The recent appearance of Vladimir Horowitz with the New York Philharmonic and Eugene Ormandy in Carnegie Hall—interesting for so many reasons both historical and contemporary—provided yet another manifestation of the present gulf between public taste and advanced musical opinion. No exponent of the advanced himself, Horowitz chose as a vehicle for his first performance with an orchestra in twenty-five years Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto (1909), not only one of the longest and toughest, but also perhaps the last famous piano concerto written in the 19th-century tradition.
Close to the end of this spectacularly romantic work, piano and orchestra join in a mighty anthem, developed out of earlier and relatively simple material. When this point in the Horowitz performance was reached, the audience seemed to lean forward—as it always does at this moment in the piece—and give every visible sign of being ready to burst into enthusiastic song. Faces were radiant and taut with absorption in the music. At the close, the predictable pandemonium broke out, a tribute both to the soloist and to the work he had just played.1
As the excitement mounted, one of America’s most respected modernist composers was heard to remark: “That’s the worst piece of trash I’ve ever heard.” Obviously the audience disagreed. And yet it was an audience composed almost entirely of Philharmonic subscribers, which meant that it was a veteran of nearly a decade’s training by Pierre Bóulez, the orchestra’s former music director and perhaps the most widely known champion of musical modernism in our day.
The popularity of Rachmaninoff’s music with a wide public goes back to his C-sharp Minor Prelude, written in 1892, when the composer was nineteen. Uncopyrighted and sold to a publisher for forty rubles, it achieved world fame in 1898, when the pianist Alexander Siloti, Rachmaninoff’s cousin, played it in London. Its popularity subsequently dogged the composer, who found himself obliged to play this favorite of struggling piano students at every one of his innumerable piano recitals.
Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto is perhaps the most frequently performed of his pieces; as played by Artur Rubinstein it was the background music of a late 1940’s Hollywood tearjerker about a concert pianist and the source as well for a hit song of the period, “Full Moon and Empty Arms.” Slightly later, the eighteenth variation from the last of Rachmaninoff’s works for piano and orchestra, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, provided American jukeboxes with still another smash hit.
As for the Third Concerto, it remains the most surefire vehicle available to a virtuoso pianist today. It has been a favorite with Horowitz for many years, and its power was demonstrated by the very fact of his having chosen it for this important and highly publicized concert. So, too, when, twenty years ago, Van Cliburn chose to perform it, along with the shorter and technically easier Tchaikowsky B-flat Minor Concerto, in a sensationally successful New York appearance after his Moscow contest triumph.
Rachmaninoff’s strictly orchestral works are also popular. His Second Symphony remains a conductorial showpiece, and his symphonic poem, the Isle of the Dead, though played less often than in the past, is still familiar to audiences. Two of his songs, “Lilacs” and the wordless “Vocalise,” come as close to being hackneyed as any art songs written in this century. Just about all his compositions are available in modern recordings; many appear in new performances almost every year.2
Critical reaction is plainly pained and embarrassed by all this public favor. The authoritative New Oxford History of Music in its concluding volume (1974) simply dismisses Rachmaninoff’s “polished superficiality.” The respected English chronicler of modern music, Wilfrid Mellers, writes that Rachmaninoff’s lifelong conflict between the desire to be musically creative and the wish to be financially successful “finds an echo in our hearts, living as we do in a society dedicated to material gain.”
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The object of these disparate judgments by the few and the many was easily one of the most versatile musical figures of the recent past—a pianist and conductor of world stature as well as a composer. In fact, his entire career may be said to represent the final flowering of the Russian musical culture which was to come to maturity uninfluenced by the Bolshevik Revolution and the ideologies of artistic and political radicalism which followed it.
Rachmaninoff was born on a small estate near Novgorod in European Russia in 1873, the child of gentry adapting poorly to the winds of change which had come with the recent abolition of serfdom. By the time he was ten, the family had been forced to leave the rural estate for a crowded flat in St. Petersburg. There the boy, who had always been deeply interested in music, was sent to the Conservatory where he did excellently in musical subjects but poorly in everything else. Later he was sent to study the piano with a famous Moscow master, Nicolai Zverev. Zverev’s pedagogical system was both simple and draconian. Although he supported himself in grand style by giving lessons to the rich, his serious work was done with young boys of immense talent whom he taught without charge. These few Zverev required to sever almost all ties with their families and live in his house, “submitting completely to his discipline.” Here they were to absorb the piano as a life rather than as a mere profession. Whatever Zverev’s actual piano-teaching abilities—no one seems to have heard him touch the piano during a lesson—his successful protégés included not only Rachmaninoff but also Scriabin.
