A wonderful opera which needs a wonderful recording.
Censorship works in mysterious ways.
Most 19 th -century Russian opera falls into the category of costume drama, peasant comedy, or fairy tale, probably because the censor was so strong. In fact, I can think only of Tchaikovsky's Yevgeny Onegin off the top of my head that purports to tackle a serious, relatively contemporary subject, even though one without obvious political overtones. In the case of Sadko , Rimsky builds an opera from themes of his purely instrumental tone poem of the same name, written thirty years earlier. I rate it only slightly lower than Mussorgsky's Boris and on a par with Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame . In general, however, Rimsky, I think, had better luck with his fairy tales and peasant comedies.