Baba Yaga, Opus 56 (1904)
Anatoly Konstantinovich Liadov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on April 29, 1855, and died in Polinovka in the Novgorod District on August 16, 1914.
Baba Yaga was begun in 1891 but completed only in 1904. Liadov conducted the premiere in St. Petersburg on February 21, 1909.
The score is dedicated to critic and historian Vladimir Stasov. The score calls for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, xylophone, triangle, cymbals, bass drum, tam-tam, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
Almost too talented for his own good, Anatoly Liadov mastered many trades. A longtime teacher at St. Petersburg Conservatory, where his students included Sergei Prokofiev and others who would become major figures in Russian music, he also excelled as a pianist, conductor, editor, and composer. His friend, mentor, and colleague Rimsky-Korsakov believed deeply in Liadov’s talent and potential, calling him “talented past telling.”
But, known for “loose living” and a short attention span, Liadov was notoriously lazy and easily distracted. Shy and retiring, he failed to capitalize on some important opportunities. Most famously, Ballets Russes impresario Serge Diaghilev gave him the plum commission of scoring a new ballet — The Firebird — for a dazzling Paris premiere, but Liadov never managed to produce a single note. This left the door open for Igor Stravinsky, who never suffered from a lack of self-confidence — and the rest is history. In a fond recollection, Stravinsky called Liadov “a darling man…sweet and charming,” and “the most progressive of the musicians of his generation.” Liadov championed the avant-garde music of Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), whose influence can be heard in the glacially slow harmonic rhythms, shimmering trills, and mystical atmosphere of Liadov’s symphonic poems The Enchanted Lake and Kikimora.
Liadov excelled in small forms. Stravinsky commented that “He composed little, because he worked slowly — one might say minutely, as if with a magnifying glass.” The longest of his compositions (Eight Russian Folk Songs for Orchestra) lasts less than 15 minutes. Most are much shorter. For piano he wrote numerous tiny mazurkas, bagatelles, preludes, and what he called “biryulki,” named after tiny carved wooden toys used in a Russian children’s game. Like other Russian composers of his era, Liadov was torn between Western models like Chopin, Liszt, and Schumann on the one hand and the Russian folk music tradition on the other.
To a large extent, Liadov shared the nationalistic aesthetic views of the “Mighty Handful” composers (Rimsky, Balakirev, Cui, Borodin, Mussorgsky) and was even known as the group’s “sixth” junior member. Living through one of the most turbulent and violent eras in Russian history, Liadov avoided engagement with political and social issues and sought refuge in the fantasy world of Russian fairy tales and legends and the severe beauty of the Russian natural world.
In the first decade of the 20th century, Liadov wrote his best-known orchestral works, all inspired by folk music and legend: Baba Yaga (1904), Eight Russian Folk Songs for Orchestra (1906), The Enchanted Lake (1908), and Kikimora (1909).
The title page of the score of Baba Yaga, published in Leipzig in 1905, bears this description in French: Tableau musical d’après un conte populaire russe (“A Musical Tableau from a Popular Russian Folk Tale”). One of the most familiar figures in Slavic folklore, the complex character of Baba Yaga combines fairy godmother and wicked witch. Usually depicted as a repulsive crone who lives in a cockeyed hut supported on chicken legs, she flies through the forest like a terrifying whirlwind, sitting in a mortar propelled by a pestle. Powerful and capricious, she sometimes feasts upon children’s bones but in other instances comes to their assistance. “Cunning, clever, helpful as much as a hindrance, she could indeed be the most feminist character in folklore,” writes journalist David Barnett.
Liadov was not the first Russian composer to be inspired by the adventures of Baba Yaga. Modest Mussorgsky placed his stomping and dissonant “Baba Yaga” episode just before the climactic “Great Gate of Kiev” in his 1874 cycle Pictures at an Exhibition, originally composed for piano solo, orchestrated by Maurice Ravel in 1922. Tchaikovsky depicted Baba Yaga in a much more benign fashion in his piano cycle Album for the Young (1878).
For his version, Liadov chose to illustrate the story of the maiden Vasilisa the Beautiful, taken captive by Baba Yaga but later rewarded for her virtue with the incineration of an evil stepmother. The music of this very short (only three minutes long) composition depicts Baba Yaga’s wild flight over the trees. Squealing flutes and piccolo shriek like the wind, followed by a creeping bassoon solo that becomes Baba Yaga’s sinister theme, underpinned by an insistent beat from the strings. As in the works of Rimsky-Korsakov, chromatic passages represent the fantastic world, slithering and sliding like snakes. The rattle of the xylophone grows towards the end, crackling like breaking branches. In the final measures, the texture gradually diminishes, as Baba Yaga disappears mysteriously into the sky.
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“It is my ideal to find the supernatural in art,” Liadov once said. “Art is the realm of the unreal. Art is a fantasy, a fairy-tale, a dragon, a water-fairy, a wood-demon — give me something unreal and I shall be happy.”
Harlow Robinson
Harlow Robinson is an author, lecturer, and Matthews Distinguished University Professor of History, Emeritus, at Northeastern University. His books include Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography and Russians in Hollywood, Hollywood’s Russians. His essays and reviews have appeared in the Boston Globe, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Cineaste, and Opera News, and he has written program notes for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, and Metropolitan Opera.
The first Boston Symphony Orchestra performances of Baba Yaga were in January 1911 under Max Fiedler’s direction.