Simone Menezes Conductor

Simon Scardifield Stage Direction and Text
Simone Menezes, Lynn Serfaty Text

Dimitri Gogos Lighting Design
Maison Rabih Kayrouz and Christian Louboutin Costume Design

Golshifteh Farahani Scheherazade
Kristin Winters Dinarzade

Rana Gorgani Dancer

Keyvan Chemirani, Bijan Chemirani Percussion

ENSEMBLE K
Raquele Magalhães Flute, Piccolo
Cyril Lefrançois Oboe
Bruno Bonansea Clarinet
Marceau Lefèvre Bassoon
Solène Souchères Horn
Pierre Favennec Trumpet
Benoit Coutris Trombone
Mara Dobresco Piano
Christophe Drelich Percussion
Nicolas Dupont, Romuald Grimbert Barré Violin
Clément Holvoet Viola
Kacper Nowak Cello
Johane Gonzalez Seijas Double Bass

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908)
Scheherazade
Symphonic Suite Op. 35 (1888)
Arranged for Ensemble under the Supervision of Vincent Paulet (2023)
Spoken Text in English

Prelude

I. The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship. Largo e maestoso – Allegro non troppo
II. The Kalendar Prince. Lento – Andantino – Allegro molto – Con moto

Interlude

III. The Young Prince and the Young Princess. Andantino quasi allegretto
IV. Festival in Baghdad. Allegro molto – Vivo – Allegro non troppo maestoso

The work’s four movements were arranged by Ana Giurgiu-Bondue (The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship), Pierre-Yves Langlois (The Kalendar Prince), Antony Sauveplane (The Young Prince and the Young Princess), and Vivien David and Timothée Bonte (Festival in Baghdad).

In cooperation with Cartier

In Search of Scheherazade 
A Conversation between Simone Menezes and Yasmine Seale

Scheherazade is the central character of the collection of tales known in English as One Thousand and One Nights, but her name has come to signify one of the most beloved musical works of the classical repertoire as well. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic suite from 1888 has become entangled in the discourse about the racist and colonialist misrepresentation of Asian cultures that Edward W. Said described in his landmark 1978 book Orientalism. Simone Menezes and her colleagues bring fresh perspectives to Scheherazade in this latest project from Ensemble K, the cosmopolitan chamber orchestra she founded in 2019.

As with their previous productions (addressing such topics as extra-European influences in classical music and composers inspired by “transcendental thought”), they approach Scheherazade with interdisciplinary, holistic curiosity. Through a new dramatic framework that presents Rimsky-Korsakov’s music in interplay with literary sources from ancient times and the present alike, they attempt to clear away the stereotypes that have obscured the true significance of the title heroine—and how she can continue to illuminate humanity today.

Menezes, part of the community of artists supported by Maison Cartier, points out that the Pierre Boulez Saal is “the right home” for the world-premiere performance of this project, which is also being released on CD and DVD. “This is not only because of Edward Said’s connection with this concert hall and the Academy but because there are so many stories being told in this hall,” she says. At the heart of Scheherazade, a Tale is a chamber version of Rimsky-Korsakov’s original score. Menezes enlisted the participation of French composer Vincent Paulet, a frequent collaborator of Ensemble K, to help prepare an edition for a chamber orchestra of 14 musicians, thus underscoring the intimacy of the framework surrounding Scheherazade’s cliffhanger stories. Paulet mentored five of his students as they reimagined Rimsky-Korsakov’s vast sonic canvas (often cited as a masterpiece of orchestration) on this newly intimate scale. “This is a hall where nobody is far away from the performers, so they can feel that they are inside what’s going on in the stories,” Menezes says.

“All poetry is contemporary, even a poem from the ancient past, because it is new in its own time, and because you’re encountering it now,” says Yasmine Seale, a British-Syrian poet, translator, critic, and printmaker who prepared a new translation of the complete One Thousand and One Nights that was published in 2021. Menezes chose her translation of an Arabic love poem as one of the texts recited in Scheherazade, a Tale, and both artists will be heard in dialogue on the project as part of a panel discussion the evening before the performance. (They will be joined by French-Iranian writer Nahal Tajadod, whose essay on Scheherazade can be found on page 35 in this program book.) In a conversation earlier in the summer, Simone Menezes and Yasmine Seale shared their thoughts about the representation of Scheherazade and her role as a strong female character.

