“Flight of the Bumblebee” was originally composed for orchestra. It was the Interlude of the opera, Legend of the Tsar Sultan (1900) by Rimsky-Korsakov. According to the plot, a prince becomes a bee and stings his villainous relatives.
The piece has been arranged many times over for various instruments including the piano. The edition that fell into my hands through an adult student was an arrangement by Rachmaninoff that had absolutely no fingerings.
My first approach to learning this chromatically woven composition was to establish a good, workable fingering which took time, thought, and effort: (When the score is blank, experimentation and modification along the way are part of the process)
2) I then marked out the basic harmonic progressions in the bass through which the chromatic style passages above are woven.
3) Finally, I had planned to shape phrases in slow tempo being attentive to swells (crescendo) and dips (diminuendo) that reflected the bee buzzing around.
