1844–1908 · Russia · Romantic
Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908) was a Russian composer, conductor and teacher, a member of The Five. He wrote fifteen operas and three symphonies, including the opera Sadko and the orchestral suite Scheherazade. As a professor at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, he taught future composers such as Igor Stravinsky and Alexander Glazunov, and also conducted symphonic concerts and opera performances.
Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov was born on 18 March 1844 in the town of Tikhvin in Novgorod Governorate, into a noble family with a long tradition of service in the Russian navy. The Rimsky-Korsakov family home stood on the bank of the Tikhvinka river, opposite the Uspensky Monastery. The composer's father, Andrei Petrovich Rimsky-Korsakov, served as vice-governor of Novgorod and later as civil governor of Volhynia. His mother, Sofia Vasilievna, was the daughter of a serf woman and the landowner Vasily Fyodorovich Skaryatin; by her son's account, she spoke good French and could play the piano. The boy was strongly influenced by his older brother Voin Andreyevich, a naval officer and later a rear admiral.
From the age of six the boy was taught at home, including piano lessons, but music made a smaller impression on him than books. He liked church music and Russian folk songs best of all. At eleven he tried composing his first pieces of music.
In 1856 his father enrolled him at the Naval Cadet Corps, despite the boy's dreams of travel. A genuine interest in music came in 1858: the young man discovered the operas of Rossini, Donizetti and Weber, but was most struck by an opera of Meyerbeer's and by Mikhail Glinka's A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Lyudmila. Later came an interest in the music of Beethoven, Mozart and Mendelssohn. Feeling the lack of a musical education, from the autumn of 1859 he began studying with the pianist F. A. Kanille.
His father died in 1862, and the family moved to Saint Petersburg. That same year, with Kanille's help, Nikolai found himself in the circle of the composer Mily Balakirev and stayed in that circle — a group later given the name The Five. At that time, besides Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov himself, it included C. A. Cui and Modest Mussorgsky. Balakirev guided the work of his younger colleagues, suggested compositional solutions and helped with the orchestration of their works.
Rimsky-Korsakov began his first major score, the future First Symphony, under Balakirev's watch. The earliest sketches came as far back as his lessons with Kanille, while the truly intensive work on the piece fell in 1861 and 1862. By the composer's own account, by the spring of 1862 the first movement, the scherzo and the finale had been written and at least roughly orchestrated.
In the spring of 1862 Nikolai graduated with distinction from the Naval Corps and became a midshipman on active duty. He spent the next three years aboard the clipper Almaz, which sailed on an expedition to the coast of North America, seeing along the way England, Norway, Poland, France, Italy, Spain, the United States and Brazil. There was hardly any time to compose in those years — the voyage produced only one finished page, an Andante for the First Symphony, ready by the end of 1862; after that, work on music paused for a while. Later, in his mature scores, these impressions of the sea would resurface in his orchestral colouring.
At Balakirev's urging Rimsky-Korsakov returned to work on the symphony: he wrote the missing trio for the scherzo and re-orchestrated the whole piece. This version of the score was first performed in 1865 under Balakirev, who went on to perform his younger colleague's early symphonic works as well. Following Balakirev, the composer turned to Slavic folk melodies and kept a national colouring in his music that later became a lasting feature of his work; he developed the same musical language later in the Overture on Three Russian Themes and the Fantasia on Serbian Themes.
On returning from his voyage, Rimsky-Korsakov again found himself among the members of Balakirev's circle. There he met the chemist and budding composer A. P. Borodin and the circle's idol A. S. Dargomyzhsky. Around that time he also became friends with Glinka's sister, L. I. Shestakova, and before long got to know P. I. Tchaikovsky as well.
An important milestone was the symphonic picture Sadko (1867), the composer's earliest programme work, which continued the programme-symphony tradition of Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt. Here Rimsky-Korsakov, who would later be called a teller of fairy tales, turned for the first time to a fairy-tale subject and used for the first time a symmetrical scale of his own invention, which became known as the Rimsky-Korsakov scale. In the same score he made his first attempt to convey the sea through orchestral colour, a device he returned to more than once later, in Scheherazade, the cantata From Homer, and the operas Sadko and The Tale of Tsar Saltan.
The fairy-tale programme direction continued in the symphonic suite Antar: Rimsky-Korsakov began working on it in 1868 as a Second Symphony, inspired by an oriental tale by Osip Senkovsky. Its first performance took place in 1869 at a concert of the Russian Musical Society.
In the late 1860s Rimsky-Korsakov spent much time on other composers' scores: he helped C. A. Cui orchestrate the opera William Ratcliff, and after Dargomyzhsky's death he completed, as the dying composer had wished, the opera The Stone Guest (1869–1870). Together with Balakirev and A. K. Lyadov he edited the scores of Glinka's operas Ruslan and Lyudmila and Ivan Susanin, and also spent a long time working on Mussorgsky's compositions — finishing Khovanshchina, orchestrating the fantasy Night on Bald Mountain, and re-editing Boris Godunov.
