Russian Easter Festival Overture

Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov was born at Tikhvin in Novgorod province on March 6, 1844, and died at Lyubensk, in St. Petersburg province, on June 8, 1908. The original title of the Russian Easter Overture (as it is usually called in the West) is Svetlyi prazdnik (Bright Holiday). The work was composed between July 25 and August 20, 1888, and had its premiere on December 3 of that year under the composer’s direction in St. Petersburg. The score is dedicated “To the Memory of A.P. Borodin and M.P. Mussorgsky,” colleagues and friends of Rimsky-Korsakov who had died in 1881 and 1887, respectively. 

The score calls for 3 flutes (third doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, glockenspiel, bass drum, triangle, cymbals, tam-tam, harp, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses). 

In Russia, where winter drags on from October to late April, Easter has traditionally been celebrated with riotous and highly theatrical enthusiasm not only as a religious holiday, but also as a harbinger of long-awaited spring. Before the Christianization of Russia in 988 A.D., pagan festivals involving ritual foods and songs marked the occurrence of the vernal equinox in late March. Later, some of these pagan rituals were incorporated into the elaborate observance of Russian Orthodox Easter, despite their origin in pre-Christian fertility rites viewed with disfavor by the Orthodox clergy. Kulich, a savory sweet bread prepared on Easter in a special cylindrical form and decorated with the Cyrillic letters XB (abbreviation for “Christ Has Risen”), is believed, for example, to have originated as a phallic symbol. A splendid mixture of folk and Christian elements, the celebration of Russian Easter (which only rarely coincides with Western Easter, because the Orthodox Church still uses the Julian Calendar to calculate the date) comes to a colorful climax during the all-night liturgy that lasts from Saturday evening well into Sunday morning. This service is accompanied with special choral singing (the use of instruments is forbidden in Orthodox church services) and the glorious ringing of church bells.

The experience of Russian Easter was one of Rimsky-Korsakov’s most vivid memories as a child growing up in a small town in Novgorod province. It was the sensations of wonder and magic he felt in witnessing the proceedings that Rimsky later sought to incorporate in the overture he called Svetlyi prazdnik (Bright Holiday). “In order to appreciate my overture even ever so slightly,” he wrote in his autobiography My Musical Life, “it is necessary that the hearer should have attended Easter morning service at least once and, at that, not in a domestic chapel, but in a cathedral thronged with people from every walk of life, with several priests conducting the cathedral service—something that many intellectual Russian hearers, let alone hearers of other confessions, quite lack nowadays. As for myself, I had gained my impressions in my childhood, passed near the Tikhvin Monastery itself.” (The composer grew up with a rich appreciation of Orthodox ritual and tradition, for his paternal grandmother was a priest’s daughter.)

But Rimsky was wrong in stating that appreciation of his overture required previous attendance at a Russian Easter service. His inventively scored composition—moving deliberately from devotion to ecstasy and culminating in a skillful orchestral illustration of a multitude of bells ringing out the news of resurrection and eternal life—succeeds brilliantly on its own, and shows us Rimsky at his most imaginative and accomplished. Having just completed the symphonic suite Scheherazade, Rimsky in Bright Holiday was at the height of his powers as an orchestrator and musical narrator.

Rimsky was not the first—or last—Russian composer to incorporate themes from the Orthodox liturgy into a piece of secular art music. Mussorgsky uses liturgical themes in his operas Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina (both later “edited” by Rimsky-Korsakov), while Tchaikovsky cites one in passing in his 1812 Overture. But Bright Holiday is the first serious symphonic composition by a major Russian composer to be constructed entirely upon themes from the obikhod, a collection of the most important and most frequently used canticles of the Orthodox Church. Rimsky uses three such original chants in the overture. Two occur in the extended, reflective introductory section, marked “Lento mistico” (“Slow and mystical”): “Da voskresnet Bog” (“Let God Arise!”) and “Angel vopiyashe” (“An angel wailed”). A third chant, “Khristos voskrese iz mertvykh” (“Christ has risen from the dead”), the familiar one sung by the congregation in response to the priest, figures prominently in the fast central part of the overture, especially towards the end. 

Treating Orthodox liturgical chants in a work of “classical” western music presents numerous obstacles. To begin with, many Orthodox believers considered the whole idea of using liturgical music in secular works nearly blasphemous. According to Rimsky’s admirer Vasily Yastrebtsev, Tsar Alexander III was so displeased when he heard the Easter Overture that he “forbade it ever to be played again in his presence.” And technically, the rhythm and meter of the unaccompanied chants as performed in church are extremely free, without a strong sense of dominant beats or bar lines. In order to convey this sense of freedom, Rimsky opens the overture in the unusual meter of 5/2, with the statement of the first (and predominant) chant theme. The key of the opening section is gloomy D minor, transformed in the joyful coda into bright, affirmative D major.

In addition to the chant themes, Rimsky uses two other kinds of musical material in the Easter Overture. One is rhapsodic solo passages for solo instruments (violin, flute, clarinet) that convey the “unearthly light” associated with the miracle of the Resurrection. These passages gradually grow into what sound like pealing bells, a musical idea that gradually grows in importance as the composition progresses. For the sound of bells, Rimsky uses the strings playing détaché and pizzicato, then adds the brass in punctuated fanfares, then introduces the triangle and glockenspiel at the end for a dazzling display of kolokol’nost’—“bell-ness.” Rimsky was particularly proud of his achievement in this regard, and boasted to Yastrebtsev that one of his most important innovations as a composer was that “I invented the orchestral reproduction of the sound of bells.”

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.

Emil Paur led the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the overture’s American premiere on October 22 and 23, 1897.