When Borodin suddenly died in February 1887, Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov undertook to complete, orchestrate and see through the press all his unfinished and unpublished compositions. During the following winter Rimsky was working on Prince Igor, and it seems that he became inspired by the Oriental character of the Polovtsian scenes from that opera. He conceived the idea of writing a composition based on various episodes from The Arabian Nights, planned the overall form of the work, made some musical sketches, and Scheherazade was complete by the end of July 1888, receiving its first performance under the composer's direction in St Petersburg in October.

sources

A  Autograph score (1888), in the National Library of Russia, St Petersburg

E,P  First edition score and parts, published by Belaieff, Leipzig in 1889. As so often, E and P are independent of each other; sometimes one is correct, sometimes the other

F  Full score, published as Vol.13 of the complete Russian Symphonic Music edition, Moscow 1991. Some errors were corrected, but P was not consulted; this hardly rates as an Urtext edition. Unless otherwise stated, its text = E