Damned with faint praise--"a great orchestrator"--Rimsky-Korsakov is
almost always treated as a minor figure
outside of Russia. And no wonder, because we never hear his major
works. Rimsky wrote fifteen operas, and
there is every reason to believe that he saw opera as his true calling.
And few outside of Russia have any idea how good and how varied these
works are. Every now and then somebody puts on The Golden Cockerel,
which only serves to reinforce the sterotype of Rimsky as a technician
and a man with no heart.
These three recordings should show just how unfair this stereotype is.
Rimsky's best operas show a profound love of his country and its music,
a sure dramatic sense, brilliant orchestration (of course!), a fine
feeling for the human voice, and both imagination and human
sympathy.
One reason for the long neglect of these works is that many of them set
fairy tales or folk legends. These are not honored genres, and we are
apt to forget not only what they require but what they meant to artists
of Rimsky's generation.
Fairy tales do not call for the kind of psychological realism that
opera critics--still stuck with nineteenth-century ideas of artistic
truth--expect as a touchstone of musical depth. Psychology would be out
of place here, as absurd as a cartoon character would be in late Ibsen.
So it's no weakness of Rimsky that many of his characters lack the kind
of individuality one finds in, say, Violetta.
We also need to remember that Rimsky, though of noble birth, was
essentially a middle-class composer seeking to build a middle-class
public and a national theater in a country where the arts were
aristocratic and the population divided between an minuscule nobility
and a vast army of peasants, only recently freed from serfdom.
At the same time, Rimsky had considerable sympathy for the Slavophiles
who saw Russia's ancient folk traditions as the source of a culture
independent from that of western Europe and superior to it in many
ways. The folk tales, nursery stories, and religious legends that
Rimsky was drawn to were cherished as repositories of the genuinely
Russian.
There was something Wagnerian about this project, but with an
appealing lack of pretension. The result, to me at least, is the
perfect musical equivalent of the illustrations of Ivan
Bilibin, some reproduced here, which can be enjoyed both for their
decorative qualities
and and for the genuine emotion artfully worked into their patterns.
I collected these recordings many years ago, haunting places like New
York's Four Continents Book Store. They are 1960s-era Soviet pressings
of recordings made some years before. (The oldest, Christmas Eve, was
made in 1948.) They have been carefully dubbed and the scratches
automatically removed; no other filtering was done. Because reissues of
these recordings are difficult to
find, and because I believe them to be out of copyright due to their
age, I have chosen to share them on line. Please contact me
if I am
mistaken, or if you want any more information.
And enjoy:
Michael Steinberg (Who?)