Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

It was as a serving naval officer that Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov began his First Symphony, and the sea never afterwards left his music. Born in Tikhvin in 1844, he entered the Naval Cadet Corps in Saint Petersburg, met Mily Balakirev and joined the circle known as The Five, and a long voyage gave him the appetite for distance and imagined worlds that returns in Scheherazade, in Sadko and in the Russian Easter Festival Overture. Appointed professor at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1871 with conspicuous gaps in his own training, he set about repairing them while already teaching, working through harmony and counterpoint exercise by exercise; the fluency of Capriccio espagnol is the eventual result. Fifteen operas, most of them drawn from folklore and legend, include The Snow Maiden, Sadko and The Golden Cockerel, whose première came only after his death in 1908. He edited, completed and reorchestrated the work of Mussorgsky and Borodin — decisions argued over ever since, though they kept the music in circulation — and he taught Glazunov, Stravinsky and Prokofiev, a line of descent that carried his instinct for orchestral colour well into the next century. The family name, so the story runs, came from an ancestor who made the pilgrimage to Rome. He was later the central figure of the Belyaev circle and counted Ottorino Respighi among his pupils, and he left textbooks on harmony and orchestration that are still in use, together with the memoir Chronicle of My Musical Life.