Sergei Rachmaninoff

Russian composer

• Born: April 1, 1873
• Birthplace: Semyonovo, Novgorod District, Russia
• Died: March 28, 1943
• Place of death: Beverly Hills, California

Rachmaninoff is best remembered as the composer who was the last great figure in the Romantic tradition and the leading pianist of his era. His music is noted for its melancholy and long melodic line.

Early Life

Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff (syihr-GYAY vah-SEE-lyih-vihch rahk-MAH-nee-nahf) was the offspring of two noble families. His father was a spendthrift who by 1882 had squandered the family fortune, forcing him to take a flat in St. Petersburg, where he soon deserted his family. Rachmaninoff received a scholarship and attended the St. Petersburg Conservatory. He had shown an early aptitude for the piano. Because of Rachmaninoff’s idle nature, Aleksandr Ziloti, his cousin, suggested that he study with Nikolai Zverev. In 1885, Rachmaninoff moved into Zverev’s apartment. Zverev was a hard taskmaster and, as a result, Rachmaninoff’s technique and musical knowledge improved rapidly, especially by playing symphonies in four-hand arrangements and attending concerts.

The Zverevs spent their summers in the Crimea, and it was there that Rachmaninoff, in 1886, first tried his hand at composition. His first surviving composition was the Scherzo in D Minor for orchestra of 1887. In 1888, he studied composition with Ziloti, counterpoint with Sergei Taneyev, and harmony with Anton Arensky. After an argument with Zverev, he went to live with his aunt, Varvara Satin, whose daughter, Natalie, he married in 1902.

In 1890, Rachmaninoff received his first commission for a piano reduction of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty, though it had to be improved by Ziloti. Rachmaninoff took his graduation examinations one year early and passed with the highest scores. In the summer of 1891, he worked on his First Piano Concerto as well as on the first movement of his Symphony no. 1 in D Minor. For his final presentation at the Conservatory, he presented a one-act opera, Aleko, receiving a gold medal for it. That fall he composed his famous Opus 3 for solo piano, Morceaux de Fantaisie , in which both the Prelude in C-sharp Minor (no. 2) and the no. 4, the Polichinelle in F-sharp Minor, are included. The former piece made him immediately famous. For millions of piano students, this is his quintessential piece because of its melancholia and grandiose style. This piece became the necessary encore at all of his concerts.

It was at this time that Rachmaninoff wrote an orchestral fantasy, The Rock (op. 7), as well as finished his First Symphony, performed on March 27, 1897. This symphony was a colossal failure, and that deeply disturbed him. So great was his despondency that the Satins sent him for psychiatric treatment with Nikolai Dahl. Dahl’s treatment was successful, and he dedicated to Dahl one of his best loved works, the Piano Concerto no. 2 in C Minor, which he introduced on October 17, 1901. It was a great success and marks his return to music as an acknowledged master.

The Piano Concerto no. 2 begins with nine unaccompanied chords on the piano and then the entrance of the orchestra with arpeggios played on the piano. It has a passionate second theme followed by a march and a coda. The second movement, the one that took the world by storm, has a nocturnal Russian-like song in the flutes and broken chords from the piano. The finale of the work is martial in character with bravura passages for the soloist. This work is considered his “signature” piece.

Life’s Work

In March, 1902, Rachmaninoff completed his choral work, Spring, and in both 1905 and 1906 he won the Glinka Award. During 1905, he and his family left revolutionary Russia and lived in Dresden. It was there that he began sketching his Symphony no. 2 in E Minor, which he conducted in St. Petersburg on February 8, 1908. It is the most celebrated of his symphonic works because of its spontaneity and sincerity, directness, and musical balance. Throughout there is a stepwise shape to his themes. This structure is the key to his mature style.

Early in 1909, Rachmaninoff was back in Dresden, where he began a symphonic poem, The Isle of the Dead , inspired by Arnold Boeklin’s famous painting of the same name. The 1880 painting is a famous mood piece with a dreamlike island cemetery toward which Charon rows a boat across the River Styx, which holds a flag-draped coffin presided over by a mourner. The island rises steeply with grottos in its tall cliffs, bathed in an eerie glow of the setting sun. High, deep-green cypresses crowd the center, and overhead there is an oppressive purple sky. Rachmaninoff set out to capture Boeklin’s morbid sensitivity. The gloom is captured by the composer’s quote of the Dies irae chant in chromatic figures. As Charon’s boat nears the isle, the music climaxes in E minor, seemingly reaching out to the high granite cliffs of the painting itself. The 5/8 bars end and the rowboat drifts to its destination. The piece concludes with the soul of the departed recalling its anguished life, used as a contrast of textures between death and life. This piece has had enormous popular success.

In the summer of 1909, Rachmaninoff prepared for his first American tour, and for this occasion he composed his Concerto no. 3 in D Minor, first performed in were chosen on November 28, 1909. Although this piece illustrates his great gifts for long phrased melodies, the music has never enjoyed the success of the Second Concerto. In 1910, he completed the Thirteen Preludes of his Opus 32 and his largest unaccompanied choral work, the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, op. 31.

In the winter of 1912, after suffering from a stiffening of his fingers, Rachmaninoff took a vacation in Rome, where he began his largest orchestrated choral work, The Bells . The previous summer he had received a copy of Konstantin Balmont’s translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem of the same name. He completed the work while still in Rome. The first movement is full of vigor and a symbol of youth. The second movement, a soprano solo with choral interjections in a rocking figure, is for the golden bells of marriage. He gives this movement a passionate melodic line for the solo voice. The third movement, a scherzo, is without solos and depicts a relentless terror. The finale is quite still and with a solo baritone and recurring chords suggesting the approach of death. In fact, the central part of the section uses a chromatism for Poe’s lines about the fiend who dwells in the belfry, and then it ends on the serenity of D flat on the last verse of Poe’s poem.

