Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

From Philosopedia

Rimsky-Korsakov, Nicolai Andreyevich (18 Mar 1844 - 21 Jun 1908)

“The Five,” a group of late 19th-century Russian composers, were Balakirev, the leader; Cui; Moussorgsky; Borodin; and Rimsky-Korsakov.

Although Rimsky originally had intended to have a naval career, he turned seriously to composing after meeting Balakirev in 1861. In 1871 he became professor of composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, retiring from the navy in 1873. In 1861 he became assistant to Balakirev, the director of the imperial Chapel, and conducted the St. Petersburg Symphony Concerts (1886–1900).

His symphonic poem Sadko (1867) and his first symphony (1865) were the first works in these forms by a Russian, but it was Rimsky’s operas that brought him fame. His best-known orchestral work is Scheherezade (1888), which was used by the Diaghilev ballet. Among his pupils were Glazunov, Gretchanin, and Stravinsky. He once spent an evening at Lev Tolstoy’s estate near Moscow at a time when the novelist had given up art for religion and who vainly as well as unsuccessfully exhorted Rimsky-Korsakov to do likewise. When the composer apologized for having exasperated his host, Tolstoy reassured him, “Not at all. For me it’s been very interesting to come face to face with gloom.”

Stravinsky referred to his teacher’s “bourgeois atheism,” recalling in one of his conversation books how Rimsky at a dinner table pooh-poohed the idea of “resurrection . . . drawing a zero on the tablecloth as he said, ‘There is nothing after death; death is the end.’ ” Meanwhile, Rimsky was not above churning out church choruses for performance by the Imperial Court Chapel Choir, at whose school he taught part time exactly until he qualified for a pension. Ironically, the atheist Rimsky’s The Invisible City of Kitezh overflows with heart-rending religious lyricism and portrays the title character Fevronia’s bodily resurrection.

Critic Richard Taruskin observed that the religion in the opera, while nominally Christian, “is really a pantheistic pagan folk religion. And that enabled Rimsky to draw inspiration from musical folklore, his eternal well, and also from that other great 19th-century pagan, Richard Wagner, whose nominally Christian Parsifal, together with the avowedly pagan ‘Ring’ cycle, served as Rimsky’s chief model in ways both overt and well hidden.”

{Richard Taruskin, “ ‘Kitezh’: Religious Art of an Atheist” The New York Times, 25 February 1995}