One or two contributors to this thread have remarked, in effect, that
Scheherezade has the potential to grow old sooner than later.  No doubt
they're right.  When I was a kid, approaching firty years ago - well,
let's say forty-five, there was an expression describing a record
collection overladen with war horses: "It's got too many Scheherezades."

And yet I owe my love of music to this piece perhaps more than any other.
My family had three 78 albums of complete works: Scheherezade, Tchaikovsky's
Romeo and Juliet and the William Tell Overture, the "Lone Ranger Song."
I liked all three, but Scheherezade fascinated me above all for its
strong narrative sense, its wealth of invention and, don't laugh, its
layers of musical complexity.

As a red-blooded lower-middle-class American kid, I was honour bound
to hate all symphonies, but in a moment of weekness I did eventually
dip into another album called, I think, The Heart of the Symphony.  It
consisted of eight three-minute snippets from the best-known symphonies
of the time performed by the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra under the
baton of one Charles O'Connell who was also the author of the Victor
Book of the Symphony, as I eventually learned.  I'm afraid that from
the moment I heard the exceprt from Beethoven 5, my red-bloodedness was
doomed.  There followed discoveries of Brahms, Schubert, Dvorak and
others.  It wasn't too long before Scheherezade was left in the shade,
though I was perrenially disappointed when the orchestras I went to hear
over the next few years never performed it.

In fact, I never heard it live until I was in my mid-thirties.  (In fact,
I heard my first live performances, though hardly my last, of R&J and
the Lone Ranger Song that same season.) I had to concede that this
Rimsky-Korsakov fellow was almost as good as I'd imagined twenty-five
years earlier.  A couple of years later I found the score in a used book
star.  I took it home, studied it a bit and found much to admire.  Yet
again a few years and I got the Dutoit-Montreal Symphony CD and was
floored by its richness of detail and the sheer beauty of the playing.
Scheherezade came by it popularity honestly, I've had to conclude.

Yet I don't listen to it often, as I don't want to wear it out.  Its
"layers of musical complexity" are sufficient to astonish an eleven-year-old,
but less impressive to someone in the final months of his sixth decade.
Still, I'll always stand up for this lovely score that started me on the
most amazing journey of my life.

Richard, who invites you to visit his classical music site at
http://opuspocus.ca