Song of the Varangian Guest (Pesnya varyazhskogo gostya), from Sadko, by Rimsky-Korsakov
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Get the practice plan for Song of the Varangian Guest (Pesnya varyazhskogo gostya), from Sadko
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- Hear it through at Slow (42 bpm). Open it in the reader, choose Slow, and follow the page with your eyes without playing. As it plays, count 4 to the bar.
- Learn the right hand of bars 1 to 8 on its own, in D minor. Say the note names out loud the first time through, then play it three times without stopping.
- Find the chords under it: Dm7, G7, Dm and Gm7. Play each one as a block in your left hand and say its name, so you know what the harmony is before the left hand has to move.
- Learn the left hand of the same bars on its own. Keep it quiet and even: it is the floor the tune stands on.
- Put hands together at Slow, 42 bpm. Bars 1 to 8 only. Stop after every wrong note and play that bar again before moving on.
- Move up to Steady (63 bpm) once Slow feels easy three times in a row. Then learn the next 8 bars the same way: right hand, left hand, together.
- Play the whole piece (about 2 minutes) from the start, at whatever speed keeps it going. A steady run with a few slips beats a fast one that stops.
About this piece
In Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Sadko, three foreign merchants sing of their homelands, and the Viking (Varangian) guest describes waves smashing against grim northern cliffs. It is arranged for piano from the song for voice and piano, and the heavy bass stepping down from D to G under every phrase is the sound of those unbreakable rocks.
How to play it
Give the descending left-hand line real weight and keep it strictly in time, Andante non troppo. In the final bars the right hand's pounding chords with the B flat above should grow without rushing.
Reading it, and printing it
The score opens in Artform's reader, which shows the music as engraved notation and plays it back so you can hear the line before you try it. You can slow the tempo down, loop a passage that is not working yet, and print the page when you would rather have paper on the stand.
The file itself is MusicXML, which MuseScore, Sibelius, Finale and Dorico all open, so the notes are yours to keep whatever you read them in.
Edition: Mutopia Project #2248, in the public domain. Converted to MusicXML by Artform and checked note for note against the original.
More free Rimsky-Korsakov sheet music
All 17 Rimsky-Korsakov scores →
Who Rimsky-Korsakov was
Russian naval officer who wrote his first symphony on a three-year cruise and only afterwards worked out that he did not properly know how music was put together, at which point he took a professorship and taught himself in front of his students. He became the greatest orchestrator of his generation and wrote the textbook on it. Scheherazade is his; so is the tidying of half of Mussorgsky. Stravinsky and Prokofiev both came out of his classroom.
Learn the music behind it
Reading a piece and understanding it are different skills. If you want the harmony under this one, the chord trainer teaches chords the way songs use them, and the scale pages cover the fingering for every key, including D minor.