4-12-2002

SERGEI  VASILYEVITCH   RACHMANINOFF

СЕРГЕЙ ВАСИЛЬЕВИЧ РАХМАНИНОВ

 (1873 – 1943)

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Em russo

Mossolov - Александр Васильевич Мосолов

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Nelson Freire

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23 de Maio de 2004 – Centro Cultural de Belém   A Orquestra Sinfónica Portuguesa, conduzida pelo maestro Donato Renzetti interpretou primeiro a Sinfonia n.º 3 – Opus 3 – Divino Poema, de Scriabin  - Александр Николаевич Скрябин  - (1872-1915), que não conhecia mas que ouvi com muito agrado. A seguir, com o Coro do Teatro Nacional de S. Carlos, cantou-se a obra de Rachmaninoff “Os Sinos”; foram solistas cantores russos: Tatyana Borodina - Татьяна Бородина, soprano, Sergei Drobitchevski - Сергей Дробышевский, tenor e Arnold Kocharyan - Арнольд Кочарян , barítono.

What Was the Matter with Rachmaninoff?

by Terry Teachout

June 2002

IN 1927, the British music-hall duo Flotsam & Jetsam recorded a comic song, “What Was the Matter with Rachmaninov?,” in which they lamented the popularity of the once-ubiquitous Prelude in C-Sharp Minor among hapless amateur pianists: “Then there’s another one down the street/Who must be trying it with her feet/She’s the one who gives you fits/Whenever she comes to the difficult bits.”

It was not only in music halls, however, that Sergei Rachmaninoff was criticized for being too popular.1 Few classical composers of significance have received so many unfavorable reviews over so long a period of time, and there can be little doubt that Rachmaninoff’s bad press arose in large part from the fact that his compositions were hugely successful with concertgoers who disliked most other 20th-century music.

As recently as the 1970’s, critical disdain for Rachmaninoff was so widespread that even his few open admirers, among them Commentary’s Samuel Lipman, struck a defensive note: “Whatever Rachmaninoff’s exact rank as a composer, it was his achievement to reflect his own world—simply, honestly, and directly.”2 Far more typical was the outright contempt of the American composer Walter Piston, who once confronted Gary Graffman after a performance of the Second Piano Concerto, asking, “How can you play such junk?” Similar sentiments can be found in the article about Rachmaninoff in the 1954 edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians:

As a composer he can hardly be said to have belonged to his time at all. His music is well constructed and effective, but monotonous in texture, which consists in essence mainly of artificial and gushing tunes accompanied by a variety of figures derived from arpeggios. The enormous popular success some few of Rachmaninoff’s works had in his lifetime is not likely to last, and musicians never regarded it with much favor.

To read this sniffy passage today is to be reminded of a remark made by Percy Grainger: “The world around me is dying of ‘good taste.’” But tastes change, and it turns out that Rachmaninoff’s “enormous popular success” has lasted. Moreover, a growing number of musicians and critics now freely admit to holding his music in high esteem. Earlier this season, for example, New York City’s Lincoln Center presented a “Rachmaninoff Revisited” festival in which such artists as the Russian pianist-conductor Vladi­mir Ashkenazy and the British pianist Stephen Hough performed most of his major works. And while much postwar Rachmaninoff scholarship remains available only in Russian—there is still no full-length critical biography in English—two important books about his life and work were reissued in paperback last year by leading academic publishers.3 Even Grove’s finally got around to changing its mind, commissioning a new article for its 1980 edition in which Rachmaninoff is described as “the last great representative of Russian late romanticism.”

This is true enough, so far as it goes. But had Rachmaninoff’s contemporaries listened more attentively to his music, particularly the pieces he wrote after emigrating to the West in 1917, they might have seen that despite his nostalgia for the lost world of Czarist Russia, the last great Russian romantic also heard—and heeded—the call of modernity.

SERGEI VASILYEVICH Rachmaninoff was the second son of a charming but irresponsible aristocrat who had money, married more money, and lost it all. Within a few years of Sergei’s birth in 1873, the Rachmaninoffs were forced to sell their ancestral estates and move to a small apartment in St. Petersburg. Vasily Rachmaninoff and his wife Lyubov soon separated, informally but permanently, and young Sergei knew from then on that he would have to make his own way in the world.

After a false start at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, the boy left his family in 1885, transferred to the Moscow Conservatory, and began working in earnest. Three years later, Tchaikovsky heard his music and predicted “a great future” for him; not long after that, he moved in with Varvara Satina, his father’s still-wealthy sister. Until he left Russia, Rachmaninoff would spend his summers at Ivanovka, the Satin family’s country home, where he did most of his composing. He was inspired by the beauty of the place, as well as by the love of a surrogate family that gave him some of the stability heretofore missing from his uncertain life. As he would later recall:

Ivanovka offered the repose of surrounding that hard work requires—at least, for me. This steppe was like an infinite sea where the waters are actually boundless fields of wheat, rye, oats, stretching from horizon to horizon. Sea air is often praised, but how much more do I love the air of the steppe, with its aroma of earth and all that grows and blossoms—and there’s no rolling boat under you, either.