Through Zverev, the young Rachmaninoff experienced much of the rich musical atmosphere of Moscow. At Zverev’s, he first met Tchaikowsky, then at the height of his fame. Because Rachmaninoff was by now taking classes at the Moscow Conservatory, he was also invited to play for the doyen of Russian music, Anton Rubinstein. Rubinstein, a legendary pianist and (at that time) popular composer, was giving his 1886 series of “historical concerts” in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Rachmaninoff twice heard these surveys of keyboard literature from Couperin to the then present, and they no doubt helped to form his idea of the pianist-composer as conquering hero and master of the musical world.
As part of his musical education, Rachmaninoff, now in his early teens, was allowed to get away from the piano enough to study theory and harmony. His work in harmony caught the attention of Tchaikowsky, and thus encouraged, he began to show more interest in composing than in playing the piano. This led to his expulsion in 1889 from Zverev’s hothouse. But within two years, he had finished his First Piano Concerto (heavily revised in 1917), and a tone poem, Prince Rostislav, written for his teacher, the composer Anton Arensky. The next year, as one of the tests for graduation from the Conservatory, he was assigned the task of composing a short opera, Aleko, based on a poem by Pushkin. He finished it in eighteen days, and the result, added to his piano playing, won him the rarely awarded Great Gold Medal of the Conservatory. His Aleko was accepted for performance by the Bolshoi Theater, and Zverev—with whom he was now reconciled—arranged for his music to be published.
Confirming Rachmaninoff’s increasing reputation as a composer, Tchaikowsky proposed that Aleko be performed as part of a double bill with his own Iolanthe. Rachmaninoff continued to compose, writing in 1893 his First Suite for two pianos and a second symphonic poem, The Rock. To make some easy money, he also turned out many small piano pieces and songs, all of which are still performed today. But his major compositional effort now was to go into his First Symphony. Performed for the first time in 1897, it was a ghastly failure, more (or so Rachmaninoff thought) for the way it was conducted than for any instrinsic musical shortcomings.
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During this decade he often found himself severely depressed. He was hit hard by the deaths in 1893 of the two great influences on his life, Zverev and Tchaikowsky, and he suffered too from a chronic lack of money. He managed to support himself, but only just, by giving lessons. For a short time he also worked as an opera conductor in a somewhat sleazy company supported by a Moscow millionaire; here he gained valuable conducting experience and met his lifelong friend and collaborator, the great basso Feodor Chaliapin.
In 1898 the success of the C-sharp Minor Prelude in London brought Rachmaninoff an invitation to conduct and play. The result was such that he was invited to return, and he promised to come back with a better piece than the First Concerto, which he had just performed. But unable even to start the Second Concerto, he fell into a depression which a visit with Chaliapin to the great Tolstoy did nothing to lighten. After hearing Rachmaninoff play his works, Tolstoy asked him: “Tell me, is such music needed by anybody?” Though Rachmaninoff managed a saucy answer when Tolstoy attempted to apologize, his self-regard had been even further damaged. As a last resort he underwent treatment by a hypnotist. Thanks to this therapy, he was at last able to compose the Second Concerto. It was a resounding public success in its first Moscow performance in 1900, as it was to be later in Vienna, London, and the rest of the world.
In 1904 he was appointed to the conducting staff of the Bolshoi Theater, but he soon left to devote himself to composing and went to live in Dresden, where he worked on his First Piano Sonata and the vastly more significant Second Symphony. The Isle of the Dead followed in 1909. That same year, in preparation for his first American tour, he completed the Third Piano Concerto which he then played in New York with Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony, and then—to his much greater satisfaction—with Gustav Mahler and the Philharmonic.
Throughout the years before World War I and the Revolution of 1917, his triple career as composer, pianist, and conductor prospered. His compositions of this period included two religious works, the Liturgy of St. Chrysostom (1910) and the Vespers (1915). In lieu of another symphony he wrote a large work for chorus and orchestra to a Russian translation of Poe’s “The Bells” (1914). And, for the piano, he completed his second set of preludes (1910), the thirteen of which, when added to the ten of the first set—and of course the C-sharp Minor—placed him with Chopin as a composer of one piano prelude in each of the twelve major and twelve minor keys.
