The Enchanted Lake
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.
The Enchanted Lake was composed in 1908. Its dedicatee, Nikolai Tcherepnin, conducted the Great Hall of the Conservatory Orchestra in the premiere on February 21, 1909, in St. Petersburg.
The score of The Enchanted Lake calls for 3 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, timpani, bass drum, celesta, harp, 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).
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Liadov called his most popular and substantial symphonic work, The Enchanted Lake, a Fairy Tale Picture. Unlike Baba Yaga and Kikimora, it does not revolve around a single character or narrative. Rather, it pays delicate and emotional tribute to the serenity of the natural world, “without people with their wishes and complaints — only dead nature, cold, evil, fabulous, as in a fairy tale.”
While writing The Enchanted Lake, Liadov had fallen deeply under the spell of Richard Wagner (1813-83). Liadov encountered Wagner’s operas early on, through his father Konstantin Liadov, a conductor at St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater, who led the first Wagner opera to be staged in Russia — Lohengrin — in 1868, when Anatoly was 13. From various accounts we know that Anatoly, a mischievous theater brat, used to spend his free time as a teenager roaming around backstage and in the boxes, “where he had unrestricted access.”
Anatoly’s teacher at St. Petersburg Conservatory, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908), was also a passionate Wagnerian. Rimsky took Wagner as a model for his last opera, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia, sometimes called the “Russian Parsifal.” Kitezh was first staged in St. Petersburg in 1907, one year before Liadov began work on The Enchanted Lake.
Although no concrete documentation of a direct link between Kitezh and The Enchanted Lake exists, such a connection seems undeniable given the closeness of the two composers (they saw each other almost daily in St. Petersburg) and the similarity between the two works in subject manner and orchestration. One could even see The Enchanted Lake as a farewell tribute to Rimsky (and to his love for Wagner), since Rimsky died while Liadov was completing it, and the premiere took place exactly eight months to the day after Rimsky’s passing, conducted by another member of Rimsky’s posse, Nikolai Tcherepnin (1873-1945).
Liadov provided no explicit program for The Enchanted Lake, but it has been suggested that it could be a response to a painting by Russian landscape artist Arseny Meshchersky (1834-1902). The actual lake Liadov had in mind was Lake Ilmen, south of St. Petersburg in the Novgorod region, where he spent many pleasant summers at an estate that belonged to his wealthy wife. “How purely picturesque it is — with bountiful stars over the mysteries in the depths,” he wrote. “One must feel the change of colors, the chiaroscuro, the incessantly changeable stillness and seeming immobility.”
Set in a sedate 12/8 meter and at low dynamic levels throughout, the score opens with all the instruments (except timpani and harp) muted. The strings divide into nine different parts, sounding a deep D-flat major chord that resonates low and high, as if between the glimmering surface of a lake and its murky depths. Short figures from the harp, celeste and flutes poke through the darkness, like sun (or moon?) beams. Fragments of a melody emerge in the woodwinds but remain unresolved. The harmony sways between chords of major and minor thirds, while in the distance we hear forest bird calls. In this impressionistic and dreamy miniature, Liadov achieves a hypnotic effect of timelessness, serenity and fantastic enchantment.
“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 American performance of The Enchanted Lake was given by the Russian Symphony Orchestra on November 16, 1910, in New York City.
The first Boston Symphony Orchestra performance of The Enchanted Lake took place at New York’s Carnegie Hall on December 3, 1921, with Pierre Monteux conducting; Monteux led the first Symphony Hall performances in February 1922 on a program with Liadov’s Baba-Yaga and Kikimora.