Editing Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (section)

===Orchestral works===
The purely orchestral works fall into two categories. The best-known ones in the West, and perhaps the finest in overall quality, are mainly programmatic in nature — in other words, the musical content and how it is handled in the piece is determined by the plot or characters in a story, the action in a painting or events reported through another non-musical source.<ref name="mfw21409"/> The second category of works is more academic, such as his First and Third Symphonies and his Sinfonietta. In these, Rimsky-Korsakov still employed folk themes but subjected them to abstract rules of musical composition.<ref name="mfw21409"/>
[[File:RimskyScheherezadeThemes.png|thumb|left|alt=Two staves of music, one with a loud, forceful theme and the second with a softer, more undulating theme|Opening themes of the Sultan and [[Scheherazade (Rimsky-Korsakov)|Scheherazade]]]]
Program music came naturally to Rimsky-Korsakov. To him, "even a folk theme has a program of sorts."<ref name="mfw21409">Frolova-Walker, ''New Grove (2001)'', 21:409.</ref> He composed the majority of his orchestral works in this genre at two periods of his career—at the beginning, with ''Sadko'' and ''Antar'' (also known as his Second Symphony, Op. 9), and in the 1880s, with ''Scheherazade'', ''Capriccio Espagnol'' and the ''Russian Easter Overture''. Despite the gap between these two periods, the composer's overall approach and the way he used his musical themes remained consistent. Both ''Antar'' and ''Scheherazade'' use a robust "Russian" theme to portray the male protagonists (the title character in ''Antar''; the sultan in ''Scheherazade'') and a more sinuous "Eastern" theme for the female ones (the [[peri]] Gul-Nazar in ''Antar'' and the title character in ''Scheherazade'').<ref>Maes, pp. 82, 175.</ref>

Where Rimsky-Korsakov changed between these two sets of works was in orchestration. While his pieces were always celebrated for their imaginative use of instrumental forces, the sparser textures of ''Sadko'' and ''Antar'' pale compared to the luxuriance of the more popular works of the 1880s. While a principle of highlighting "primary hues" of instrumental color remained in place, it was augmented in the later works by a sophisticated cachet of orchestral effects, some gleaned from other composers including Wagner, but many invented by himself.<ref name="mfw21409"/>

As a result, these works resemble brightly colored mosaics, striking in their own right and often scored with a juxtaposition of pure orchestral groups.<ref name="abng1632"/> The final ''tutti'' of ''Scheherazade'' is a prime example of this scoring. The theme is assigned to trombones playing in unison, and is accompanied by a combination of [[string instrument|string]] patterns. Meanwhile, another pattern alternates with chromatic scales in the [[woodwind instruments|woodwinds]] and a third pattern of rhythms is played by percussion.<ref>Abraham, ''New Grove (1980)'', 16:32–33.</ref>

Rimsky-Korsakov's non-program music, though well-crafted, does not rise to the same level of inspiration as his programmatic works; he needed fantasy to bring out the best in him.<ref name="mfw21409"/> The First Symphony follows the outlines of Schumann's Fourth extremely closely, and is slighter in its thematic material than his later compositions. The Third Symphony and Sinfonietta each contain a series of variations on less-than-the-best music that can lead to tedium.<ref name="mfw21409"/>