“You, Mozart, Aren’t Worthy of Yourself”: Aesthetic Discontents of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Mozart and Salieri

This chapter analyzes Rimsky-Korsakov's creative crisis by considering his opera Mozart and Salieri. With Mozart, Rimsky-Korsakov was compelled to interrogate directly—for the first time in his life—the very core of his professional being, and so query the very grounds of composerly worthiness. Indeed, in his Mozart, Rimsky-Korsakov summoned historical styles not to comment on history, but to confront the contemporaneity that appeared increasingly incapacitated by what he'd identified in 1892 as metaphysical excess, but what he was now coming to see as a more widespread ailment, “the indifference of taste”—the loss of familiar experiential connection, of active kinship between life and art. His opera did not just celebrate the creator sympathetically aligned with his environment; it offered an object lesson in the proliferation of sentience.