The operatic genre, which later became central to Rimsky-Korsakov's work, first appeared in 1872, when the composer finished The Maid of Pskov, based on a drama by Lev Mey. In that same year, 1872, he married the pianist Nadezhda Purgold, and one of the witnesses at the wedding was Modest Mussorgsky.
In the 1870s Rimsky-Korsakov's professional duties grew. He became a professor at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1871, teaching courses there in practical composition, instrumentation and orchestration. At the same time, from 1873 to 1884, he held the post of inspector of the Naval Department's bands, and in 1874–1881 he ran the Free Music School. From 1874 conducting was added to this: first symphonic concerts, and later opera performances.
In the mid-1870s Rimsky-Korsakov set about improving his compositional technique: he discovered gaps in his own musical education and began to teach himself the disciplines taught at the conservatory. The result of this work was the Third Symphony in C major. In the 1880s he wrote the orchestral suite Scheherazade, the Capriccio Espagnol, and the overture Russian Easter Festival, and also prepared for publication the operas of friends who had already died — Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina and Borodin's Prince Igor.
From 1882 Rimsky-Korsakov headed the Belyayev circle, and from 1883 to 1894 he served as deputy manager of the Court Chapel Choir. From 1886 to 1900 he regularly conducted the Russian Symphony Concerts: for instance, in November 1887 his Capriccio Espagnol was performed for the first time under his own direction, and in 1888, in the hall of the Nobility Assembly, he conducted the Russian Easter Overture, dedicated to the memory of Borodin and Mussorgsky. In 1906 the composer was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.
In the early 1890s Rimsky-Korsakov's creative activity slowed for a while — he studied philosophy, wrote articles and revised some of his older works. His work then picked up again with new energy: he wrote the opera Christmas Eve in 1895, Sadko in 1896, Mozart and Salieri in 1897, and also a prologue to The Maid of Pskov and the opera The Tsar's Bride, based on a drama by Lev Mey — both in 1898.
During the revolutionary events of 1905–1907, Rimsky-Korsakov openly supported the striking students and condemned the actions of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory's leadership — he resigned and returned only after the conservatory had gained partial autonomy and changed its leadership. In 1907 he was a member of the committee organising the Historic Russian Concerts in Paris, appearing there as both conductor and composer.
Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov died on 21 June 1908 of a myocardial infarction at his estate of Lyubensk. A memorial museum complex is now located there, combining the house at Lyubensk with the neighbouring estate of Vechasha, where the composer had lived until 1907.
Rimsky-Korsakov created his own school of composition: among his roughly two hundred pupils were composers, conductors and musicologists, including Anton Arensky, Alexander Glazunov, Alexander Gretchaninov, Anatoly Lyadov, Nikolai Myaskovsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Ottorino Respighi and Igor Stravinsky. Many of his pupils later became prominent figures of national schools of composition in Armenia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine and Estonia.
Rimsky-Korsakov's teaching work was highly valued by P. I. Tchaikovsky, who wrote to him that he had become a music teacher and had raised a whole generation of young Russian musicians. One of his pupils, Igor Stravinsky, remembered his teacher as an attentive and thorough educator who could phrase a remark so that it was almost impossible to forget, and who, unlike many others, never praised his pupils, yet could be extremely severe in his criticism.
Rimsky-Korsakov wrote fifteen operas, three symphonies and other orchestral works, instrumental concertos, cantatas, chamber, vocal and sacred music. Many of his works are linked to fairy-tale and sea subjects: he was the first to use a symmetrical scale of his own invention, the Rimsky-Korsakov scale, to depict a fantastical world, and he conveyed the sea through orchestral colour more than once, from the symphonic picture Sadko to the suite Scheherazade. His operas include The Maid of Pskov, Christmas Eve, Sadko and The Tsar's Bride.
The programme orchestral scores — the symphonic picture Sadko and the suite Antar — were an important stage in his work: in them he developed the programme-symphony tradition of Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt and for the first time used a symmetrical scale of his own invention for fairy-tale imagery.
As a professor at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, Rimsky-Korsakov spent much time on instrumentation and orchestration, both his own and other composers': he completed, edited and prepared for publication works by his fellow members of The Five, including Mussorgsky's opera Khovanshchina and Borodin's Prince Igor.
The orchestral suite Scheherazade, the Capriccio Espagnol and the overture Russian Easter Festival were written in the 1880s, while Rimsky-Korsakov headed the Belyayev circle; the Capriccio Espagnol was first performed at the Russian Symphony Concerts under the composer's own direction.
About two hundred pupils passed through his classes at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory; among them were Alexander Glazunov, Sergei Prokofiev, Nikolai Myaskovsky and Igor Stravinsky.
The site has piano pieces by Rimsky-Korsakov from the Op. 11 set — Impromptu, Novellette, Scherzino and Etude — as well as the standalone Fugue sur le nom de Bach. Beginners might start with the intermediate-level Fugue sur le nom de Bach, then move on to the intermediate-plus Impromptu, Scherzino and Etude, leaving the more advanced Novellette for later.
Besides composing, Rimsky-Korsakov held several musical-administrative posts: he ran the Free Music School, served as inspector of the Naval Department's bands, and for many years conducted the Russian Symphony Concerts.