Rimsky-Korsakov scored empires while serving the navy
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908), one of The Five, painted orchestra with folk tune and fantasy—Scheherazade above all. He spent years as a naval officer and later as a civilian inspector of military bands while teaching the next Russian generation.
He was born in 1844 at Tikhvin, about 200 kilometres east of Saint Petersburg, into a noble line of governors and generals; one ancestor, Ivan, was a lover of Catherine the Great, and a 1677 decree let the Korsakovs add Rimsky, meaning Roman, to their name. His brother Voin, 22 years older, was a noted navigator whose tales, together with books, gave the boy a romantic love of an ocean he had never seen. He composed from about ten but preferred reading, and at 12 he entered the naval school in Saint Petersburg, sitting his final exams in April 1862.
Piano lessons, approved by Voin as a cure for shyness, led to the teacher Feodor Kanille, who opened his ears to Glinka and Schumann and in November 1861 introduced him to Mily Balakirev. Through Balakirev he met Cui and Mussorgsky. Balakirev pushed him to keep going with a symphony in E-flat minor despite his lack of training, and often reshaped his pupils' ideas at the keyboard, praising two bars and mocking the next two.
Late in 1862 he sailed on the clipper Almaz for a voyage of two years and eight months, writing the symphony's slow movement during a stop in England, buying scores in every port and studying Berlioz's treatise on orchestration. He saw London, Niagara Falls and Rio de Janeiro, but by the end his musical ambitions had faded. Back ashore in 1865, with only light clerical duties, renewed contact with Balakirev pulled him back into composing.
Scheherazade, Capriccio Espagnol and the Russian Easter Festival Overture became repertoire staples, and he wrote fifteen operas, often on fairy-tale or folk themes and with exotic orientalist colour; the sea may lie behind Sadko. After becoming a professor at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1871 he drilled himself in Western technique, later serving as civilian Inspector of Naval Bands. His editions brought The Five's music into concert halls, though his reworking of Mussorgsky remains disputed, and his teaching makes him the chief architect of the Russian classical style.
Source: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
