This was the background to the intellectual conflicts over the conception of Sadko (1897), the opera by Rimsky-Korsakov. The evolution of the opera was typical of the collectivist traditions of the kuchkist school. The original idea had been given by Stasov to Balakirev as early as 1867; Balakirev passed it on to Musorgsky; and Musorgsky handed it to Rimsky-Korsakov. It is easy to see why Rimsky should have been attracted to the story of the opera. Like Sadko, Rimsky was a sailor (a former naval officer, to be precise) and musician who came from Novgorod. Moreover, as Stasov wrote to him with his draft scenario in 1894, the subject would allow the composer to explore 'the magic elements of Russian pagan culture which are so strongly felt in your artistic character'.91 In the standard versions of the bylina Sadko is a humble minstrel (skomorokh) who plays the gusli and sings of setting sail for distant lands in search of new markets for the town. None of the merchant elites will back him, so Sadko sings his songs to Lake Ilmen, where the Sea Princess appears and declares her love for him. Sadko journeys to the underwater world, where the Sea King, delighted by the minstrel's singing, rewards him with his daughter's hand in marriage. At their wedding there is such wild dancing to the tunes played by Sadko that it causes hurricanes and a violent sea storm, which sinks all the ships from Novgorod. When the storm subsides, Sadko is washed up, with a net of golden fish, on the shores of lake Ilmen. He returns to Novgorod, gives away his money to the merchants ruined by the storm, and endows the church of St Boris and St Gleb.
For Stasov this bylina was the perfect vehicle for his cultural politics. The spirit of rebellion which Sadko showed against the Novgorod elites symbolized the struggle of the Russian school against the musical establishment. But more importantly, as Stasov hoped, the opera was a chance to draw attention to the Eastern elements of the Sadko tale. As Stasov explained in his draft scenario for Rimsky-Korsakov, Sadko was full of shamanistic magic, and this pointed to its Asian provenance, in particular to the Brahmin Hariuansa tale. The skomorokh, in
Stasov's view, was a Russian descendant of the Asian shamans (a view, incidentally, which many modern scholars share).92 Like a shaman, the skomorokh was known to wear a bearskin and a mask, to bang his gusli like a drum, and to sing and dance himself into a trance-like frenzy, chanting magic charms to call upon the spirits of the magic world.93 In the draft scenario Stasov underlined these shamanistic powers by having Sadko's music serve as the main agency of transcendental flight to the underwater world and back again; and, as he emphasized to Rimsky-Korsakov, it was the 'magic effect of his music that should be seen to cause the sea-storm, which sinks all the ships'.* Sadko's odyssey was to be portrayed as a shamanistic flight to a dreamworld, a 'spiritual voyage into his own being', as Stasov mapped it out for the composer, and the hero of the opera should return to Novgorod 'as if waking from a dream'.94
There was good reason for Stasov to look to Rimsky as the ideal composer for the opera. Rimsky had in the past been interested in Stasov's Eastern version of Sadko. In 1867 he had composed the symphonic suite Sadko, a work whose debt to Balakirev's Tamara ('far from completed at the time but already well-known to me from the fragments played by the composer') was candidly acknowledged by Rimsky in his Reminiscences.95Sadko's whirling dance is practically identical to the Tamara theme, and, like Balakirev, Rimsky used the pentatonic scale to create an authentic oriental feel.+ However, by the time of his Sadko opera, Rimsky had become a professor at the Conservatory and, like many professors, was rather too conformist to experiment again with pentatonic harmonies or oriental programmes for the plot. Besides, Rimsky by this stage was much more interested in the Christian motifs of the bylina. It was an interest which reflected his increasing preoccupation with the Christian ideal of Russia - an ideal he expressed in his last great opera, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya (1907). Rimsky rejected the draft scenario which Stasov, in his usual cajoling manner, had insisted
* According to A. N. Afanasiev, the great nineteenth-century scholar of mythology, Sadko was the pagan god of wind and storms among the ancient Slavs (see his Poeticheskie vozzreniia slavian na prirodu, 3 vols. (Moscow,1865-9), vol. 2., p. 214). + Sadko's dance is even written in Balakirev's favourite key of D flat major,