Simone Menezes Scheherazade is the archetype of a heroine, a brilliant noblewoman who was willing to give her life if necessary to save her people. Her story forms the framework for the actual tales of One Thousand and One Nights: to avenge his wife’s infidelity, the Sultan, Shahriyar, slept with a virgin every night whom he ordered the vizier, Sheherazade’s father, to kill the next day. Scheherazade volunteered to marry the Sultan, knowing that she would be killed by her own father. Her sole weapon of persuasion to stay alive and attempt to cure the Sultan’s madness would be her intelligence. Each night she tells him a story that is so captivating that he must have her continue the following day—and so he lets Scheherazade live. But the popular image of the character deteriorated as a result of Sergei Diaghilev’s ballet version of Schéhérazade, which is based on Rimsky’s music [and which caused a sensation when it premiered in 1910, the first complete ballet presented by the Ballets Russes]. It creates an atmosphere of seduction and removes Scheherazade from her role as the protagonist to cater to the European imagination of the time. Our goal is to reestablish a story that tells the truth and brings back the conversation about this incredible character.

Yasmine Seale I agree about this deterioration. The question of how to represent Scheherazade has always been a problem, which I think comes from the text of One Thousand and One Nights. In the frame tale that introduces her, she is barely described: “Scheherazade had read a lot of books, science and philosophy, knew poetry by heart, had studied history and myth and the wisdom of kings. And she was practiced at clear thinking and full feeling and close reading, and one day she said to her father: let me tell you what is on my mind…” What is on her mind is to marry the Sultan and end the massacre. So she risks herself in this extraordinary way, using only her memory and her imagination. Looking beyond the image of the femme fatale, it’s worth remembering that Scheherazade is primarily a reader, who puts what she has read to heroic use, and an artist working in conditions of terrifying brutality.

SM Diaghilev catered to the Orientalism that became a fashion with Parisian audiences. People were imagining the Middle East in particular as a place where women play the role of the seductress. To do this, Diaghilev did not use the story that Rimsky-Korsakov composed his music to. He simply took a small part from the introduction [the “backstory” of the Sultan’s betrayal by his first wife that accounts for his rage] to create a scenario that would intrigue Parisians at that time. Which became a scandal in Russia. Rimsky-Korsakov had already died [in 1908], but his family spoke out because he never intended for this music to be used for a ballet. He was clearly familiar with the text of One Thousand and One Nights, in the French translation by Antoine Galland, and the way he constructed the themes throughout the work shows he had a coherent narrative in mind that aligned closely with the original story. But the success of Diaghilev’s ballet somehow imposed an image of Scheherazade that was stronger than the original texts or Rimsky’s vision—which is a pity because today we still lack a balanced view of this incredible character.

YS It’s very rare within the Nights for a female heroine to be described entirely through her intellectual and moral qualities—her internal qualities. Almost every other character in the stories is described in terms of their beauty. But Scheherazade stands out in not being characterized in this way. The Nights were first introduced into a European language through Galland’s translation in the early 18th century. He adds to the passage I quoted before that Scheherazade was “a perfect beauty”—but that’s not in the Arabic text. The Diaghilev ballet is a continuation of this fantasy of a woman who is a creature of the bedroom, kept indoors as a sex object. In the original text, she is described purely as a mind, a kind of library. What’s so wonderful about music is that you can capture that abstract quality of hers— this emotional atmosphere—without having to represent her physically. Scheherazade is a great heroine of course, but she is also a concept. To me she represents a principle of creation, an idea of what it means to create, which has to do with performance. I love that you’re developing a performance, because Scheherazade really is a performing artist who risks herself in the way that all performing artists do when she enters the space of the bedroom, which could also be a stage, where she embarks on a journey of great peril. The stakes for her are extremely high. She has to sustain the Sultan’s interest to make something new every night.

SM There is another female present in the original story. This is Dinarzade, the younger sister who is invited by Scheherazade every night to the foot of the bed to wake her up or to ask her to tell a story. Nobody talks about this character, but we decided to include her along with Scheherazade. [Two actresses play these roles and tell the story in a new text by Simon Scardifield, Lynn Serfaty, and Simone Menezes that is recited around and between the musical movements.] So the stories that Scheherazade begins to tell are not actually for the Sultan but for her younger sister. Scheherazade is seen as the woman who, through her intelligence, tries to usher in a better world for the next generation.

YS Dinarzade is a fascinating character who is always there but never says anything. Scheherazade addresses her sister, and her sister listens to her. Dinarzade’s role is to show the Sultan what it means to be a good listener. The Sultan’s problem is that he is too quick to react: he has discovered that his wife has betrayed him and, instead of grieving, he reacts with mass murder. He is unable to tolerate difficult emotion. Dinarzade shows him how to suspend judgment, how to listen deeply without rushing into action. She is modeling a way of being as much as Scheherazade is. The central relationship is between Scheherazade and Dinarzade—one of solidarity between women. The Sultan is a third presence; he is cast as an eavesdropper. A formula is repeated at the end of every night, after Scheherazade has been speaking, as the sun comes up: “and morning gained on Scheherazade and cut her speaking short.” Dinarzade then invites her to continue, inaugurating her speech again, night after night.

