03-26 Josefowicz_Layout 1 3/12/15 1:48 PM Page 27
NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
By James M. Keller, Program Annotator
The Leni and Peter May Chair
The Enchanted Lake, Op. 62
Anatoly Lyadov
A
natoly Lyadov received his first musical
training from his father, who for nearly
two decades served as a conductor at the
renowned Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg.
As a student at the newly founded St. Petersburg Conservatory, he gave up aspirations for a
performing career and set his sights on composition instead. Within a couple of years he was
expelled for truancy, having made a habit of
skipping Rimsky-Korsakov’s composition tutorials, but he managed to be readmitted in 1878,
in order to take his graduation exams. He
passed the exams with distinction and immediately joined the school’s faculty as a teacher of
music theory.
Lyadov lived to the age of 58, and his final
years were consumed by ill health. Even taking that into account, his catalogue of works is
modest. As Jennifer Spencer writes in the New
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (second edition),
on the matter. After listening to Lyadov’s
description of his potential fiancée, RimskyKorsakov heartily endorsed the decision. The
choice thus confirmed, Lyadov married the girl;
but having done so, he never allowed any of his
musical friends to meet his wife, and even Rimsky-Korsakov, on whose approval the marriage
had depended, confessed in his memoirs that
in the 20 years that had since passed he had not
so much as glimpsed Mrs. Lyadov.
An odd character Lyadov was, intensely private and pathologically shy, although Igor
Stravinsky reported that he was “a darling man.”
He rarely performed in public, and steadfastly
avoided the spotlight when his compositions
were played. His pupil Lazare Saminsky reported:
IN SHORT
Born: May 11, 1855, in St. Petersburg, Russia
Died: August 28, 1914, in Polïnovka
His personal integrity was beyond reproach,
but he never succeeded in applying himself
wholeheartedly to his work for more than a
short period.
Lyadov was a born procrastinator and severely
self-critical, seemingly stymied by the realization that he was not the most talented among
his contemporaries. He stood particularly in
awe of Rimsky-Korsakov, the professor whose
Conservatory classes he had so diligently cut.
Self-doubt extended into more personal aspects of his life, too. When Lyadov felt the urge to
marry, in 1884, he consulted Rimsky-Korsakov
Work composed: 1909
World premiere: February 21, 1909, in
St. Petersburg, conducted by Nikolai Tcherepnin,
to whom the piece is dedicated
New York Philharmonic premiere: July 28,
1926, Nikolai Sokoloff, conductor
Most recent New York Philharmonic
performance: May 28, 2005, Hans Graf,
conductor
Estimated duration: ca. 6 minutes
MARCH 2015 | 27
03-26 Josefowicz_Layout 1 3/12/15 1:48 PM Page 28
In the Composer’s Words
Lyadov thrived on fantasies. He wrote:
Give me fairies and dragons, mermaids and goblins, and I’m thoroughly happy. Art feeds me on
roast birds of paradise; it is another planet, nothing
to do with our earth.
Lyadov’s timid form hiding behind some column at the première of his works was unique
and unforgettable. Of course, he never appeared in acknowledgment of the plaudits.
When the musical community of St. Petersburg
turned out in force to honor him at an event convened in his honor in 1913, he was the only one of
their legion who failed to make an appearance.
Lyadov’s greatest talent was as a miniaturist, both in piano pieces (his Musical Snuff-box
was once a staple among recital encores) and
in orchestral works, where he could capitalize
on his sensitivity to instrumental timbre, gift
for deft characterization, and sense of delicate
compositional subtleties. He was drawn toward
pieces with descriptive programs — wisely so,
since it somewhat relieved him from solving
the problems of structure, which is essentially
the musical equivalent of a plot.
At least three such program pieces — the
tableau Baba-Yaga, and the legends Kikimora
and The Enchanted Lake — retain a toehold in
the orchestral repertoire to this day. Although
dense in their variety of color and their detailed
craftsmanship, the works are miniatures: the
first lasts less than four minutes, the others less
than eight each.
The Enchanted Lake depicts a forest lake
Lyadov was fond of visiting. He explained:
It is so picturesque and pure, with stars, and
so mysterious in its depths. Most importantly, there is no one there, no requests and
no complaints — just dead nature, cold, evil,
but as fantastical as in a fairy tale.
Instrumentation: three flutes, two oboes,
three clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, timpani, bass drum, celeste, harp, and strings.
Portions of this note were originally written
for the San Francisco Symphony and are used
with permission. © James M. Keller
News and Reviews
Shortly after Lyadov’s death in August 1914, the critic and composer Vyacheslav Gavrilovich Karatïgin published
a memorial tribute in the magazine Apollo:
Lyadov’s exceptional predilection for the miniature helps to resolve
the paradoxical question of finding depth in the surface. His pieces
are miniature not only in form, scale, and number of printed pages.
They are miniature also in respect to psychology. … Everything
about it is small. All the reflections of aesthetic emotions, all the
movements of the soul, the entire realm of pathos are presented in
Lyadov’s art on an exceedingly reduced scale …. And because
everything is small and toy-like, everything becomes special, unusual, different from the ordinary — for instance, just as a tumbler
of water is different from the tiniest drop of water which, because it
is impossible to examine it with the normal eye, we examine
through a microscope and the microscope opens up for us unexpectedly a whole world of life in an insignificant splash of water.
Lyadov, in a portrait by Ilya Repin, 1902
28 | NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC