I. The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship
1. It’s Scheherazade! Rhymes with “this hair is mod,” in case you want to impress your friends. Though if your friends are that easily impressed, you might consider getting new ones.
2. Not all orchestral music has a story with specific characters and plot lines, but this one does. Our opening theme is brought to you by the angry low brass, who represent THE BAD GUY.
3. Meanwhile, our good guy (or in this case, good gal) is represented by the solo violin. Her name is Scheherazade, and she’s telling a bedtime story. So if you’re feeling drowsy, that just means our concertmaster is doing a good job.
4. THE BAD GUY is a sultan, who executes his wife every morning, and marries himself a new one later that day. So he’s either a hopeless romantic with some trust issues, or an irredeemable psychopath.
5. But Scheherazade, his latest wife, tells him a compelling bedtime story, and ends it each night with a cliffhanger. Which forces the sultan to delay the execution over and over. It’s like he’s binging Lost.
6. Eventually, the sultan realizes he loves Scheherazade, so (spoiler alert!) he pardons her. It’s like the end of Lost, when (spoiler alert!) it turns out Hurley dreamed the whole thing after eating a bad cheeseburger.
II. The Story of the Kalendar Prince
1. By now, you’ve no doubt noticed what many people have already discovered: Scheherazade is a gorgeous piece of music with beautiful melodies and colorful orchestration.
2. It has captivated audiences around the world for well over a century. It has been adapted, rearranged, choreographed, and even adopted by figure skaters.
3. So close your eyes and imagine legendary skater Michelle Kwan Lutzing and Axeling all over this movement, as she did in the 2002 Winter Olympics.
4. Figure skating, in case you wondered, is often ranked among the most difficult sports, alongside boxing, motocross, and water polo (?!)
5. What would you say if someone told you to run backwards, then jump up, cross your ankles, spin around three times, and land gracefully. On ice. Also, you’re wearing spandex and machete shoes.
6. I’d say “let’s save some time and you can just beat me with an iron pole.”
7. But at least you get to listen to beautiful music while you do it! Figure skaters have intense powers of concentration and nerves of steel. Which probably helps Michelle Kwan at her current job:
8. She is now the United States Ambassador to Belize! Probably way easier than Axeling and Lutzing.
III. The Young Prince & The Young Princess
1. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov is considered to be among the most influential Russian composers of all time. He was a stellar composer, colleague, teacher, writer, and all-around thinker.
2. He also appears to have been the boring one in the family, whose history reads like a 19th century Russian novel.
3. Nikolai’s family tree includes noblemen, governors, and war generals. Also a peasant serf, a well-known explorer, the daughter of an orthodox priest, and one of Catherine the Great’s lovers.
4. Nikolai must have read the story of Scheherazade and thought “Love and betrayal and stories of battles and shipwrecks? Aww, just like Nanny and Pawpaw!”
5. How would you stand out in a family like that? Being a world-famous composer doesn’t even get you in the top five!
6. And as if being a renowned musician and teacher wasn’t enough, he was also a navigator in the Imperial Russian Navy. Which is extraordinary!
7. I count many composers among my friends, but I’m not sure they could navigate the log ride at Six Flags. Bless their hearts.
IV. Festival at Bagdad
1. Welcome to the final movement! We’re not supposed to know specifically what this movement’s story is about; you might hear a battle, a chase, a love story, or a shipwreck. Or a turtle on a bicycle. Imagination is a funny thing.
2. We do know that we’re hearing a story within a story. Kind of like those Russian nesting dolls, where each doll contains another smaller doll.
3.The first set of Russian dolls was carved in 1890, just two years after Scheherazade was written! Less than 75 kilometers away from where Rimsky-Korsakov composed the piece! Which, if you’re traveling by ox cart, might take about two years.
4. To be fair, the concept was most likely borrowed from China, where nesting boxes had been invented 900 years before, during the Song Dynasty.
5. Nesting boxes might seem less fun to play with than dolls, but I can’t tell you how many toddlers I’ve seen entertain themselves with an empty cardboard box.
6. Back to Russia. The first nesting dolls were painted to resemble a family, with the mother on the outside, containing her successively smaller children, down to the final doll, a tiny wooden baby. Aww!
7. There’s no record of the Chinese boxes containing a baby, but it seems like if you’ve got a bunch of empty boxes lying around, and you also have a baby who can crawl, it’s going to happen at some point.
8. As our story ends, and Scheherazade sweetly tucks her psychopathic husband into bed, we hope you, dear listener, are as contented as a baby nestled in a box.