World War I, his father’s death in 1916, and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 were extremely hard on Rachmaninoff. He and his family left Russia permanently just before Christmas of that year. First they went to Scandinavia, and then to the United States, where he took up a performing career that would last for the rest of his life. During the 1920’s and 1930’s, he became an incomparable pianist whose theory of a performance centered on making every piece have a culminating point that had to be approached with exact calculation. His playing always had, in addition, a pronounced rhythmic drive, precision, and clarity.

In the United States, Charles Ellis arranged his tours and Victor-RCA did all of his recordings. From 1924 onward, he began to alter his American tours so as to spend time in Europe, first at Dresden; then finally he made Lucerne, Switzerland, his home. It was also at this time that he founded a musical publishing house in Paris called Tair. When, in 1930, he coauthored a letter to The New York Times that was critical of the Soviet Union, his music was condemned by the Soviets. In 1931 he resumed composing after a ten-year dry spell. This work was a solo set of variations for the piano on a theme of Marie Corelli and inaugurates his last creative period.

In 1933, Rachmaninoff began work on his Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini , which he finished in August of 1934, giving its first performance on November 7. This piece was an immediate success and is technically his finest work. The rhapsody was written in a loose concerto form of three movements, or twenty-four variations: fast (1-10), slow (11-18), fast (19-24). They are all variations on Paganini’s Violin Caprice in A Minor, which Rachmaninoff fully quotes in the second variation. In Variation 7 we get the Dies irae theme, which also ends the tenth variation. In Variation 14, the theme is inverted. Variation 17 is a darkly moving passage that leads to the central variation, 18, a highly lyrical modified inversion. Variation 19 starts the last section as a toccata with the rest of the variations increasing in crescendo to the Dies irae restatement concluding Variation 24. This is the most melodic and lyrical of all Rachmaninoff’s music.

Rachmaninoff returned to Switzerland, and from June to August of 1937 he wrote his Third Symphony. In 1940, he finished his last masterwork, the Symphonic Dances of the op. 45. It was first performed by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra on January 3, 1941. Here is a piece of deep chromaticism and contrasting textures. It is especially famous for its long melodic lines in the central section carried by the solo alto saxophone. It ends, humorously, with a quote from his failed First Symphony.

Rachmaninoff’s health collapsed in 1942, and in February of 1943 he was brought to his home in Beverly Hills, where he died of lung cancer on March 28, 1943.

Significance

Sergei Rachmaninoff’s career has all of the pathos of a Romantic novel wherein the hero is at first accepted, then rejected for another lover, undergoes much travail, and is finally reaccepted. After the ups and downs of Rachmaninoff’s career, can anyone wonder why this Romantic hero of music is renowned for his compositions of deep melancholy and a rich lyricism of unremitting sadness? Rachmaninoff’s music deeply reflects the inner torment of his own soul’s journey through life. It was truly his own life that he saw in Boeklin’s picture, The Isle of the Dead of 1880, that found such a responsive chord for Rachmaninoff’s work of 1909. Perhaps it is because human life oscillates between hope and despair that Rachmaninoff’s music will always touch the heart of humanity. Rachmaninoff may be considered the last romanticist. His music is melodic and melancholic. Though he was out of joint with twentieth century music and disliked by two other émigré Russian composers, Sergei Prokofiev and Igor Stravinsky, his music is so lush and beautifully moving that he has found a permanent place in the contemporary repertoire.

Bibliography

Bertensson, Sergei, and Jay Leyda. Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music. New York: New York University Press, 1956. Reprint. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. This is the definitive biography of Rachmaninoff and is must reading for anyone interested in the composer. The research on this book is extraordinary and the whole benefits from the intimate recollections of Rachmaninoff’s cousin, Sophia Satina.

Cross, Milton, and David Ewen. Encyclopedia of the Great Composers and Their Music. Rev. ed. Vol. 2. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962. Pages 598-608 are an excellent and succinct starting place for those who enjoy Rachmaninoff’s music. The “analytical notes” on the composer’s major works are particularly helpful for the nonspecialist.

Harrison, Max. Rachmaninoff: Life, Works, Recordings. New York: Continuum, 2005. Harrison chronicles Rachmaninoff’s life, including his work as a composer, pianist, and conductor, and analyzes his musical scores and recordings.

Norris, Geoffrey. Rachmaninov. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1976. This book is well worth the reader’s effort. It is conveniently divided into a biography and a thoroughgoing analysis of Rachmaninoff’s works, including useful piano parts. Also, there is a biographical calendar and a very useful catalog of his works.

Rachmaninoff, Sergei. Rachmaninoff’s Recollections. Translated by Dolly Rutherford. Reprint. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970. This is a controversial book, because, after the composer’s many conversations with the editor, the final product angered Rachmaninoff. Nevertheless, it is a very personal account, especially of his early life, with a very important chapter on his psychiatric treatment by Dahl.

Rimm, Robert. The Composer-Pianists: Hamelin and the Eight. Portland, Oreg.: Amadeus Press, 2002. Examines the life and music of Rachmaninoff and seven other composer-pianists from the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries and features commentary from one of their critics, Marc-André Hamelin.

Seroff, Victor I. Rachmaninoff. Reprint. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970. A popular and very readable account of the composer’s life. It is especially noteworthy for its photographic album of the composer.