Rimsky’s Colour

The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica names him Nicolas Andreievich Rimsky-Korsakov, born at Tikhvin, Novgorod, on the 18th of March 1844, New Style. He was one of the musical amateurs who, with Borodin, Cui and Mussorgsky, gathered round Balakirev in St Petersburg in the days when Wagner was still unknown. By 1865 he had written a symphony in E minor which in that year was performed — the first by a Russian composer, 1911 says — under Balakirev’s direction. In 1873 he definitely retired from the navy, having been appointed a professor in the St Petersburg Conservatoire. The same year witnessed his marriage to a talented pianist, Nadejda Pourgold, and the production of his first opera, Pskovitianka. The amateur had become a professional without dropping the circle. The navy is not a metaphor on this page. It is the job he left in order to teach.

Ilya Repin painted him in 1893, oil on canvas, one hundred and twenty-five by eighty-nine and a half centimetres, now in the Russian Museum. A man among papers and a piano, not a uniform. The 1911 life is already a list of operas by then: May Night (1878), The Snow Maiden (1880), Mlada (1892), Christmas Eve (1894), Sadko (1895), Mozart and Salieri (1898), The Tsar’s Bride (1899), Tsar Saltana (1900), Servilia (1902), Kostchei the Immortal (1902), Kites (1905). The last is 1911’s spelling of Kitezh. But his operas, the encyclopaedia says, attracted less attention abroad than his symphonic compositions, which show a mastery of orchestral effect combined with a fine utilisation of Russian folk-melody and a happy feeling for programme music. His writing was peculiarly individual in its restraint and avoidance of violent methods. The Spanish Capriccio of 1887 was particularly appreciated. The visitor who knows only a bee or a sea has met the travelling cards. The conservatory is the fact under them.

The Five are the company 1911 will not let him leave. Balakirev’s circle, a nationalist school, a common goal of a Russian music that would not wait for a German permission. Mussorgsky’s roughness, on the later Britannica showing, is what Rimsky would edit and complete after the hospital death. Gratitude and loss sit in the same bar. Without him, much would have waited longer for a first hearing. With only him, the speech would have been remembered as a smoother dialect than the manuscripts speak. This page has already walked Mussorgsky’s pictures. Rimsky is the other labour of that friendship: the professional who could teach orchestration, conduct, and never spare himself in assisting the musical development of the Russian school. He eventually took Balakirev’s place as the leading conductor in St Petersburg. 1911’s last civic sentence is that one. He died there on the 20th of June 1908.

The Snow Maiden, 1880 in 1911’s dating, is the opera that binds this shelf to a painter. Viktor Vasnetsov’s costume and set sketches of 1885, in the Tretyakov, were made for Mamontov’s Private Opera. The first time the painter saw the Snow Maiden was on Trinity Day on the Sparrow Hills; the colours, he said, came from Vyatka festivals and Maiden Field, from pearls and kokoshniks. Rimsky had already written the tsardom. Vasnetsov made it visible. Elena Polenova, using the sketches, made stage costumes. The collaboration is folklore moving from a dining-room carpet onto a stage that would sing. A visitor who knows only Scheherazade’s sea has not yet heard the spring that a Russian fairy tale asked of an orchestra. The 1880 date is the score. The 1885 date is the night the score put on beads.

The Snow Maiden

The concert world, as 1911 already guessed, took the orchestral suites and overtures farther than the operas. IMSLP’s catalogue dates Scheherazade, Op. 35, to 1888: four movements, The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship among them. The same year’s other large colour is the Russian Easter Festival overture, Op. 36, first performed on 15 December 1888 in St Petersburg, the composer conducting. 1911 does not name either title. It names the gift they demonstrate: orchestral effect, folk-melody, programme, restraint. Antar, the second symphony, sits in that list with the Spanish Capriccio. The sea in Scheherazade is not Aivazovsky’s wreck. It is a violin that tells a story so that a sultan will let morning come. Pierre Monteux’s San Francisco recording of March 1942, Naoum Blinder the violin, is the swell this page can play. The opening minutes are the reputation’s door. A ship, a tale, an orchestra that has learned to gleam without violence.

