The Enchanted Lake

Wrote ANATOLY LYADOV: ‘How wonderful is this enchanted lake of mine! ... I get intoxicated by playing it. Never before have I written in this sort of style (...) How purely picturesque it is – with bountiful stars over the mysteries in the depths! But most importantly it is uninhabited, without entreaties and complaints; only nature – cold, malevolent, but fantastic as a fairy tale. The fairy-tale scene The Enchanted Lake constitutes the second part of the triptych, consisting of Baba Yaga (1904, premiere under the direction of Felix Blumenfeld) and Kikimora (1909, premiere under the baton of Alexander Siloti) whose imagery and personages were borrowed from a collection of fairy tales by Ivan Sakharov. Like the other two fairy-tale scenes, The Enchanted Lake was long searched for, long thought over and reflects the author's deep essence and poeticism. Ever since the 1880s, Lyadov had been looking for a real or poetic image under the influence of reading the Finnish Kalevala epic and as a collector of Russian fairy tales. He searched for this image in the fairy tales, looked for it in nature and found it in the deep Russian province around the village of Volynovka. Said Lyadov: "I know one such thing – well, a simple Russian forest lake and especially beautiful in its invisibility and stillness. One has to feel the change of the colors, the chiaroscuro, the incessantly changeable stillness and seeming immobility! I began to look in Russian folk tales for suitable descriptions of such a lake. I kept looking and looking for something to lean on. But Russian fairy tales are not inclined to halt the action and the progress of the narrative for descriptions of natural phenomena in the way I needed for my music: there seems to be no movement, but thought is always on the move, and at times, it seemingly goes away completely.” The piece premiered in 1909 at a symphony concert under the baton of Nikolai Tcherepnin. It represents the finest embodiment of Lyadov's mastery of the orchestra: for example, the rustling of grass and the undulating waves are rendered by means of muted strings; the idea of the depth of the Lake – by extreme registers; the radiance of the starry firmament – by a combination of harp and celesta. All the three fairy-tale scenes were greeted with extreme enthusiasm by audiences and critics.