page_title: Sadko (musical tableau)
section_title: Composition
hierarchical_section_title: Sadko (musical tableau) / Overview / Composition
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Vladimir Stasov.
context_page_description: Sadko, Op. 5, is a Tableau musical, or Musical picture, by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, written in 1867 and revised in 1869 and 1892. It is sometimes called the first symphonic poem written in Russia. It was first performed in 1867 at a concert of the Russian Musical Society, conducted by Mily Balakirev. Rimsky-Korsakov later wrote an opera of the same name which quotes freely from the earlier work. From the tone poem the composer quoted its most memorable passages in the opera, including the opening theme of the swelling sea, and other themes as leitmotives - he himself set out to "utilize for this opera the material of my symphonic poem, and, in any event, to make use of its motives as leading motives for the opera".
context_section_description: 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—a movement in D-flat major, the next in D major and then a return to D-flat major—specifically to please Balakirev, "who had an exclusive predilection for them in those days."
  Rimsky-Korsakov began the work in June 1867 during a three-week holiday at his brother's summer villa in Tervajoki, 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.
caption: Vladimir Stasov wrote the program for Sadko.
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