Scheherazade

The suite’s method is the method 1911 called programme music without making the programme a shouting. Sinbad’s sea is a swell. The Kalendar Prince is a tale inside the tale. The young prince and princess are a love that does not need a battlefield. Festival at Baghdad is the night that gathers the others. A visitor does not need the Thousand and One Nights as a crib. The violin is already the narrator. Rimsky’s restraint, in 1911’s ear, is the refusal of violent methods: colour as a discipline, not as a crash. That is why later halls could take the first movement as a visiting card and still be hearing the whole argument. The navy officer had looked at water. The conservatory professor knew what an oboe could do with it. The 1888 suite is both facts in one key.

The other 1888 door is a morning, not a sea. IMSLP’s Russian Easter Festival, Op. 36, is the overture whose Church Slavonic title is Svetly prazdnik — a bright feast. First performance, 15 December 1888, St Petersburg, Rimsky on the podium; first publication at Leipzig, M. P. Belaieff, 1890–91. The opening in the Czech National Symphony’s Musopen recording is the part a hall needs in order to understand 1911’s “fine utilisation of Russian folk-melody” as something that includes liturgy. Easter, here, is not a tourist onion dome. It is melody the orchestra has been asked to remember as colour. To put it after Scheherazade is to hear two 1888 temperatures: a story told so that dawn may come, and a dawn that already knows the chants. He did not have to choose between a sultan’s night and a Russian morning. The same year held both.

Russian Easter Festival

Sadko, in 1911, is an opera of 1895. Ilya Repin’s Sadko of 1876, in the Russian Museum, is a bylina canvas painted twenty years earlier, a merchant underwater among sea folk, commissioned in the years Vasina records as a folklore fashion at the Academy. The two must not be collapsed. Repin’s picture is a painter’s underwater. Rimsky’s opera is a musician’s Novgorod, a later night in which the same bylina has learned to sing. Together they show how a story moved through The Five’s decades without belonging to one art. Vasnetsov’s bogatyrs are the wall version of that movement. Rimsky’s Sadko is the stage version. A visitor who only knows the bee has skipped the merchant. The merchant is why a Russian orchestra could go to sea without waiting for Scheherazade’s sultan. Novgorod had already sent a man down.

Tsar Saltana, 1900 in 1911, is the opera IMSLP dates 1899–1900: The Tale of Tsar Saltan, of his Son the Renowned and Mighty Bogatyr Prince Guidon Saltanovich, and of the Beautiful Swan Princess. The concert number later halls know as Flight of the Bumblebee is the buzzing minute this page can play complete, in the United States Army Band’s public-domain recording. 1911 does not name the bee. It names the opera year and the gift of orchestral effect. The bee is that gift reduced to a visiting card, a minute of insects made of strings. Popularity, here, is not a slight. It is what travelled when the operas, as 1911 said, attracted less attention abroad than the concert colour. A child who knows the bee and a hall that knows Scheherazade are hearing the same orchestrator at two temperatures. One is a joke of speed. The other is a night of stories. Both are Rimsky.

Repin’s Mussorgsky, painted in a hospital in 1881, is the friend whose roughness Rimsky would later smooth. Britannica’s Mussorgsky life is unsparing: original versions began to return from 1928. The visitor can be grateful for the concert Night on Bald Mountain and still want the speech. Rimsky’s labour is the other half of that sentence. He taught, conducted, completed, orchestrated, and wrote the suites that made Russian folk-melody a European colour. Tchaikovsky, on another wall of this shelf, is the theatre that did not need The Five’s argument in order to travel. Rimsky is the argument that learned to gleam. A country that has a lake of swans and a sea of Sinbad is richer than a country that must choose. 1911 already heard the gleam as restraint. The bee is the gleam as a joke. The Easter morning is the gleam as a chant.

Kuznetsov’s Tchaikovsky of 1893, the last year, is the other famous face of Russian sound abroad. Carnegie Hall opened with him. Rimsky’s abroad, in 1911’s account, was the Capriccio and the suites. The contrast is not a quarrel this page needs to referee. The Five wanted a school. The Imperial theatres wanted a night. Both got what they asked for, and later ears mixed the gifts until a bee and a swan could sit in the same afternoon. Rimsky’s own list, from Pskovitianka to Kitezh, is longer than a visiting card. The Tsar’s Bride, Mozart and Salieri, Christmas Eve: 1911 names them because they were the labour. The labour is a conservatory life. The colour is what left the conservatory. He never spared himself, the encyclopaedia says, in assisting the musical development of the Russian school. The sentence is a colleague’s epitaph. The recordings are why a visitor still arrives.