As a pianist he devoted himself, after Scriabin’s death in 1915, to playing that composer’s works. Here he aroused controversy, for Scriabin’s adherents felt that Rachmaninoff’s approach was too severe and old-fashioned for this mystical and revolutionary music. But as a conductor his triumph was near complete: in Moscow he was called by the press a God-given leader, an equal of Nikisch and Mahler. And in general, something of the aura which surrounded his career and public position in the years just prior to the end of the traditional Russian world may be seen in the composer Glazunov’s remarks during Rachmaninoff’s visit to the St. Petersburg Conservatory, of which Glazunov was the director: “. . . this is a day to be marked no less than a day when the school is visited by a member of the Imperial family.”
Without doubt the Bolshevik Revolution in November of 1917 was the great watershed in Rachmaninoff’s life. Though he had signed a petition demanding reforms during the 1905 revolution, he never forgot his quasi-aristocratic social origins. He had held office under Czarist patronage, as a high officer of the Imperial Russian Musical Society. Furthermore, as an estate owner deeply interested in agriculture, he was heavily involved in traditional landlord-peasant relations. A petty irritant, but one he must have felt prophetic of the future, was enforced attendance at Bolshevik-imposed house-committee meetings. It was plain to him that the freedom and the repose he needed for his work, and indeed his very physical existence, had been placed in jeopardy by the Communist accession to power. So it was that he left his beloved Russia at the end of 1917, never to return. From now on he would support himself and his family as a concert pianist.
Given both the trauma of exile and the demands of a keyboard career, his new compositions became fewer. Moreover, they were generally less successful. His Fourth Concerto, written in 1926 and revised more than a decade later, was a public failure, as were his Third Symphony (1935-36) and his last major composition, the Symphonic Dances (1940). Indeed, only one work of his last years, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (1934), proved an immediate public success.
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Throughout the 1920’s he combined residence in America with an evident inability to give up the Russian world he had lived in so long. He kept up a busy correspondence with musicians who had remained in Russia, and he frequently sent his old friends money. Both in this country and later in Europe, he associated mostly with Russians. Thus when he signed a letter to the New York Times in 1931 protesting conditions in the Soviet Union, he was perhaps unprepared for the consequences. These included a boycott of his music and meetings in Moscow and other Russian cities to accuse him of anti-Soviet behavior. By the end of the 1930’s—probably because of Stalin’s desire to build up Russian nationalism—the music was reinstated, and Rachmaninoff himself was rehabilitated as a person after Hitler’s attack on Russia in 1941. For his part, Rachmaninoff supported the Soviet war effort, and made several large contributions to Russian war relief.
He died of cancer in Beverly Hills in 1943, several weeks after becoming an American citizen, and a few days before his seventieth birthday. He had been concertizing until almost the end. How much he saw himself as a pianist may be gathered from his touching and often quoted words in the hospital as he lay near death: “At my age one can’t miss practice. . . . My dear hands. Farewell, my poor hands. Farewell, my poor hands,”
And indeed, his piano performances are supreme examples of the art. Many of them have been preserved on records, and often reissued in the years since his death. At present they are available in a complete set,3 constituting documentation of a pianistic achievement which may well rank in excellence if not in scope with that of Franz Liszt and Anton Rubinstein. Most of his recordings are of his own music; in their simplicity and easy technical mastery they have set a high standard for his successors. The only recordings he ever made of extended works by other composers—the B-flat Minor Sonata of Chopin and the Schumann Carnaval—are simultaneously imaginative, idiosyncratic, and willful. In these recordings, as in the many he made of smaller Chopin pieces, he has often been accused of revealing more of himself than of the composer. While this criticism may well be justified, it ignores the fact that the immanent tendency of virtuoso performance is self-exhibition rather than self-abnegation.
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As a composer, Rachmaninoff was not prolific in the fashion of the greatest masters, but it is not generally realized just how much music he actually wrote. Five works for piano and orchestra, three symphonies, a choral symphony, three symphonic poems, three short operas, two religious services, two piano sonatas, a host of songs and smaller piano pieces; it is an output comparable in size to that of such coevals as Sibelius, Mahler, and Schoenberg, though certainly not in influence to the last two.
