Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov - Biography
Nikolai Andreyrevich Rimsky-Korsakov was born near Novgorod on March 18th 1844 and died in St. Petersburg on June 21tst 1908. He came from a long line of Russian nobility. He took piano lessons as a boy not to be a musician but a part of becoming a cultured young man. When he was 12 he was sent to the Naval Academy and studied there for six years graduating as a junior naval officer. While in the Academy he received formal musical education from Feodor Canille who introduced to him to the German classics and the music of Russia’s national composer Glinka. He was also to meet the composer and critic Mili Balakirev who introduced him to two slightly older Army officers Cesar Cui and Modeste Mussorgsky who were men with musical ambitions and along with Borodin and Balakirev were to form the Russian nationalist musical school the Mighty Five’. Rimsky-Korsakov was to embark in 1862 on a worldwide voyage on a naval cruiser that would last three years and landed him to what at the time was the exotic port of San Francisco. While on the voyage he completed his First Symphony a pleasant conservative and hardly characteristic work. Upon his return to Russia he took advantage of his relatively light military duties to make a study of the major works of musical history which he barely knew. After composing an Overture on Russian Themes and a symphonic poem Sadko he wrote his first major work his Second Symphony , Antar which is really more a multi movement symphonic poem then a symphony based on Middle Eastern theme (A very engaging work and a dress rehearsal for Scheherazade).
In 1871 he was appointed a professor of composition at St. Petersburg Conservatory even though he was very aware of the fact that he had huge holes in his technical musical armor, for the first year or so he barely kept ahead of his students but he methodically plowed on to he became the foremost musical pedagogue in Russia. In the early 1870’s he roomed for a while with Mussorgsky and whose work as a civil servant kept him away during the day enabled Rimsky to work on the solitary piano during the day and Mussorgsky during the night. The steady income of the professorship allowed him to resign his naval commission and also enabled him to marry Nadezhda Purgold who was herself a gifted musician. While resigning from the navy he was able to keep a position as an inspector of Naval Bands a job title that has a Gogol like satiric edge. Rimsky was to write the first of his fifteen operas The Maid of Pskov in 1873 as with many of his works he was to revise it in later years. The next year he was to complete his Third Symphony. The ‘Five’ that we have alluded to before that is also sometimes referred to as the ‘Mighty Handful’ were nationalists who believed that the future of Russian Music was to come from music that was based on Russian folk sources and not Westernized cosmopolitan music as represented by the then most famous of Russian composers Anton Rubinstein. The young Tchaikovsky who seems quite Russian to us was on poor terms with the ‘Five’ except for Rimsky because he was viewed as to ‘European’.
The next one of Rimsky’s operas was to be May Night followed by the fairy tale opera the Snow Maiden. It needs to be emphasized to those of us in the West that the heart of his work were his operas and they far transcend in value his reputation as a composer of orchestral showpieces. Rimsky was to work on the first version of his Orchestration Guide which he was to revise many times and is a standard guide to orchestration to this day. The early death of his friends Mussorgsky at 42 in 1881 of alcoholism and Borodin at 53 in 1887 was to have a deep affect on him. He was to put together Borodin’s magnum opus Prince Igor from a mass of material. He thoroughly recomposed Mussorgsky’s Night on Bare Mountain and more controversially re-orchestrated and re-harmonized his great opera Boris Godunov. Rimsky’s version held the stage for generations but critics rightly pointed out that his opulent version with corrected harmonies took a lot of original genius out of the score. Rimsky’s intentions were noble and he always felt there would be a time when Mussorgsky’s original could hold the stage. Many of Rimsky’s famous orchestral pieces could be attributed to his relationship with the Russian Symphony Concerts put together by the impresario Mitrofan Belyayev. The celebrated Capriccio Espagnol, Russian Easter Overture along with his most famous work Scheherazade were written for these concerts. Also these concerts introduced him to a young prodigy the soon to be famous composer Alexander Glazunov.
In 1889 Rimsky was to attend a performance of Wagner’s Ring put on by traveling German troop; he was overwhelmed by the music especially the power and subtlety of the orchestral effects. Rimsky felt that his role was now to create opera based on the mythical Russian past. The first of these was to be Mlada of 1891. Rimsky was developing health problems a persistent angina of the heart that led to a period of clinical depression. The death of his rival and sometimes friend Tchaikovsky made him now the undisputed master of Russian music and shook him out of his depression and he quickly composed the short opera Mozart and Salieri based on the Pushkin story and the epic Sadko (not to be confused with his earlier symphonic poem). Rimsky was now a professor of composition for more than a quarter of a century and his students were to include significant composers as Glazunov,Liadov,Ippolitov- Ivanov, Arensky,Miaskovsky , his future son in law Maximilan Steinberg and his last and greatest pupil Stravinsky. In 1898 he wrote the opera The Tsar’s Bride which was followed a year later by Tsar Sultan that has a one minute piece about a gigantic bee that was to be immortalized as The Flight of the Bumble Bee. Perhaps Rimsky’s greatest opera was to be his penultimate Invisible City of Kitezh of 1904 the most Wagnerian of his operas.
Rimsky-Korsakov was politically liberal and when the revolution of 1905 occurred many of his students were expelled for participating in the uprising. His protests over this led to his firing after thirty four years of service .The international furor over treating a man of such stature in such a manner forced the government to reinstate him. His last opera based on Pushkin’s story The Golden Cockerel a satire on a stupid king who was led into a disastrous war by a traitorous foreign queen was too close to the reality of Tsar Nicolas regime losing the Russo- Japanese war and the influence of his German born Tsarina, This great satirical opera was not to be performed until after Rimsky’s death due to heart disease that occurred on June 21st 1908.
We have a very solid record of the events of Rimsky-Korsakov’s life because he wrote a superb auto biography shortly before His death entitled My Musical Life. There are many scoundrels in the history of music but few men as decent and noble in character as Rimsky-Korsakov. Some of his music like Scheherazade is enormously popular but his music is not as appreciated outside of Slavic countries because his major achievement was his opera’s. Thanks to the superb recordings by the Kirov Opera of St. Petersburg under Valery Gergiev along with international tours of the Kirov, the West is now beginning to access his stature. Also legendary conductors of the past like Beecham, Ansermet and Stokowski have made great recordings of his music.
