Rimsky-Korsakov is whelmingly popular in the West for such brilliant, glowingly scored orchestral works as Capriccio espagnol, Russian Easter Overture, and Scheherazade. But on his native ground he is regarded as primarily an opera composer and, though the operas, owing to barriers of language and culture, have not achieved a lasting place in the Western repertoire, it is hardly surprising that they should have been mined for their numerous passages of scintillant orchestral music (e.g., the evergreen "Flight of the Bumblebee" from Tale of Tsar Saltan). Around the turn of the century, Rimsky-Korsakov prepared suites or "musical pictures" from several of the operas—those from Tsar Saltan and Pan Voyevoda bearing opus numbers (reflecting some arrangement), while those from Mlada, Christmas Eve, The Golden Cockerel, and Tale of the Invisible City of Kitezh, being largely compilations, dispense with them. Curiously, the composer may have had nothing whatever to do with assembling the suite from The Snow Maiden (Snegurochka). It is not included in Rimsky-Korsakov's works list, nor is it mentioned in his autobiography, My Musical Life. Moreover, it is a cut and paste job, the second number, "Dance of the Birds," for instance, specifying the elaborate vocal and choral parts, duplicated by strings, to be performed ad libitum. Absence of verifiable involvement in the compilation of the suite is more remarkable in that Rimsky-Korsakov, an indefatigable reviser and arranger, regarded The Snow Maiden as "my best work, not only that but perhaps, on the whole, the best of all contemporary operas." True to form, he revised it in 1895, while as late as 1904 he began to prepare a thematic catalog of the opera, left unfinished but bespeaking nostalgia for the magical summer of 1880 in which The Snow Maiden came suddenly into being as Rimsky-Korsakov felt himself an enchanted amanuensis for the song of the earth. Scholars have assigned a tentative date of 1890 for compilation of the suite, and 1895 as the conjectural year of full score publication by Bessel, in Saint Petersburg. The suite's opening number, "Beautiful Spring," reproduces the opera's introduction, delicately evoking nature's springtime awakening, whose mood is joyously elaborated in "Dance of the Birds," rippled by piquant—and ornithologically accurate—birdcalls. Glinka's spirit hovers over The Snow Maiden and is nowhere more apparent than in the "Procession of Tsar Berendey," a suave spinoff of "Tchernomor's March" in Russlan and Lyudmilla. The final, mercurial "Dance of the Tumblers" rounds the suite off with Mendelssohnian deftness.

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