The Mightiest of the Five

Between 1860 and 1870, a group of composers got together in St Petersburg under the leadership of Mili Balakirev. The “Mighty Five”, as they came to be known, aimed to create an independent, distinctly Russian musical language. Michail Glinka was a major influence on the group, which consisted of amateurs with regard to composing, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was the only member who was professionally active in music. Sent to naval cadet college at the early age of 12 to pursue the traditional family career of a naval officer, that was where he received his first lessons in music, became acquainted with the operas of Verdi, Glinka, Meyerbeer, Mozart and von Flotow, studied Beethoven’s piano sonatas and made the acquaintance in 1861 of Mili Balakirev, who became his teacher. Balakirev’s lessons and views influenced Rimsky-Korsakov deeply. Balakirev strongly eschewed Western music, and any academic syntax for that matter; he was convinced that it would be possible to write great works without any technical qualifications. And thus he set his pupils loose right away on major music forms such as symphony and opera.
Balakirev recognized in Rimsky-Korsakov a born symphonist from the start, promptly setting him the task of a symphony in E-flat minor, no less, which proved quite a struggle for the novice. At that point, Balakirev could not have imagined that Rimsky-Korsakov would later develop into one of the most prolific and probably also most influential composers of opera in Russian music history. Rimsky-Korsakov’s acceptance of a professorship in practical composition and instrumentation in St Petersburg in 1871 marked the beginning of his emancipation from Balakirev and his philosophy. Rimsky-Korsakov was now acquiring the technical foundations for his new profession, without which his operas and also the sometimes drastic rewritings of many works by colleagues of the Mighty Five would have been inconceivable. Eleven of his sixteen operas, incidentally, were not created until after Tchaikovsky’s death in 1891.
After The Maid of Pskow and May Night, Rimsky-Korsakov composed the first version of his opera Snow Maiden in 1880/81. These were early works in pursuit of self-discovery, according to Dorothea Redepenning. The opera, to a text by Alexander Ostrovsky, tells how the snow maiden, who is the daughter of winter and spring, finds human love and perishes by the sun’s rays. Pagan gods of nature, fairytale and old Slavic themes are interlinked. The opera was not a tremendous success as it was lacking in dramatic power, but the orchestral suite consisting of Introduction, Dance of the Birds, Cortège and Dance of the Clowns combines the beautiful and the grotesque, the magical and the prosaic, the sophisticated and the naive.
After a near 10-year break from opera, Rimsky-Korsakov composed the magical opera-ballet Mlada in 1889/90. Originally intended as a joint effort with comrades in arms Cui, Borodin and Mussorgsky of the Mighty Five, the collaborative work was not completed. With its representation of conflicts between ordinary mortals and ancient gods, Mlada links up with Snow Maiden. Like the preceding work, it received little success when performed, with the action being insufficiently plausible and the scenes enfolding with too little dramatic effect. As Redepenning puts it, “We have a witches’ sabbath in which the Slavic Black God Cernomor, the immortal Kashchei and Cleopatra as a beautiful woman from the underworld all make an appearance in order to erase prince Jaromir’s memory of his murdered bride Mlada, before an earthquake and storm tides finally destroy the temple of the pagan god Radegast, and the ghosts of Mlada and Jaromir are united in eternal love in a heavenly world with a sunset and a rainbow.” As with Snow Maiden, Rimsky-Korsakov arranged instrumental pieces into a suite. In 1899-1901, he composed an orchestral version of the 3rd act of the opera entitled Night on Mount Triglav; in 1903 an orchestral suite was created from the opera. The music undoubtedly carries echoes of Wagnerian music dramas, not so much in a motif-thematic sense as in the many harmonic changes and the instrumentation (for example, brass movement and voice leading in Night on Mount Triglav and the appearance of the shadows, and interweaving of strings in Morning Song with echoes of Forest Weaving from Siegfried).
The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitesh and of the Virgin Fevronia is Rimsky-Korsakov’s fourth to last opera and was written in 1903/04. The Libretto was written by Vladimir Belsky and based on various sources. The work had its premiere in St Petersburg in 1907, and the same year saw the creation of the orchestral suite with four movements which once again shows Rimsky-Korsakov to be an excellent instrumentator and a sensitive illustrator of natural events. The prologue starts mystically, evoking a primal nature from which little birds successively emerge to speak. The heroine Fevronia communes with the animals of the forest. She is chosen by Prince Vsevolod to be his bride. Then the Tartars attack the city of Lesser Kitesh, which Rimsky-Korsakov vividly expresses with tempestuous brass movements and rhythmical aggression. Fevronia manages to render the city of Greater Kitesh invisible through prayer, thus saving it from destruction by the Tartars. She enters eternal life with the dying Vsevolod, and the couple celebrate their wedding in the invisible city.

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