Anton Rubinstein wrote his Persian Songs in 1854, while on tour in Germany. The source was a recent collection of poems by Friedrich von Bodenstedt, who advertised them as translations from the work of the Azeri poet Mirza Shafi Vazeh (Mirzə Şəfi Vazeh, 1805-52), with whom he had studied during his travels to the Caucasus. Tchaikovsky was later commissioned to produce a singable Russian translation of the German texts, but he disputed the provenance, maintaining that Bodenstedt, whom he had met, did not know Persian and simply invented the poems (Bodenstedt, as it happens, had by then decided to claim the authorship of these bestselling poems for himself). The 20th century saw a revival of Vazeh’s work, and an examination of the original texts showed that Bodenstedt had indeed translated them, although his versions were much more effusive than Vazeh’s.
Rubinstein, in these twelve songs, pioneered the use of “oriental” colouring in Russian music. It is not known how he arrived at these idioms, since he had not made any ethnomusicological study in the region. Some have even suggested that his childhood absorption of Jewish cantorial chant might have provided much of his inspiration. But whatever the source, Rubinstein handles the style with discretion and taste. The distinctive “oriental” features can be heard in the unusual phrase lengths, certain distinctive harmonic progressions, and arabesque melodic patterns. The original score was for voice with orchestra, including unusual instruments, such as the guitar and cimbalom. Some of the characteristics of the scoring can still be divined from the piano version.
Contemporary audiences thought more highly of Rubinstein’s Persian Songs than his operas and symphonies. Friedrich Niecks, writing for the Musical Times in 1885, thought they displayed “a character of their own” of “great piquancy”. Later, Charles Bennett, in his obituary for Rubinstein, singled out these songs as miniatures whose “art is perfect, the charm complete”. The little quirks of the Persian Songs provided the seed for the Russian Orientalist style of Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade and Golden Cockerel, among many other works. This, unfortunately, was never properly acknowledged by The Five, since they habitually disparaged Rubinstein for reasons of institutional politics.
In this selection of five songs, we encounter stories of love, enmeshed in rich metaphor. Rubinstein endows them with nostalgia and melancholy, but preserves their essential simplicity.

Professor Marina Frolova-Walker FBA