ABSTRACT
Doubtless the best example of the composer's tendency towards introspection is his 1896 opera Sadko, a pageant of Russian orientalism, nationalism and epic song. Here, the Russo-French philosopher Vladimir Jankelevitch observes, Rimsky-Korsakov documented his life-long love for the sea: his childhood fascination with "the round the world voyages of Dumont d'Urville" and "the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor," his attempt to "rig a brig"1 and, most crucially, his apprenticeship as a naval midshipman, which culminated in a three-year posting aboard the clippet Almaz. Jankelevitch contends that, within Sadko, "geography," "cosmology" and "meteorology" coalesce, "aligned by the sea that unites the contirrents of the glo be, and the sun that, in Levant, is the great oriental chimera of navigators."2 The word "Levant," referring in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century colonialist literature to the holdings of the Ottoman Empire (or, more generall y, the 1 Vladimir Jankelevitch, La Musique et les Heures (Paris, 1988), 94. 2 Jbid.
