Beschreibung
The Tale of Tsar Saltan is an opera by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and libretto by Vladimir Belsky, based on the poem of the same name by Aleksandr Pushkin. Written in 1899–1900 to coincide with Pushkin's centenary, it was first performed in 1900 in Moscow, The lengthy full title of both the opera and the poem is The Tale of Tsar Saltan, of his Son the Renowned and Mighty Bogatyr Prince Gvidon Saltanovich and of the Beautiful Princess-Swan. The music is composed in the manner of Rimsky-Korsakov's operas after Snowmaiden, i.e., having a more or less continuous musical texture throughout a tableau (as with Wagner, but with the exception of the separable orchestral introductions mentioned above) and a fairly thorough-going leitmotif system, broken up here and there by song-like passages.
"Flight of the Bumblebee" (Russian: Полёт шмеля) is an orchestral interlude written by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov for his opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan, composed in 1899–1900. Its composition is intended to musically evoke the seemingly chaotic and rapidly changing flying pattern of a bumblebee. Despite the piece's being a rather incidental part of the opera, it is today one of the more familiar classical works because of its frequent use in popular culture.
The piece closes Act III, Tableau 1, during which the magic Swan-Bird changes Prince Gvidon Saltanovich (the Tsar's son) into an insect so that he can fly away to visit his father (who does not know that he is alive). Although in the opera the Swan-Bird sings during the first part of the "Flight", her vocal line is melodically uninvolved and easily omitted; this feature, combined with the fact that the number decisively closes the scene, made easy extraction as an orchestral concerto piece possible.