help from a water sprite, the old Mayor is put to shame in his grotesque ambition of marrying the girl his son has already set his heart on. What the composer did was take some of the best tunes from the score, many of them genuine Ukranian folk songs, and arrange them in a construction which proceeds gradually, though with one or two setbacks here and there, from a slow start to a quick ending. So, to set the May night scene, it begins Molto andante with a series of short nocturnal horn calls each one of which elicits an atmospheric response from woodwind and strings. At a somewhat quicker Andante commodo e tranquillo tempo the horn introduces a lovely lyrical melody which then accelerates into a lively Russian dance and a dramatic episode of urgent string figuration with with a fine dashing tune on violins. Coming to rest on another horn solo, the violins then go back to their dashing tune which is developed at some length before giving way to another splendid tune, this one on cellos. But it is the violin tune that prevails at the fortissimo climax of the work before a quicker and quicker coda leads to a celebratory Presto ending.