Eventually, Rachmaninoff would marry Natalya Satina, his first cousin, and become master of the estate that was now his true home. By then, though, he had long since established himself as a key figure in Russian music. In 1891, he finished his first important work, the Piano Concerto No. 1 in F-Sharp Minor, Op. 1; he graduated from the Moscow Conservatory the following year, and within months had found a publisher, set up shop as a professional composer, and brought out a set of five short piano pieces, one of which would make him famous. The tightly interlocked chords of the Prelude in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 3, No. 2, evoke the sound of tolling church bells—an onomatopoeic device of which he would thereafter make frequent use.

Rachmaninoff was one of the very small number of classical musicians to have been equally gifted as composer, pianist, and conductor. Like the comparably multitalented Leonard Bernstein, he found it difficult to keep his three lives in balance, and tended to emphasize one “career” at a time; in Russia, he alternated between conducting and playing piano, whereas in the West he was primarily known as a pianist. Still, it was his compositions that brought him the widest acclaim, though even in Russia he occasionally ran afoul of highbrow critics who, like Vyacheslav Karatygin, claimed that “[t]he public worships Rachmaninoff because he has hit the center of average philistine musical taste.”

The essential elements of Rachmaninoff’s style were already firmly in place by the time he graduated from the Moscow Conservatory. Then and later, Tchaikovsky was his strongest influence, though he had a darker orchestral palette than his mentor, favoring the lower strings where Tchaikovsky’s scoring is aerated by bright woodwind lines. Similarly, his piano writing is full of thick-voiced chords that cannot be executed comfortably by players with small hands, though it also contains numerous passages of Chopin-like delicacy.4

A lifelong depressive, Rachmaninoff readily admitted to being desperately afraid of death, an obsession presumably related to the unstable circumstances into which he was born, and his melancholy temperament left its mark on his music. Most of his compositions—including all three of his symphonies and all five works for piano and orchestra—are in minor keys. The Dies Irae, the familiar plainchant setting of the section in the Roman Catholic requiem mass that refers to the day of wrath that will “dissolve the world into ashes,” is quoted prominently in several of his works, including The Isle of the Dead, Op. 29 (1907), the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43 (1934), and the Symphonic Dances, Op. 45 (1940). In addition, some of his best-known original melodies, among them the opening themes of the Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18 (1900-01) and the Piano Concerto No. 3 in D Minor, Op. 30 (1909), have the flavor of Russian Orthodox liturgical chant.

LIKE MANY other Franco-Russian composers, Rachmaninoff did not take naturally to the sonata-allegro form that had dominated Austro-German musical tradition. Unsure of his ability to sustain an organically developed musical argument, he cut and revised many of his longer pieces prior to their final publication, and sometimes even after that. Significantly, he admitted to finding it “of great help,” when composing, “to have in mind a book just recently read, or a beautiful picture, or a poem. Sometimes a definite story is kept in mind, which I try to convert into tones without disclosing the source of my inspiration.”5

Not surprisingly, then, he was more at home with character pieces for solo piano, which require less rigorous formal control, and with songs and choral music, whose structure mirrors the sequence and imagery of a pre-existing verbal text. While he also produced a few successful large-scale instrumental works during his Russian years, most notably the Second and Third Piano Concertos and the Symphony No. 2 in E Minor, Op. 27 (1906-7), more characteristic—and arguably more effective—is The Isle of the Dead, a Liszt-like symphonic poem inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s macabre painting of the same name.

This lack of formal rigor was offputting to German-trained critics, who habitually condescended to Rachmaninoff without betraying the slightest appreciation of his gift for writing the long-breathed, immediately memorable tunes that are now known the world over as his trademark. Amazingly, the writer Philip Hale rendered the following wrongheaded judgment on the Second Concerto in a program note for the Boston Symphony’s first performance of that now-beloved piece: “The first movement is labored and has little marked character. It might have been written by any German, technically well trained, who was acquainted with the music of Tchaikovsky.”

As he grew older, Rachmaninoff lightened his palette, producing songs whose vaporous keyboard textures and elaborately chromatic harmonies are almost impressionistic in effect. At the same time, his rhythmic language became more unpredictable, even aggressive; the Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter would later go so far as to claim that the Etudes-Tableaux, Opp. 33 and 39 (1911-16) foreshadowed the modernist keyboard techniques of Sergei Prokofiev. Still, these changes took place within the framework of an already well-defined style, and though the Etudes-Tableaux are more musically sophisticated than Rachmaninoff’s earlier pieces, they are no less clearly the work of the composer of the C-Sharp Minor Prelude.