In quality, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and the four piano concertos—including the lesser known First and Fourth—comprise the most important body of work for piano and orchestra since Brahms. Their appeal to a wide audience is nicely balanced by the difficult but surmountable technical challenge they offer to pianists. The same can be said about his twenty-four preludes, and to a large extent of his other solo piano pieces as well.
Of his three symphonies, the Second not only seems to me more consistently interesting in its musical material than the Second Symphony of Sibelius (the best-known of the seven written by that composer); it even compares favorably to the symphonies of Tchaikowsky, being both of equal melodic power and rather less harmonically obvious. A similar verdict can be passed on The Bells, which was Rachmaninoff’s favorite of all his works; unfortunately it requires forces too large to permit frequent performance. Among his symphonic poems, the Isle of the Dead easily stands with the comparable productions of Richard Strauss as a masterfully integrated and sensuously beautiful example of late 19th-century orchestral writing.
No such high claims can be made for Rachmaninoff’s operas, though Aleko, the product of his youthful facility, seems the most successful in its combination of gypsy love and jealousy, well-drawn characters, and attractive melodies. On the other hand, his neglected church services contain some of his most beautiful music. What is most striking about Rachmaninoff’s achievement here is his ability, particularly in the Vespers, to write freely and originally within the strict rules which governed music composed for the Russian Orthodox Church. Because of his disciplined submission to these rules, and the religious devotion he clearly felt, this music seems rather plainer, purer, and more inward than his other works.
These religious pieces aside, the most obvious of Rachmaninoff’s musical virtues are his broad, long-lined, and easily remembered melodies. His orchestration—especially in its use of the strings—also easily catches the listener’s ear; in this area his effectiveness was so great that his detractors have often pointed accusingly to the use Hollywood and other commercial composers have made of his characteristic orchestral sound.
But music is more than melody and orchestration. Less obvious is the role played by Rachmaninoff’s other compositional virtues in supporting and setting off his melodies. There is, first, his rhythmic energy and the excitement it invariably generates. His work is also rhythmically complex, as is shown by the tendency of his melodies to find their natural climax off the strong beats of the bar. All this vitality, expressed technically by the syncopations with which his music abounds, makes Rachmaninoff both interesting and tricky to perform.
Like the academically well-trained Russian composer he was, Rachmaninoff found counterpoint fascinating. His music is full of inner voices and depends for much of its harmonic richness on his habit, especially noticeable in the preludes, of filling in every blank space on the staff with melodies. An overlooked example of this luxuriant contrapuntal writing may be found in his G Minor Prelude, opus 23 no. 5. Here the slow central section simultaneously combines in its second half three separate strands: the melody of the first half of the section, a motive drawn from the outer parts of the piece, and an additional related melody as well.
Harmonically, Rachmaninoff belongs to the very end of the 19th century. Despite a few attempts in the Fourth Concerto and the Symphonic Dances to assimilate some 20th-century developments, any dissonances he used were merely “false notes” employed in addition to and not as substitutes for clearly consonant chords. These chords functioned within a strong and simply tonal, diatonic system.
It is a paradox that Rachmaninoff, whose music seems so Russian to us, belonged, with his mentor Tchaikowsky, to a more cosmopolitan group of composers than those who, like the “Five” (Borodin, Cui, Balakirev, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakoff), formed a consciously nationalistic school of composition. Despite his attachment to Russian culture, Rachmaninoff looked to the West for his formal musical models. He admired non-Russian composers and performers; he felt that American orchestras in general, and the Philadelphia Orchestra in particular, were the best in the world. Nevertheless, his melodies do have a Russian cast about them; and at the bottom of his harmony one can always find a fully articulated bass line, drawn from the timbre of the Russian bass voice with its distinctive richness and cutting edge.
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As far as the guardians of musical opinion have been concerned, the status of Rachmaninoff as a performer has never been in doubt. Their dislike of his compositions, however, has often taken the form of a ferocious attack on Rachmaninoff’s principled and total rejection of modernism. Rachmaninoff accepted neither the 20th-century dissolution of traditional harmonic practice nor the new idea of music as social provocation. Not only did his own works hew closely to 19th-century aesthetics and techniques, but he spoke freely of his dislike of the direction music was taking around him. He thought the new music heartless and ugly, a product of the disordered contemporary world. As long ago as 1906, he said he only liked Richard Strauss’s Salome when “it wasn’t too discordant.” When the young Henry Cowell brought him a new work for evaluation, his only remarks concerned the number of wrong notes he had found in it. One can only regret that his specific comments about Arnold Schoenberg and his school were never preserved.