SM I think the way Rimsky-Korsakov composed the piece makes it very clear he knew exactly what is going on in this story. The score gives us all the keys. The first movement, for example, is about Sinbad. But it begins with a violin solo that represents the voice of Scheherazade throughout the piece. A very loud theme from the trombone is the voice of the Sultan, and then we hear the movement of the waves as Scheherazade begins to tell the first story. This pattern is repeated until the last movement, where the stories are overlaid on top of each other—as if by telling all the stories Scheherazade has been able to bring a kind of healing to the Sultan, and his voice dies down. It is as if she has won power after bringing all this truth and at the end is left to say, “I’m free but I’m still here.”

YS The ability of women to speak—and the question of what sorts of things women are permitted to say—is one of the struggles that Scheherazade is engaged in. We can hear this expressed musically as her voice becomes more confident over the course of the piece. I think it’s very inspiring that you’re transposing this music from large orchestra to a chamber ensemble. The chamber in the story is the bed chamber, an intimate space. We must remember that these are stories told at night. They take place where dreams should be, at the end of the night. What we are reading and what we are hearing forms a kind of dream landscape. These stories are all about the dark side of the mind, all of its fears and fantasies. Sometimes, of course, they borrow from real life—there are many examples of real material culture from the societies that produce these stories. But the whole thing is passed through the logic of the imagination. One way around the problem of Orientalist representation, I think, is to treat it like a kind of dream.

SM This ability for a woman to take hold of speech and keep it is very important. What is remarkable here is that Scheherazade is helped in this by another woman—by Dinarzade, who asks her to tell a story. The Sultan doesn’t give her the floor, it’s Dinarzade who makes her tell the stories. He listens passively, and the process of his “healing” is indirect.

YS There’s something quite wonderful about having this combination of music and literature and dramaturgy in this project. Although One Thousand and One Nights comes down to us as a text, it’s always leaping off the page. I sometimes feel that it doesn’t want to be a book: it wants to be more than that, to find other expressions. Many artists have identified with Scheherazade over the centuries. She represents the figure of the artist whose speech is always threatened with being cut short. What is death for an artist, what is death for an author? It’s the threat of no longer being listened to. So when we play this music, Rimsky-Korsakov in some sense is still alive among us. He has resisted death in the same way that Scheherazade pushes death away through her art.

Interview: Thomas May 

Thomas May is a writer, critic, educator, and translator whose work appears in The New York Times, Gramophone, and many other publications. The English-language editor for the Lucerne Festival, he also writes program notes for the Ojai Festival in California.

Ce que femme veut* 

Nahal Tajadod 

When I was little, I saw Scheherazade (Shahrzad for us Iranians) as a clever and mischievous aunt. Today, she seems to me more like a rebellious, invincible, and prodigious niece. Persian culture is steeped in her influence. I have friends named after her, I walk through streets bearing her name, drink her tea, envy her imagination and her culture. She inhabits our daily lives, haunts our souls, and confounds us.

Recall that she offers herself as a victim to Sultan Shahriyar, who, to avenge his wife’s infidelity, has decided to kill each morning the companion of the previous night. For a thousand and one nights, unending nights, Scheherazade’s words stave off the threat. How does she succeed where her predecessors, equally beautiful and noble, failed? But Scheherazade is educated, eloquent, and learned. “She owns a thousand history books and has read them all.”

A fictional woman representing a challenge to tradition, Scheherazade, created by a group of Indian, Persian, and Arab authors, saves her life and those of her peers through her knowledge. She imparts to Shahriyar all that he does not know, everything she has acquired. Her aim is to change the king’s negative and arbitrary view of women, influenced by cultural norms but exacerbated by his own misfortune. Speaking to him and an imaginary audience, she transforms their souls by painting a multitude of female portraits and, crucially, introducing a new concept: individuality.

At first, to win the king’s trust, she attributes all faults to women, reassuring him with stories “passed down by tradition.” But one must catch, amid the accusations, her secret revelation, her whisper: “He does not know that when a woman among us desires something, nothing can overcome her.” One must follow her until the end of the work to receive her declaration, reminiscent of the Islamic profession of faith: “There is no god but Allah,” but in different terms: “When nothing existed, love existed… It is the first and the last.”

One night, she tells the story of a woman, Douce-Amie, who “learned beautiful writing … grammar and syntax … jurisprudence, ethics, and philosophy, geometry, medicine, and land surveying,” but who excels especially in poetry, music, singing, and dance. Scheherazade also mentions poetesses like Toumâdir, who composed “Weep, My Eyes,” a funeral song for her brother’s death, sung by all and described by her contemporaries as a work “surpassing men and jinn in poetry!” Or Belle-Heureuse, capable of improvising endless variations from a single word of the first line of a song throughout an entire night. Or Tohfa, the virtuoso of the lute, who placed her instrument on her chest like a swan tucks its head under its wing. Or Morgane, who, using scarves, handkerchiefs, and sticks, performed the dances of Jewish, Greek, Ethiopian, Persian, and Bedouin women. Or Hama, the lecturer, called the Mistress of Masters, who traveled from country to country to inquire and be inquired about sciences, jurisprudence, theology, and literature. Or Docte-Sympathie, who, at the request of Caliph Haroun, participated in a debate against the greatest scholar of Baghdad.

