Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov was born on March 6, 1844, in Tikhvin, a small town east of St. Petersburg in the Novgorod province of the Russian Empire ^[1]. His family belonged to the minor nobility and had a long record of military and naval service. His father, Andrei Petrovich, had served as a civil governor, and his much older brother Voin was a naval officer whose letters from distant voyages fired the boy's imagination ^[2].

Music entered his life early but casually. He began piano lessons at six and tried composing small pieces by his early teens, yet nobody in the household treated these efforts as the start of a career. The family expected him to follow Voin into the navy, and in 1856 the twelve-year-old entered the College of Naval Cadets in St. Petersburg ^[1]. Anyone asking who was Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov at that point would have received a simple answer: a cadet with a sideline in music.

St. Petersburg changed his sense of what music could be. He attended operas and concerts, heard Glinka's A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Lyudmila, and took piano lessons with Fyodor Kanille, who recognized real talent behind the amateur enthusiasm ^[2]. In 1861 Kanille introduced him to Mily Balakirev, the charismatic leader of a group of young composers determined to build a distinctly Russian school of music. Balakirev encouraged the seventeen-year-old cadet to begin a symphony, an audacious assignment for someone with almost no formal training ^[3].

Naval duty interrupted everything. From 1862 to 1865 Rimsky-Korsakov served aboard the clipper Almaz on a cruise that took him to England, the eastern seaboard of the United States during the American Civil War, Brazil, and back across the Atlantic ^[1]. He composed little at sea, but the voyage left him with vivid memories of ocean light and weather that later surfaced in works such as Scheherazade and the opera Sadko ^[2].

Back in St. Petersburg he finished the symphony Balakirev had assigned. Balakirev conducted its premiere in December 1865, and critics greeted it as an early landmark for Russian symphonic writing ^[3]. Rimsky-Korsakov now took his place in the circle that came to be called The Five or the Mighty Handful: Balakirev, Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Borodin, César Cui, and himself. The group rejected what it saw as the dry academicism of the conservatories and drew instead on folk song, Orthodox chant, and Russian history and legend ^[4].

His reputation grew through the late 1860s with orchestral works including the musical picture Sadko and the symphonic suite Antar ^[2]. Then came a decision that startled his friends. In 1871 the St. Petersburg Conservatory offered him a professorship of composition and orchestration, even though, as he later admitted in his memoirs, he could barely harmonize a chorale and had never written strict counterpoint ^[3]. He accepted, resigned his active naval commission in 1873 for a civilian post as inspector of naval bands, and set about teaching himself the fundamentals while teaching others. For several years he worked through harmony and counterpoint exercises with the discipline of a cadet, a self-education that transformed him from gifted amateur into the most technically assured member of his circle ^[1].

Any account of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov achievements begins with the orchestra itself. He handled instrumental color with a precision and brilliance that few contemporaries matched, and he codified his methods in Principles of Orchestration, a treatise completed after his death by his student Maximilian Steinberg and still consulted by composers today ^[5]. Three orchestral works from a single burst of creativity in 1887 and 1888 carried his name around the world: the Capriccio Espagnol, the Russian Easter Festival Overture, and Scheherazade, a four-movement suite drawn from the Arabian Nights whose solo violin theme, representing the storytelling queen, remains one of the most recognizable melodies in the repertoire ^[2].

Opera occupied the center of his creative life. He completed fifteen, most of them rooted in Russian legend, fairy tale, and history: The Maid of Pskov, May Night, The Snow Maiden, Sadko, The Tsar's Bride, The Tale of Tsar Saltan, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, and finally The Golden Cockerel ^[1]. The Tale of Tsar Saltan contains the orchestral interlude known as the Flight of the Bumblebee, a miniature that has been arranged for nearly every instrument ^[2].

