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Chandos
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Nicolas Nabokov Ode:
Méditation sur la majesté de Dieu Almost twenty-five years after his death in 1978, few will be familiar with the music of Nicolas Nabokov, cousin of the novelist Vladimir Nabokov. During the 1930s, however, he was widely known as a fine composer. |
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Nicolas Nabokov was born into the Russian gentry in a small town near Minsk. He left Russia for good in 1919, fleeing the revolution. The young Nabokov continued his musical studies with Juon and Busoni in Stuttgart and Berlin. In 1923 he moved to Paris where he enrolled at the Sorbonne and joined the large community of Russian émigrés which included Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Diaghilev. In the mid-1920s Diaghilev commissioned Nabokov to write a ballet for the Ballets russes de Monte Carlo. The result was his first major score, the ballet-oratorio Ode. This unique work consists of ten loosely related movements: airs, recitatives, duos, choruses and symphonic interludes. Though it has been staged as a ballet, in reality the work seems more of an oratorio in the vein of nineteenth-century Russian romances and Glinka's operas. In
1934 Nabokov was commissioned to write a ballet to be performed by the
Ballets russes de Monte Carlo and Leonid Massine in the United States.
The brief was for a truly American ballet depicting the construction
of the famous Union Pacific railway. The choreography was simple. Every
dancer of the company was allowed a solo and Massine himself danced
the barman. In composing Union Pacific Nabokov was mainly inspired by
old cylinder recordings of popular songs and dances from the beginning
of the century. Union Pacificwas an immediate hit and for several years
was performed all over the United States and Europe. |
