Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908), painted in 1896 by Ilya Repin
We mark the birth of the Russian composer Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov on March 18, 1844: 180 years ago today. Born in the Russian town of Tikhvin – roughly 120 miles east of St. Petersburg – Rimsky-Korsakov died at the age of 64, on June 21, 1908, on his estate near the Russian town of Luga, about 85 miles south of St. Petersburg
Fake It ‘til You Make It
Like most kids growing up, I had various assumptions about grownups (i.e. “adults”). As someone who has now – presumably – been an adult for very nearly a half of a century, I have learned that my assumptions – a few of which I’ve listed below – were all crazy wrong.
Assumption one: at around 21, we cross the line into adulthood.
Wrong. There are no such “lines”; we’re all changing, all the time.
Assumption two: adults are emotionally mature.
Wrong. Physically, yes, I’m pushing seventy. Emotionally? I’m roughly fifteen. On a good day.
Assumption three: adults know what they’re doing.
Really? Adults only “know” what they’re doing (if they ever learn what their “doing” at all) after they’ve been doing it for decades. Until then, they are apprentices, “learning on the job,” which are nice ways of saying “faking it”!
Growing up, I had no concept of this. I just assumed that once you got to a certain age, you actually knew what you were doing.
The Purnell School, Pottersville, New Jersey, main entrance
Silly me. I was disabused of that bit of foolishness as soon as I entered the job market when, at the age of 23, I was hired as the music teacher at a now defunct, all-girls’ private high school in Pottersville, New Jersey called the Purnell School. Oh sure, I thought I had it all together at the time, but in retrospect I didn’t know Scheiße from Shinola (which was a brand of shoe polish that was popular during the first decades of the twentieth century).
In retrospect, my “apprenticeship” as a teacher – that period that saw me “fake it ‘til I made it” – lasted some 5 years. This doesn’t mean that I ever stopped learning on the job; hopefully, I’ll never stop getting better at what I do. It only means that it took me around 5 years to achieve what today I consider to be a passing competence at teaching.
And so it was as well for Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.…
Every week, Music History Monday arrives with the kind of curiosity that turns dates on a calendar into doorways. Hosted by composer and historian Robert Greenberg, this podcast digs into the stories that happened *around* the music, finding the human moments-sometimes profound, sometimes scandalous, always fascinating-tied to a specific Monday. Greenberg approaches his subjects not as distant icons but as the complicated, brilliant, and often messy people they were, which makes each episode feel like a conversation rather than a lecture. You’ll hear about pivotal premieres, bitter rivalries, unexpected inspirations, and the sheer luck or misfortune that shaped the pieces we know today. The tone is erudite but never dry, packed with context and delivered with a wit that respects the art without putting it on a sterile pedestal. It’s for anyone who loves a good story and suspects that the history behind a symphony or a sonata is just as compelling as the notes themselves. Tune in each Monday with Robert Greenberg to connect the dots between a day in history and the soundtrack it inspired.
Author: Robert Greenberg
Language: en-us
Episodes: 100