He also served Russian music as an editor and rescuer. After Mussorgsky died in 1881, Rimsky-Korsakov prepared performing editions of Boris Godunov and completed Khovanshchina; after Borodin's death in 1887 he and Glazunov finished Prince Igor ^[4]. Scholars have long debated whether his polished revisions smoothed away too much of Mussorgsky's rough originality, and modern performances often return to the original scores. Even critics of the practice concede that without his labor these operas might have waited decades for the stage ^[3]. From 1883 to 1894 he also worked at the Imperial Chapel, and he conducted concerts of Russian music in St. Petersburg, Brussels, and at the Paris World Exposition of 1889 ^[1].

In 1872 Rimsky-Korsakov married Nadezhda Purgold, a trained pianist who had studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and moved in the same musical circles as The Five ^[2]. Nadezhda was a sharp musical judge and made piano arrangements of her husband's orchestral works; their household became a gathering place for composers, and their musical evenings continued a tradition begun in the Purgold family home. The couple had seven children, two of whom died young ^[1].

Several of the children made their own marks. Andrei became a musicologist and wrote extensively about his father's work, while the composer's son-in-law Maximilian Steinberg taught at the conservatory and edited his unfinished writings ^[5]. The family summered at country estates, and the property at Lyubensk, near Luga, became the composer's final home.

By temperament Rimsky-Korsakov was methodical, plain-spoken, and skeptical of mysticism, a rationalist who nonetheless spent his career setting fairy tales and pagan rituals to music. His autobiography, My Musical Life, written in installments over more than thirty years and published after his death, records his opinions with a candor unusual for the genre, including hard judgments on his own early technical failings ^[3].

The 1890s brought a creative crisis and then a remarkable recovery. After a period of doubt following Tchaikovsky's death in 1893, Rimsky-Korsakov entered the most productive operatic stretch of his life, completing roughly an opera a year, many of them premiered by Savva Mamontov's private opera company in Moscow, where the young Fyodor Chaliapin sang leading roles and artists such as Mikhail Vrubel designed the productions ^[4].

Politics disrupted his final years. During the upheavals of 1905, conservatory students joined the wave of strikes sweeping Russia, and Rimsky-Korsakov publicly defended their right to protest. The directorate of the Russian Musical Society dismissed him from his professorship in March 1905, an act that provoked resignations by Glazunov and Anatoly Lyadov and a flood of public support for the composer ^[1]. Performances of his works were briefly banned in St. Petersburg. When the conservatory gained autonomy later that year, Glazunov became its director and reinstated him ^[3].

His last opera, The Golden Cockerel, completed in 1907, turned a Pushkin fairy tale into a barbed satire on autocratic incompetence, and the imperial censors blocked its staging during his lifetime; it reached the stage in Moscow in 1909 ^[2]. Suffering from angina, he died at his Lyubensk estate on June 20, 1908, at the age of sixty-four, and was buried in the Tikhvin Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in St. Petersburg ^[1].

Rimsky-Korsakov's influence runs through two channels: his scores and his students. Over thirty-seven years at the St. Petersburg Conservatory he taught or advised an extraordinary roster, including Glazunov, Lyadov, Anton Arensky, Ottorino Respighi, Sergei Prokofiev, and above all Igor Stravinsky, who studied with him privately from 1902 until the older man's death and whose early ballets carry the stamp of his teacher's orchestral technique ^[3]. Through the textbooks on harmony and orchestration that grew out of his classes, his methods reached far beyond Russia ^[5].

In the concert hall, Scheherazade, the Capriccio Espagnol, and the Russian Easter Festival Overture never left the repertoire, and the Flight of the Bumblebee became a fixture of popular culture. His operas took longer to travel; inside Russia works like The Snow Maiden, Sadko, and The Tsar's Bride remain staples, while Western houses have staged them more selectively, though productions of The Golden Cockerel and Kitezh have grown more frequent in recent decades ^[2].

Among the plain Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov facts that summarize the life: a sailor who circled the Atlantic before he could harmonize a chorale, a self-taught professor who became the great systematizer of Russian compositional technique, and the editor who kept Mussorgsky and Borodin on the stage. Any Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov biography ends where the histories of Russian modernism begin, because Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and their generation built on foundations he laid in the classroom and in the orchestra pit ^[4].