Flight of the Bumble Bee (1900) – Rymsky Korsakov

Posted on March 6, 2024 by observationblogger — 3 Comments

I presented Flight of the Bumble Bee (possibly the most recognisable classical piece in popular culture) in my post about the Australian movie Shine. That movie is based on the life of piano genius David Helfgott, a child prodigy whose schizo-affective disorder manifested in young adulthood, which eventually caused a mental breakdown. He spent years in an institution before making an unlikely recovery. His re-emergence below as a much older man (played by Geoffrey Rush who won the gong) playing Flight of the Bumblebee in a local restaurant will forever be etched in my memory.

At the Academy Awards ceremony, the real-life Helfgott received a standing ovation for a fevered rendition of the same famous piece.

Flight of the Bumblebee is an orchestral interlude written by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov for his opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan, composed in 1899–1900.

All I see is a row of violinists playing this and one by one they keep falling down out of exhaustion, and the other violinists still playing start to sweat and watch their dying friends with the corner of their eyes. All this while the conductor is shaking his arms violently and is completely dissociative.
– Shamsher1171

Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov was a Russian composer, a member of the group of composers known as The Five. He was a master of orchestration. He is thought of as developing a nationalistic style of classical music. Rimsky-Korsakov appreciated Western musical techniques after he became a professor of musical composition, harmony, and orchestration at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1871. He undertook a rigorous three-year program of self-education and became a master of Western methods and further enriched by his exposure to the works of Richard Wagner.

References:
1. Shine (film) – Wikipedia
2. Flight of the Bumblebee – Wikipedia