Scheherazade demonstrates women’s abilities to govern a state, wage wars, travel the world, and master maritime routes. When one of her heroines, Mariam, faces enemies to save her lover, Scheherazade herself becomes carried away: “Becoming one with her horse, her lance stuck in the ground, Mariam was as unyielding as a mountain and as still as destiny.” Dalila-the-Willy, director of the Sultan’s carrier pigeons, “goes to the palace every day on horseback, wearing a golden helmet topped with a silver pigeon, accompanied by her 40 slaves dressed in red silk and brocade.” Cast out by her husband, Yasmine goes far away, has a palace built, and ascends to the throne, dressed as a man.

In this book, which reflects the world, Scheherazade emphasizes poetry. It appears as early as the third night and remains a guiding thread throughout the novel. On the thousand and first night, as a loving wife and mother of three, she founds a family, but her victory, besides still being alive, stems from Shahriyar’s desire to educate his brother as he has been. Scheherazade’s resistance transformed the barbarian into a civilized man.

Since the writing of the Nights to the present day, the power of women, acquired through knowledge, is constantly endangered, attacked, and suppressed. Beware of those who seek to learn but also to dance, sing, play an instrument, or have control over their bodies. In the 12th century, Mehsti, a Persian-speaking poetess, following in Scheherazade’s footsteps, became the official chanter of the Ghaznavid Sultan’s court, spoke of sensual love, and was pursued for her rejection of ignorance and obscurantism. Nicknamed Shahr Âshoub, “turmoil in the city,” she embodied in flesh and blood her illustrious sister Shahr Zâd, “born in the city.”

Later, in the 19th century, when One Thousand and One Nights was printed in Egypt (the Bulaq edition, 1835), notables and religious figures in Cairo began reading it in hotels designated for this purpose. Naturally, no women or common men were admitted, as only upper-class men were deemed capable of appreciating and understanding the stories. However, educated women rented copies of the Bulaq edition—the multi-volume book was very expensive—to read at home in women-only gatherings, safe from prying eyes. Resistance again.

Also in the 19th century, in Iran, women organized secret sessions to read, mime, and perform the Nights, disguised as men. A curse was said to befall any woman who continued reading the book up to the thousand and first night. Death awaited her at the tip of the last day’s spear. After centuries, readers of the Nights were killed at random by men as determined as Shahriyar.

In 1848, an Iranian poetess and theologian named Tahereh publicly removed her veil in an unprecedented gesture. Scandalized, a witness attempted to slit his own throat. But this did not stop the rebellious woman from loudly proclaiming: “Now look at my face with the eye of your heart / And see the face of God free from all veils.” She was arrested and sentenced to death at the age of 35. But her voice would be carried by another woman, Forough Farrokhzad, who, as early as the 1960s in Iran, dared to speak about her body and desires in her poems. She died in a car accident, and her figure has become iconic, with her poetry known by all. Resistance always. At the end of the 20th century, in Afghanistan under the Taliban, a group of women and men organized a sewing workshop (souzan talayi, or “the golden thimble”) in the basement of a building in Herat. Wrapped in burqas, equipped with scissors and patterns, but above all with notebooks and pens, they left their children outside to keep watch and give warning, and they went there to … read. They read Shakespeare and Joyce. Their inspiration came from the secret readings of the Nights in Iran in the 19th century. This sewing workshop was destroyed by a bomb. Its members perished in the explosion, except for four, including the poetess Nadia Anjoman (1981–2005), who would later be beaten to death by her husband. She is considered the alter ego of Forough Farrokhzad (1934–1967), of Tahereh (1817–1852), of Mehsti (1113–1206), of so many other threatened women, and of course of Scheherazade. This sister of all sisters who escaped death through storytelling. And who gave us the keys to resistance. Let us listen to her, night after night.

*The French expression “ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut” may be translated as “what woman wants, God wants.”

Translated from French 

Nahal Tajadod was born in Tehran and moved to Paris at the age of 17. She collaborated with Jean-Claude Carrière on the French translation of 100 poems by Rumi, published Roumi le brûlé, a biography of this great mystic, and adapted 36 tales from his major work, the Masnavi, into a novel. She is the author of Passeport à l’iranienne (engl. Tehran, Lipstick and Loopholes), Debout sur la terre, Elle joue, Les simples prétextes du bonheur, and most recently L’Affamé, about the life of Shams of Tabriz, Rumi’s spiritual mentor.