Childhood years in Tikhvin. The first manifestations of musical abilities. Music lessons. Reading. Attraction to the sea and maritime business. First attempts at composition. Departure to Petersburg.

I was born in the city of Tikhvin on March 6, 1844. My father had already retired long before that and lived in his own house with my mother and my uncle (father's brother) Pyotr Petrovich Rimsky-Korsakov . Our house stood almost on the edge of the city, on the banks of the Tikhvinka, on the other side of which, opposite us, was the Tikhvin Monastery.

In the very first year of my existence, my parents went for some time to Petersburg to my father's brother, Nikolai Petrovich Rimsky-Korsakov, and took me with them. Upon their return from there, I lived in Tikhvin without a break until 1856.

I have shown musical talent since early childhood. We had an old piano; my father played quite decently by ear, though not particularly fluently. In his repertoire there were some motifs from the operas of his time; thus, I recall: the well-known romance from Joseph, the aria (dtantpalpt) from Tancred, the funeral march from The Vestal Virgin, Papagena's aria from The Magic Flute. My father often sang, accompanying himself. His vocal pieces were for the most part some kind of moralizing verses; so, for example, I remember the following:

Similar poems were sung by him to melodies from various old operas. According to the stories of my father and mother, my uncle on my father's side, Pavel Petrovich, had great musical abilities and perfectly and fluently played whole overtures and other pieces by ear (without knowing the notes). My father, it seems, did not possess such brilliant abilities, but, in any case, he had a good ear and a good memory and played cleanly. My mother's hearing was also very good. The following fact is interesting: she had a habit of singing everything that she remembered, much more slowly than she should; so, for example, she always sang the melody “How Mother Was Killed” at the pace of adago. I mention this because, as it seems to me, this property of her nature resonated with me, which I will say later. My mother learned to play the piano in her youth, but then she quit and, as far as I can remember, she never played anything.

The first signs of musical ability showed up very early in me. I was not yet two years old, when I already well distinguished all the melodies that my mother sang to me; then for three or four years I was excellent at beating a toy drum to the beat when my father played the piano. Father often deliberately suddenly changed the pace and rhythm, and I immediately followed him. Soon afterwards I began to hum very faithfully everything that my father played, and often sang along with him; then he himself began to pick up on the piano the pieces he heard from him with harmony; soon, having learned the name of the notes, I could distinguish and name any of the piano tones from another room. At the age of six, they began to teach me how to play the piano. An old woman, a certain Ekaterina Nikolaevna Unkovskaya, our neighbor, took up this. At the present moment, I can not at all judge the degree of her musicality, nor how she herself played, nor about her teaching method. Probably, it was all extremely mediocre, in a provincial way. However, I still played scales, light exercises and some little pieces with her. I remember that I played all this badly, inaccurately and was weak in the score.

My abilities were excellent not only in relation to music. I learned to read without learning, just joking; I had an excellent memory: I memorized whole pages from what my mother read to me by heart word for word, I began to understand arithmetic very quickly. It cannot be said that at that time I loved music, I endured it and studied quite diligently. Sometimes, for fun, I sang and played the piano according to my desire, but I don’t remember that music made a strong impression on me at that time. Perhaps this is due to low impressionability, or perhaps because at that time I had not yet heard anything that could really make a strong impression on a child.

A year and a half or two after the beginning of my studies with Ekaterina Nikolaevna, she already refused to give me lessons, because she found that I needed a teacher better than her. Then a governess began to teach me in the house of some of our good friends (Fel family) - Olga Nikitishna, I don’t remember her last name. I don't know, but it seemed to me that she played excellently. I have made some progress under her guidance. Between the pieces that I played with her, there were some arrangements by Beyer from Italian operas, some piece based on a motif from a Burgmiller ballet, and also a Beethoven sonata in 4 hands (D-dur), which I liked. I remember that I played 4 hands with her, among other things, Marx's potpourri on motives from The Prophet and Damants de la couronne. Olga Nikitishna taught me for a year or a year and a half, and after her I went to her student, Olga Feliksovna Fel, who also played quite well. From the pieces of that time I remember: the overture "Othello" in 2 hands (performed at a much slower pace than it should), the A-dur scherzo from Beethoven's sonata A-dur op. 2, medley from "Huguenots" in 2 hands, fantasy on motives from "Rigoletto" (whose, I don't remember, but easy), fantasy on motives from "Zar und Zmmermann", overture of "Vestal" in 4 hands. I studied with Olga Feliksovna for three years, in a word, until the age of 12 (1856). It seemed to me that she played quite well; but one day I was struck by her performance by a lady (I don’t remember her last name), who once came to Tikhvin, whom I saw at Olga Feliksovna’s; she played "Sl'oseau j'etas". For 11 or 12 years, I happened to play 4 hands and 8 hands with our friends Kalissky. I remember that they then had an engineer colonel Vorobyov, who was considered a good pianist in Tikhvin. We played the Othello Overture in 8 hands .

Of other instrumental music, I heard nothing in Tikhvin; there were no violinists or amateur cellists. The Tikhvin ballroom orchestra for a long time consisted of a violin, on which a certain Nikolai sawed out polkas and quadrilles, and a tambourine, on which Kuzma, a painter by profession and a big drunkard, artistically beat. In recent years, Jews appeared (violin, cymbals and tambourine), which eclipsed Nikolai and Kuzma and became fashionable musicians.

In terms of vocal music, I heard only one young lady from Tikhvin - Baranova, singing the romance "What are you sleeping, little man"; then, besides my father's singing, there remained spiritual music, that is, singing in the women's and men's monasteries. In the women's monastery they sang unimportantly, but in the men's, as far as I remember, decently. I loved some cherubic and other plays

Bortnyansky; also her concert “Glory in the Highest” and from simple singing “Bless my soul”, “To your cross”, “Quiet light” for the vigil. Church singing, in the beautiful atmosphere of archimandrite worship, made a greater impression on me than secular music, although I was not at all an impressionable boy. Of all the plays known to me, the "Song of the Orphan" and the duet from "A Life for the Tsar" gave me the greatest pleasure. We had these notes at home, and one day I decided to play them. My mother told me then that this is the best place from the opera. She badly remembered A Life for the Tsar, and I don’t even know if she saw it on stage .

My uncle (Pyotr Petrovich) sang several beautiful Russian songs: “Sharlatarla from the party”, “It’s not sleep that drives my little head”, “Like grass on an ant”, and so on. He remembered these songs from childhood, when he lived in the village of Nikolskoye, Tikhvin district, which belonged to my grandfather. My mother also sang some