The Spanish Capriccio of 1887 is the orchestral piece 1911 singles out as particularly appreciated. A year before Scheherazade and the Easter overture, it is already the gift the encyclopaedia heard: mastery of orchestral effect, a happy feeling for programme, restraint instead of violence. Spain, here, is colour the St Petersburg conservatory could learn without a nationalist quarrel. The same ear that would dress a Snow Maiden in Vyatka beads could write a capriccio that travelled as brilliance. 1911’s list of notable works puts the first symphony beside Antar, the second, Op. 9, and a third, Op. 32. The visitor who only knows the bee has not heard that the colour was already a system. The Capriccio is the system on holiday. The 1888 pair is the system at home.

He also wrote, 1911 says, a number of beautiful songs and pianoforte pieces. The sentence is easy to skip after the opera list. It is the chamber size of the same ear: a voice, a piano, folk-melody without a stage. The conservatory professor who orchestrated other men’s roughness still wrote small. Teaching is the other smallness that is not small. A generation learned colour from him as a method, not as a souvenir. Mussorgsky’s hospital portrait is what happens when the method is applied to a friend after death. The songs are what happens when the method is applied to a single line. Both belong to the same professional life that began when the navy was left in 1873.

He eventually took Balakirev’s place as the leading conductor in St Petersburg. 1911’s civic sentence is not a flourish. The amateur circle had needed a professional podium. Rimsky supplied it, and never spared himself in assisting the musical development of the Russian school. Conducting, editing, teaching, writing suites: the labour is one job with several coats. Mozart and Salieri, 1898, is a chamber opera in that labour, a Pushkin night rather than a bylina sea. The Tsar’s Bride, 1899, is the other temperature, a drama 1911 names beside Tsar Saltana. The visitor who came for Sinbad can stay for a bride. The school wanted Russian melody. The conservatory wanted craft. He spent the decades proving they were not enemies.

IMSLP’s work list is the later catalogue 1911 did not have in that shape. Scheherazade and the Easter overture sit in 1888. The opera Tsar Saltan sits in 1899–1900. The songs and the Capriccio sit where the encyclopaedia already put them. A list is not a life. It is how a visitor checks that the sea, the morning, and the bee are not three different men. They are one orchestrator at three speeds. The 1911 life ends on 20 June 1908 in St Petersburg. The recordings on this page are later hospitality: Monteux’s San Francisco sea of 1942, a Musopen Easter, an Army Band bee. The hospitality is how the colour still arrives. The man who left the navy in order to teach had already written the gleam the later halls would keep.

Antar, the second symphony, Op. 9, is the programme work 1911 names beside the first symphony and the third, Op. 32. The encyclopaedia’s “happy feeling for programme music” is this habit of giving a tale to the orchestra without making the tale a shout. Mlada, 1892, and Christmas Eve, 1894, keep the habit on the stage. Kites, 1905, is 1911’s spelling of the city later catalogues call Kitezh. The visitor does not need every title. The visitor needs to hear that colour was a career, not a single suite. The 1888 pair is the easiest door. The list is why the door is not a trick.

Folk-melody, in 1911’s compact praise, is not a costume cupboard. It is a utilisation: a chant that can become an overture, a tale that can become a swell, a festival that can become a capriccio. Restraint is the other half of the praise. Violent methods would have made the bee a novelty and the sea a wreck. He avoided them. The naval officer had already learned that water does not need to shout in order to be deep. The professor taught that an orchestra can gleam without a crash. Between those two jobs the Russian school gained a craftsman who would complete other men’s nights and still write his own mornings. That is why a later hall can play three minutes from three works and still be in one career.

Begin with Scheherazade’s first movement if you want the reason his name is a sea. Stay for the Easter overture if you want the same year as a morning. The Flight of the Bumblebee is allowed, even required, once you have heard that the minute is an orchestrator’s joke and not the whole gift. The Snow Maiden is the fairy tale Vasnetsov dressed. Sadko is the bylina that went underwater twice, once in Repin’s oil and once in Rimsky’s theatre. He was born at Tikhvin in 1844, left the navy in 1873, taught in St Petersburg, and died there in 1908. The Five were the company. The orchestra was the instrument. After him, a Russian tale can gleam without shouting, and a bee can cross a hall in a minute because someone who had looked at water knew how fast strings could move. The sultan is still listening. The feast is still bright.