Some of the critical attack on Rachmaninoff has made its point by simply denying him any role at all in either 19th- or 20th-century music. He is not mentioned, for example, in Alfred Einstein’s classic history of 19th-century composition, Music in the Romantic Era. And Joseph Machlis, consigning him to the past in his standard college text, Introduction to Contemporary Music (1961), emphatically states: “Although certain of his works have enjoyed a phenomenal vogue with the public, Rachmaninoff has no proper place in a work on contemporary music.” Even where he is included, he is often dismissed as a mere follower: Paul Henry Lang, in Music in Western Civilization (1941), finds him “entirely under [Chopin’s] spell . . . [but] not able to derive from Chopin’s heritage more than ephemeral compositions, dated at the time of their creation. . . .”
Critics more sociologically oriented than these have found in the character of his music something even worse than a turning away from the proper course of artistic development. They have seen Rachmaninoff’s music as both representative and expressive of a decadent, outmoded, and discarded society. When Rachmaninoff had the temerity in 1919 to call himself a “musical evolutionist”—in contrast to the revolution and anarchy he saw going on around him—the American modernist critic Paul Rosenfeld answered:
His music is evidently wanting in boldness. On the whole it is cautious and traditional. . . . The school of which Rachmaninoff is perhaps the chief living representative is . . . the work of men essentially unresponsive to the appeal of their compatriots . . . [they] did not hear the appeal. They sat in their luxurious and Parisian houses behind closed windows.
Because he had never been a modernist, Rachmaninoff did not suffer the hatred and personal obloquy reserved for the renegade Richard Strauss; and in any case, these criticisms of his reactionary cultural identification are, at least as description, accurate. He called himself “a ghost wandering in a world grown alien.” He did indeed find in the world of his birth a social environment which he thought made autonomous artistic creation possible. More generally, he saw that world as gentler, more civilized, and, despite its flagrant abuses, more merciful and hopeful than all the “utopias” which succeeded it.
Foolish as this notion of bourgeois melioration and social peace may sound in a liberated age, millions of people—among them the vast majority of music lovers—seem to share with Rachmaninoff precisely such a vision of a tolerable and indeed happy past. Whatever Rachmaninoff’s exact rank as a composer, it was his achievement to reflect his own world—simply, honestly, and directly. The public has perceived this in his music, which is why that music, regardless of the demands of advanced opinion, will continue to be played, heard, and loved.
1 A recording of this performance has been issued by RCA as CRL 1-2633.
2 In addition to the Horowitz recording of the Third Concerto, new releases of Rachmaninoff works during the past year alone in the United States and England have included:
Aleko (excerpts)
Previn (Angel S-37260)Concertos
First: Orozco (Philips 6747 397) Second: Simon (Turnabout 34658) Third: Berman (Columbia XM 34540) Sheppard (EMI CFP402S7) Simon (Turnabout 34682) Fourth: Orozco (Philips 6747 397) Vásáry (Deutsche Grammophon
2530 905)Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini
Lapsansky (Rediffusion Royale ROY-
2007)
Simon (Turnabout 34658)
Vásáry (Deutsche Grammophon 2530
905)Solo Piano Music
Laredo Vol. 4 (Columbia M-34532)
Ohlsson (Angel S-37219)
Ponti Vol. 2 (Vox SVBX-5478)
Ponti Vol. 3 (Vox SVBX-5488)Songs
Södeiström-Ashkenazy Vol. 3 (Decca
SXL 6832)
Vishnevskaya-Rostropovich (Deutsche
Grammophon 2530725)Third Symphony
De Waart (Philips 9530002)
Previn (Angel S-37260)Two-Piano and Four-hand Music
Ashkenazy-Previn (London 6893)
Ponti-Leonardy (Vox SVBX 5488)
3 The Rachmaninoff performances, which also include his recordings as conductor of the Isle of the Dead and the Third Symphony, are available on RCA ARM3-0260, ARM3-0261, ARM3-0294, ARM3-0295, and ARM3-0296.
