Description
Aram Khachaturian (1903-1978) was a Soviet Armenian composer and conductor. He wrote Masquerade in 1941 as incidental music for a production of a play of the same name by Russian poet and playwright Mikhail Lermontov. The play tells the story of a world-weary aristocrat who, suspicious of his wife, Nina’s, adultery, becomes consumed by jealousy, murders her and is driven to insanity upon the revelation of her innocence.
In 1944 Khachaturian extracted five movements to make the well-known symphonic suite, of which the Mazurka is the third movement.
In the play the Mazurka accompanies a ballroom scene in which Nina dances exuberantly, getting very hot in the process. She asks her husband for some ice cream to help cool her down, which he duly brings her, having laced it with poison. Khachaturian’s Mazurka has been described as an energetic, “wild carousel” of a dance – a kind of deranged waltz with accents on the second or third beats, rather than the first.
The Waltz from the suite is also available for wind quintet here.
