Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
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| Painting of Sadko byAndrei Ryabushkin |
Musical picture (Музыкальная картина); Tableau musical, Opus 5
Versions: A 1867 ; B 1869 ; C 1891--92 (standard version) C used in this recording
The Rotterdam Philharmonic conducted by David Zinman
Rimsky wrote his "musical tableau" Sadko, Op. 5, in 1867 but revised the work in 1869 and 1892. It has sometimes been called the first symphonic poem written in Russia. It was first performed in 1867 at a concert of the Russian Musical Society (RMS), conducted by Mily Balakirev.
Mily Balakirev, leader of the Russian nationalist music group "The Five," was long fascinated with Anton Rubinstein's Europeanising Ocean Symphony and wanted to create a more specifically Russian alternative. Music critic Vladimir Stasov suggested the legend of Sadko and wrote a program for this work, giving it to Balakirev in 1861. At first Balakirev relayed the program to Modest Mussorgsky, who did nothing with it. (Mussorgsky's comment to Balakirev on hearing Rubinstein's Ocean Symphony was "Oh Ocean, oh puddle"; he had much preferred Rubinstein's conducting of the work over the work itself.) Mussorgsky eventually offered the program to Rimsky-Korsakov, after he had long given up on it. Balakirev agreed, counting on the naval officer's love of the sea to help him produce results.
Instead of direct experience of the sea, Rimsky-Korsakov fell back on Franz Liszt's symphonic poem Ce Qu'on entend sur la montagne for inspiration. Acting as bookends to the middle of the work are two sketches of the calm, gently rippling sea. While Rimsky-Korsakov took the harmonic and modulatory basis of these sections from the opening of Liszt's Montagne, he admitted the chord passage closing these sections were purely his own. The central section comprises music portraying Sadko's underwater journey, the feast of the Sea King and the Russian dance that leads the work to its climax. Typical of Rimsky's modesty and self-criticism, he offers several influences for this section: Mikhail Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila, Balakirev's "Song of the Goldfish," Alexander Dargomyzhsky's Russalka and Liszt's Mephisto Waltz No. 1. Rimsky-Korsakov chose the principal tonalities of the piece—D-flat major, D major and D flat major—specifically to please Balakirev, "who had an exclusive prediliction for them in those days."
Painting of Sadko by Andrei RyabushkinRimsky-Korsakov began the work in June 1867 during a three-week holiday at his brother's summer villa in Tervaïoki, near Vyborg. A month's naval cruise in the Gulf of Finland proved only a temporary interruption; by October 12, he was finished. He wrote Mussorgsky that he was satisfied with it and that it was the best thing he had composed to date, but that he was weak from the intense strain of composition and needed to rest.
Rimsky-Korsakov felt that several factors combined to make the piece a success—the originality of his task; the form that resulted; the freshness of the dance tune and the singing theme with its Russian characteristics; and the orchestration, "caught as by a miracle, despite my imposing ignorance in the realm of orchestration." While he remained pleased with Sadko's form, Rimsky-Korsakov remained discontented with its brevity and sparseness, adding that writing the work in a broader format would have been more appropriate for Stasov's program. He attributed this extreme conciseness to his lack of compositional experience. Nevertheless, Balakirev was pleased with the work, paying Sadko a combination of patronization and encouraging admiration. He conducted its premiere that December.
