Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
Composer

A Boy from Tikhvin Who Almost Became a Sailor

I was born in 1844 in Tikhvin, a town about 200 km east of Saint Petersburg, and the family liked to say we were descended from nobility, with an ancestor who was supposedly a favorite of Catherine the Great, though that is family lore and nobody can say for sure. I had piano lessons, first with Ulikh and then with Feodor Kanille, and it was Kanille who made me want to give myself to composing. My elder brother Voin was a navigator and explorer, though, and his example pushed me toward the Imperial Russian Navy instead. So the plan for my life was a uniform and a ship, and the music was supposed to be a hobby on the side.

A Very Persuasive Man Named Balakirev

In November 1861 I was introduced to Mily Balakirev, a musician with strong opinions and no interest in hearing that you were busy. He encouraged me to write a symphony, which was a bold thing to ask of a young man who had hardly studied the craft. Then in late 1862 I went off as a midshipman on the clipper Almaz, on a cruise that lasted about two years and eight months. I came back from it with a tan, a good many sea stories, and a first symphony that I now had to finish.

Professor, Inspector, and Man of Many Desks

Saint Petersburg was where my working life happened, and it gave me several jobs at once. From 1871 I was professor of composition and orchestration at the Conservatory, which is an odd post for someone who had barely studied the subject himself, and I stayed for decades. In 1873 I became Inspector of Naval Bands, a civilian post that let me leave active service, and for years I was also Balakirev's deputy at the Court Chapel. Over 35 years I taught about 250 students, including Glazunov, Prokofiev and Respighi, and Stravinsky came to my home for private lessons.

The Famous Insect

If you have ever heard a violin player race through a furious, buzzing passage that makes your fingers ache just to watch, you have met my Flight of the Bumblebee. It is not a piece on its own, as many people assume, but a short moment from my opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan. The music swarms up and down in rapid little steps, so you can almost feel something small and fast circling your head. My larger orchestral works, like Scheherazade, which I conducted for the first time in Saint Petersburg in October 1888, are full of color, but this little buzzing one seems to have found its way into everyone's ears.

Trouble with Critics and Authorities

Not everyone approved of the path I took, and the critic Stasov called me a "renegade" once I drew closer to Tchaikovsky and to academic study. I did not take it too hard, because I believed that a composer who knows his craft properly is simply a better composer. The bigger trouble came in 1905, when I wrote letters in support of students during the Revolution and was dismissed from the Conservatory. The students walked out in protest, and by December I was back at my post under the new director Glazunov.

The Last Opera and the Last Argument

From about 1890 I suffered from angina, and it grew worse after 1905, until I could no longer work after December 1907. Before that, I began The Golden Cockerel in 1906 and had finished it by September 1907, meaning it as a razor-sharp satire of the autocracy. In 1908 the censors demanded a long list of changes, and I refused to give way. I died on 21 June 1908 at my Lubensk estate near Luga, aged 64, just two days after my last letter on the matter.

What Came After Me

The Golden Cockerel finally reached the stage on 7 October 1909 in Moscow, so I missed the one opening night I had fought for. People often describe me as a bridge between the self-taught Glinka and The Five on one side and composers with full professional training on the other. Ravel and Debussy learned from my way of handling an orchestra, and so did my pupils, who carried my lessons into the twentieth century. I also finished and polished works by friends, so Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain is usually still played in my arrangement, though people argue about how much I should have changed, and I wrote down my own story in My Musical Life.

A Little Box of Colors for You

What I most want to hand you is color, because to me an orchestra is a big box of paints, and every instrument is a different shade. You do not need any training to enjoy it, and you do not have to know what a symphony is before you listen. Let the music paint something for you, whether it is a sea, a fairy tale, or only a very busy insect. If you come away smiling, even a little, then my years at the desk were well spent.