Ближний Восток и его соседи

g 138 h Firuza Melville Rimsky-Korsakov’s widow and son, who sued Diaghilev for ruining the com- poser’s original music by very freely rearranging the parts of the symphonic poem and turning a serene and then stormy sea theme and then a feast in Baghdad into a massacre in a generic harem, made the second accusation. It is now difficult to be sure if Diaghilev did this purely for the sake of the artistic and commercial success of the ballet, or if it was his revenge for the cruel judgement of Rimsky- Korsakov. The latter was teaching Diaghilev composition while he was a law student at St Petersburg University. At the end of the course Rimsky-Korsakov declared that Diaghilev had no musical talents and should not be wasting his time. What is important is that Diaghilev, in his attempts to promote Russianism in Europe, was using Rimsky-Korsakov’s exceptionally national, and even nation- alistic music, which he was paradoxically composing for his most Oriental, or Orientalist pieces, like Novgorodian Sadko (1896), Perso-Arabian Scheherazade (1888) and Arabian Antar (1869). The latter piece was based on the tragic love story of the pre-Islamic poet and warrior ʿAntara b. Shaddad (525–608) and his cousin ʿAbla whom he could not marry as his mother was a slave (see Pl. 13). Rimsky-Korsakov used Senkovsky’s tale (1833) where the only connection with the Arabic protograph was the name of the protagonist. In Senkovsky’s Pl. 10. Valentin Serov, Curtain for the ballet Scheherazade, 1911, paint on canvas, 680 ×  870 cm © Collection of N. L. Rostropovich and G. P. Vishnevskaya family