Buzzing Through the Hive with Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee
The Best Moments
Flight of the Bumblebee
I'm Rimsky-Korsakov, and I'm glad to welcome you to the best moments of my Flight of the Bumblebee. You'll hear how a few seconds of racing chromatic notes, written for a prince turned into an insect on his way to see the tsar, can make a whole theater hold its breath. On this site my fellow composers and I also teach you to recognize our pieces when they come on, so why not give it a go right after you listen?
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The Bee Gets Its Orders
I wrote this little piece in 1900 for my opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan, and it begins at the moment a magic Swan-Bird turns Prince Gvidon into a bumblebee so he can visit his father, the tsar. The music takes off almost at once with a buzzing swirl of notes, so you hardly have time to wonder how a prince feels about suddenly having wings.
No Time to Breathe
In the middle I hardly let the music stop, because it is one long stream of tiny notes sliding up and down at about 144 beats per minute. Those notes slip through several different keys on the way, which suits a bee that seems to change direction every second and has no interest in following a map.
Buzzing Off Into Fame
By the end I think you can picture the bee zooming away on its mission, and I am happy to say the prince reaches his father in the story. I never expected this interlude to become so famous, yet Rachmaninoff made a piano version around 1929, and a 2021 study of Spotify found more than 1,000 recordings of it.
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I hope you enjoyed learning about the best moments of Flight of the Bumblebee as much as I enjoyed telling you about them. It's a small piece, but it has stayed with listeners for a long time, and I find it a little remarkable that something I wrote as a brief interlude in an opera has travelled so far from the stage. Many people now know it from concert halls and from everyday life, and it has become a favourite for players who like to show how nimble their fingers can be. There is still a lot more to discover about Flight of the Bumblebee, from the opera it belongs to and the fairy tale behind it to the many ways other musicians have made it their own. If you'd like to keep exploring, I invite you to click on the links provided and follow the bee a little further.
Recording: US Army Band, Public domain