Orin Richardson: Composer Biography: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Orin Richardson: Composer Biography Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was born into a Russian noble family with an extensive history of military and government service on the 18th of March, 1844 in the small village of Tikhvin. Even though both of his parents were illegitimate children, his father, Andrei Petrovich Rimsky-Korsakov, used his connection with a Russian general to regain his family’s noble status, and later worked in the Interior Ministry of the Russian Empire. His older brother, Voin Rimsky-Korsakov, who was as much of an influence on Nikolai as his parents, decided that the best path for Nikolai to take would be to follow in his footsteps and pursue a career in the Russian navy. For more than half of his adult life Nikolai was required to balance his naval duties and independent …show more content…
At ten, he began composing his first musical pieces, but he would not become fully interested in music until hearing operas by composers such as Donizetti, Glinka, and Meyerbeer performed in nearby St Petersburg. His interest grew further when one of his teachers, Fyodor Kanille, showed him the masterpieces of Bach, Beethoven and Schumann, but at the age of seventeen, his older brother put an end to his piano lessons with Kanille due to worries that he was devoting too much time to music. He continued to learn music theory and composition from Kanille and began receiving informal piano lessons from Mily Balakirev, a composer who would go on to become Rimsky-Korsakov’s mentor. As a learning exercise, Balakirev persuaded him to create a symphony despite his lack of former compositional training, and after painstaking effort which was hindered by a three-year naval tour, his first symphony was finished with extensive input from Balakirev and was first performed shortly after in 1865. Balakirev played a rather large role in the completion of this symphony, and according