Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Classical Music / Composers Datebook: March 18

 

Brief biography of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, master in orchestration with strong Russian flavour and colour. He was a member of 'The Five' 19^th-century Russian nationalist composers with a gift for lively and colorful orchestration, and known for fairy tale subjects.

 

 

Nikolai (Nikolay) Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov, Russian composer and conductor, was born in Tikhvin on March 18, 1844. He was a Russian nationalist and the youngest member of 'The Five' or 'the Mighty Handful,' a group of 19th-century Russian composers organized by Mily Balakirev.  

   

Early Years

Rimsky-Korsakov was born into an aristocratic family and had conventional music education. His initial ambition was to be a sailor, a naval officer. In 1856, he entered the Corps of Naval Cadets in St. Petersburg but while at sea he had pianoforte lessons, he even composed a symphony. He also attended opera and concerts. Greatly influenced by Balakirev and deeply impressed by Glinka’s nationalist works, he showed great promise in his musical ability especially in orchestration. 

Career beginnings

At 27, the professorship of composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire was offered to him. He accepted the position aware that he was unqualified. Secretly, he began his self-imposed study especially in harmony and counterpoint. About this time, he married a fellow musician, Nadezhda Purgold, also a composer but superior to him.

Music output

It was in 1882 that his work, in particular, an opera The Snow Maiden that showed a new, personal clever voice with some fantasy blended with comedy. The next few years nothing much happened in terms of his musical output. However, after six years, he produced the successful Spanish Capriccio, encored at its first presentation.  With its success, this was followed by Russian Easter Festival Overture and the symphonic suite Scheherazade, an exotic music derived from the famous classic tale Thousand and One Night.  His mastery of orchestration is demonstrated in all three compositions.

 

Featured video:Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade op.35, with Leif Segerstam conducting Sinfónica de Galicia.  Youtube, accessed March 18, 2024. 

 

Rimsky-Korsakov's operas include The Maid of Pskov  (1873), The Snow Maiden (1882), Mozart and Salieri (1898), The Legend of Tsar Saltan (with the famous The Flight of the Bumble Bee, 1900),  and Le Coq d’Or (The Golden Cockerel, 1907), a satirical attack on despotism that was banned until 1909. His other works include symphonic poem Sadko (1867), programme symphony Antar (1869), symphonic suite with four episodes Scheherazade (1888) which has been considered by some critics as his most famous work.  Notably, he composed choruses, folk-song arrangements and piano pieces. 

 

Rimsky-Korsakov's last opera, The Golden Cockerel was based on Pushkin's satire about a bumbling monarch, and for this, was banned by the Russian censor during his lifetime.   

He completed works by other composers, for example, Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (with his pupil Aleksandr Glazunov), the completion and orchestration of Aleksandr Borodin’s Prince Igor after Borodin died in 1887. Significantly, he very well extended his strong influence into the modern age, in particular his style, as a teacher of Igor Stravinsky, Glazunov and Sergei Prokofiev.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov suffered from angina and died in Lyubensk on June 21, 1908. His widow preserved his work.   

Legacy

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov is credited with developing a nationalistic style of classical music. This style employed Russian folk songs and lores along with exotic harmonic, melodic and rhythmic elements in a practice known as musical orientalism, and eschewed traditional Western compositional methods. A member of the group of Russian composers known as 'The Russian Five', he was a master of orchestration, and best-known for his repertoires, along with suites and excerpts from some of his 15 operas. Scheherazade, based on Arabian Nights stories which he composed in 1888, is an example of his frequent use of Russian fairy tale and folk subjects. The intimate setting of the "Our Father", recorded for "Sacred Treasures III: Choral Masterworks from Russia and Beyond", reveals his mastery in composing heartfelt music for Russian cathedrals as well as concert halls. (Hearts of Space Records.) 

 

Photo credit:

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Wikipedia Commons / Public Domain. Portrait of Rimsky-Korsakov in 1898 by Valentin Serov.

 

Resources:

Kennedy, Michael & Joyce, & Tim Rutherford-Johnson. Oxford Dictionary of Music, 6th Edition.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. en.wikipedia.org 

Stanley Sadie, Ed.  The Grove Concise Dictionary of Music. London: Macmillan, 1994.

 

(c) March 2009. Updated March 18, 2024. Tel. Inspired Pen Web. All rights reserved.