This work is based on Pushkin's 1835 fairy tale of the same name. A fisherman stumbles upon a magical fish who can speak and also grant wishes. As each wish comes true, the fisherman's wife becomes increasingly greedy. Finally, she asks for too much, and it all goes away. Tcherepnin obviously enjoyed the challenge of writing music based on fairy tales: his "Contes de fee: dix-huit melodies, Op. 33" -- eighteen songs set to poems by Konstantin Balmont about fairy-tale characters -- are short, designed for young children whose attention span may not be up for a lengthier story.
In his unpublished autobiography, Tcherepnin referred to this composition as "The Tale of the Fisherman and the Goldfish: Six Musical Illustrations of Piano" and, indeed, his piano score is divided into six movements, interspersed with excerpts of the Pushkin poem. The composition was completed before 1915, and Tcherepnin published an orchestrated version in 1921. Some sources refer to this work as a ballet, but it is improbable that a staged performance ever took place.
Tcherepnin very probably knew that an earlier Russian composer wrote a ballet based on this same Pushkin fairy tale: in 1866, Ludwig Minkus wrote the music and collaborated with ballet-master Arthur Saint-Leon to create a one-act ballet, Le poisson dore, to honour the wedding of Tsarevich Alexander Alexandrovich to Princess Dagmar of Denmark. There were several revivals of that ballet, including one in Moscow in 1905.
Prokofiev, in his detailed diaries, mentions hearing his friend and fellow student, pianist Boris Zakharov, perform piano music by Tcherepnin on 3 January 1915, at an Evening of Contemporary Music. On that evening, he notes, "Boris Zakharov played The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish indifferently, and some pieces from the same composer's marvellous Alphabet very well indeed."
Tcherepnin's son Alexander also reports on "An Evening of Nikolai Tcherepnin's Compositions" presented at the Georgian Musical Society around 1920: "The performance by the composer himself of The Fairy Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish caused great excitement. In six sketches, Tcherepnin embodied in music the brightest motifs of Pushkin's marvellous tale. This work, though deeply Russian, shows at the same time an absolutely new approach to the subject, and is a big step forward against the cliched Kuchkism."
A live performance of "The Fisherman and the Fish" requires the unusual addition of a narrator with the pianist. Certainly, there are precedents for such works, such as Franz Liszt's six melodramas, and Richard Strauss's "Enoch Arden", but in those cases the narrator speaks over the music. In Tcherepnin's work, the narrator pauses, and then the pianist makes a musical commentary on the action of the story.
Tcherepnin's achievement is remarkable. It is possible to hear the dropline plunging into the water, the fish struggling on the line and glinting in the sunlight, the fisherman's wife chattering complaints, the imperial guards marching around the new castle, and so on. But beyond the more literal depictions, the listener also gains access to psychological profiles enhanced by the music. Musical phrases illuminate the three "protagonists" and give them an emotional dimension that adds to the literary and poetic dimensions, not unlike Schumann's achievement in the preludes and postludes of his best song-cycles.
(Naxos Music Library)
Please take note that the audio AND the sheet music ARE NOT mine. Change the quality to a minimum of 480p if the video is blurry.
Original audio: classical-music...
(Performance by: David Witten)
Original sheet music: imslp.org/wiki/...)
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