RACHMANINOFF'S STYLISTIC growth was interrupted by the Russian Revolution, a disaster about whose implications he had no doubt whatsoever. At the end of 1917, the composer and his family left Russia, never to return. Fourteen years later, he would co-sign a letter to the New York Times declaring that “[a]t no time, and in no country, has there ever existed a government responsible for so many cruelties, wholesale murders, and common-law crimes in general as those perpetrated by the Bolsheviki.”

No sooner had he settled in the U.S. than Rachmaninoff realized he would no longer be able to earn a living as a composer: Russia had never ratified international copyright conventions, thus making it impossible for him to profit from the continuing sale of his most popular works. Igor Stravinsky faced a similar problem when he emigrated from the Soviet Union, and both men came up with the same solution, retrofitting themselves as high-priced celebrity performers. Rachmaninoff briefly considered a career as a conductor (the Boston Symphony even offered to make him its music director), but opted instead to become a full-time concert pianist, playing his own concertos with symphony orchestras and giving numerous solo recitals that established him as one of the half-dozen greatest piano virtuosos of the 20th century.

Rachmaninoff recorded extensively between 1919 and 1942, making it possible for later generations to hear the playing that W. J. Henderson described in his review of a 1929 performance of the Chopin B-Flat Minor Sonata:

The logic of the thing was impervious; the plan was invulnerable; the proclamation was imperial. There was nothing left for us but to thank our stars that we had lived when Rachmaninoff did and heard him, out of the divine might of his genius, re-create a masterpiece. It was a day of genius understanding genius.

But while Rachmaninoff’s 78’s continue to be admired by connoisseurs, the impression they make on modern-day listeners is quite different from that which they made when new.6 Today, Rachmaninoff is seen as the quintessential romantic, imperiously high-handed in his free treatment of the printed text; but in his own time he was thought to be (in the phrase of the American critic-composer H. T. Parker) “the puritan of pianists,” austere and direct to the point of matter-of-factness. In fact, both points of view are valid. For all the flexibility he brought to the music of Chopin and Schumann, it is Rachmaninoff’s galvanizing rhythmic exactitude that gives his playing the distinctively “modern” quality noted by his contemporaries.

UNFORTUNATELY, his grueling concert schedule, including the immense amount of practice time he needed in order to work up a sufficiently varied solo repertoire, made it all but impossible for him to concentrate on composing. Beyond this, the shock of leaving his native land—of losing Ivanovka, for him the embodiment of all things Russian—robbed him of inspiration. As a result, he wrote no original compositions of any kind between 1918 and 1925, and from 1926 until his death seventeen years later he produced only six pieces.

By the time Rachmaninoff once again felt capable of composing, he had become painfully aware that the world of classical music had changed beyond recognition. Czarist Russia had been more or less isolated from modernist developments in the West; but by 1926, the modern movement in music was firmly established in Europe and America, and Rachmaninoff claimed to find its values unsympathetic: “I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien. I cannot cast out the old way of writing, and I cannot acquire the new. The new kind of music seems to come, not from the heart, but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel.”

Yet for all his seeming rejection of modernism, the compositions of Rachmaninoff’s later years suggest that he was not only aware of the new music but had even been influenced by it. In addition to being more compact and coherent in form than their predecessors, the Paganini Rhapsody, Symphonic Dances, and Symphony No. 3 in A Minor, Op. 44 (1936) are tough-minded, even sardonic in tone. Rhythmically edgy and harmonically acerbic, these romantic yet forward-looking pieces are the work of an artist who was fully prepared to engage with modernity—on his own terms. It is revealing that only the Paganini Rhapsody found ready acceptance in the concert hall, no doubt because it is a spectacular virtuoso showpiece, whereas the Third Symphony and Symphonic Dances left audiences cold.

Alas, Rachmaninoff wrote no more music after the Symphonic Dances, claiming that they were his “last flicker” of inspiration. Instead, he threw himself into concertizing, continuing to perform even after it became clear that he was seriously ill. In February of 1943, he canceled his remaining appearances and returned home to Los Angeles, where his doctors learned that what they had thought to be a severe case of pleurisy was in fact malignant melanoma, a particularly virulent form of cancer. He died a month later, and was buried in New York.

THE REHABILITATION of Rachmaninoff is one of the most curious chapters in the history of musical taste. For unlike so many apparently similar phenomena, it cannot be explained by the collapse of the avant-garde monopoly. Rather, Rachmaninoff’s music was widely dismissed by tonal and atonal modernists alike, and it was only because of the unswerving loyalty of performers—and, of course, audiences—that he continued to be performed throughout the era of high modernism.

That so committed an exponent of the natural law of tonality should have inspired such widespread contempt even among those who shared his views can be partially explained by recourse to one of the fundamental tenets of modernism itself: the notion that cultural progress is historicall