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Sergei Rachmaninoff

Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff was born at Semyonovo,district of Starorusky, Russia, on 1 April 1873 and died inBeverly Hills, California, on 28 March 1943.

Rachmaninoff is one of those composers whose popularity rests uponan excessively small and unrepresentative group of works. (Handeland Dvor‘a’k are two others who come immediately to mind.) We

know the symphonist and even the writer of solo piano music and songstoo little, the composer of church music and opera almost not at all.

His fifty—year career can be reckoned as having started in 1890, whenthe seventeen'year—old Moscow Conservatory student began working onhis Piano Concerto No. 1, a work we always hear in its 1917 revision; itclosed in 1940 with the Symphonic Dances, composed, like the ThirdSymphony, for the Philadelphia Orchestra. Both beginning and end ofthe career were unhappy. Rachmaninoff’s first important teacher, NikolaiSergeievich Zverev, who ran a sort of pianists’ hothouse in his apartment,permitted this most gifted pupil of his to stretch his horizons by takingsome lessons with Alexander Siloti, Rachmaninoff’s cousin and a Zverevalumnus, but bitterly resented his growing interest in writing music and hisenrollment in the composition classes of Sergei Taneyev and Anton Aren-sky. A break with Zverev was both necessary and painful. It left Rachmavninoff free to be a composer, but the brutal reception accorded his FirstSymphony in 1897, horrendously conducted by Alexander Glazunov,threatened to silence him for good. Rachmaninoff's miseries in the lastfifteen years or so of his life had to do chiefly with his sense of being outof touch with his public, or rather, that the public was out of touch withhis aspirations. That is a story I tell in my essay on the Symphony No. 3.

444 THE SYMPHONY: A LISTENER’S GUIDE

Having really become a composer with the completion of the PianoConcerto No. 1 and the tone poem Prince Rostls'lav (1891), Rachmaninoffwrote prolifically during the next few years: the two Trios e’le’giaq'ues, theopera Aleko, the tone poem The Rock, the Suite No. 1 for Two Pianos,several sets of songs, that Cvsharpvminor Prelude whose outlandish popu.larity was to be a source of gloom and frustration to him all his life, andthe Symphony No. 1. It took three years of psychotherapy and hypnosisbefore Rachmaninoff could again face writing a largevscale compositionafter the catastrophic premiere of that last work. He withheld it from pub—lication and further performance, but after his death there came to lightfirst a two—piano transcription, then a set of orchestral parts, and so thesymphony had a second premiere in Moscow in 1945. It is a strong andinteresting work.

Treatment with Dr. Nikolai Dahl, who had trained with Charcot inParis, enabled Rachmaninoff to compose his muchrloved Piano ConcertoNo. 2 in 1900—1901, and it was the success of that work in turn that freedhim. Even so, it was a long time before the notion of “symphony” ceasedto make him shudder. The Second came along ten years after the First,and after finishing it, Rachmaninoff swore he would never write anothersymphony. It was twenty—eight years before he changed his mind and beganwork on his third and last essay in the form.

Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Opus 27

Largo—Allegro moderatoAllegro moltoAdagioAllegro vivace

Rachmaninoff composed the Symphony No. 2 between October 1906 andApril 1907 and conducted the first performance in Saint Petersburg on 26January 1908. The dedication is to Rachmaninoff ’5 teacher, the composerSergei Taneyev.

Three flutes and piccolo, three oboes, two clarinets and bass clarinet, twobassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, bass tuba, timpani,glockenspiel, bass drum, cymbals, and strings.

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When Rachmaninoff was working on this symphony, he was living inDresden, where he had gone to escape the constant clamor for his servicesas a conductor. There he also composed his Piano Sonata No. l, the tonepoem The Isle of the Dead after the Bo"cklin painting he had seen in Dres—den's Semper Gallery, and, for his first American tour in 1909, the PianoConcerto No. 3. Thirtyvthree years old, he was in his fifth year of convtented marriage, a father (his second daughter, Tatiana, was born aboutthe time the symphony was completed), an experienced composer in manygenres, an unsurpassed and scarcely equaled pianist, and a highly esteemedconductor. As a composer he was original as well as experienced, with atone of voice and melodic style all his own and, as many attempts, particu-larly in film studios, have proved, inimitable. In his Preludes and EtudesrTableaux for piano he developed an impressive skill at composing a highlyeconomical sort of music, but in his symphonies and concertos be pre—ferred, at least at this point in his development, a more expansive manner.

Expansive enough in this instance to have disturbed conductors intomaking many cuts. Some of the standard deletions consist of petty impavtiences like reducing the four measures of accompaniment at the start ofthe first Allegro to two, but they have also entailed such brutal surgery asthe removal of the entire principal theme from the recapitulation of theAdagio. Cuts do not solve formal problems: they merely shorten the timeyou have to spend dealing with them. Paradoxically, a work may feellonger when it is cut because the proportions are off and the distributionof light and shade is all wrong.

Rachmaninoff himself was strangely passive about this. In 1940, LeslieJ. Rogers, the Boston Symphony’s librarian in the early part of this cenvtury, sent Pierre Monteux the twenty—nine cuts “supposedly given to [JosefStransky, conductor of the New York Philharmonic] by the composer" aswell as the list of different excisions made by Serge Koussevitzky, conducvtor of the Boston Symphony. In his cover letter Rogers writes: “I asked[Rachmaninoff] about the Stransky cuts. He told me that Stransky madethem and he ‘approved’ them. I asked him if he wanted cuts made and hesaid that if he conducted it himself there would be no cuts but had noobjections to others cutting if they thought it should be cut." In a note forhis wonderful 1973 London Symphony recording, Andre’ Previn writesthat, having begun by making the standard cuts, he had decided, “on re—examining the score . . . to reinstate every note. . . . It makes the sym—phony undeniably long, but I feel that its honesty, its power. its heart—feltlyricism can stand it.”1

1Until the appearance in 1994 of new recordings by Valery Gergiev and Yuri Temirkanov. Edodc Waart is the only conductor in my experience to have taken the repeat of the first movement's

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Rachmaninoff begins in mystery, with pianissimo low strings}

What the cellos and basses play here is a motto that turns out to have alarge role in the symphony, sometimes on the surface, sometimes beneathit. Immediately, sonorous wind chords vary its first three notes, and theviolins make lachrymose response. The texture becomes more tightly wo’ven, with imitative entrances following fast upon one another; at the sametime, the melodic flow is gorgeous. The penetrating high writing for violas,who enter on the same high C as the violins, is especially effective. Rach—maninoff slowly works this up to an intense climax from which he thendescends rapidly. Harmonically, this whole introduction describes onegreat halfrcadence from tonic to dominant.

Alone, the English horn muses on these events for a moment. Strings,in softly shuddering tremolando, play a fragment of a rising scale, and themain part of the first movement has begun. The first theme, which theviolins introduce, is yet another variant of the introduction’s motto, nowurgent and forward—thrusting. It is presented in a broad paragraph, andRachmaninoff’s command of such spans is very impressive indeed. Accel'erating, the music moves toward a new key, the relative major, G. Thetheme is new, yet both the design—wind chords leading to a melancholyviolin response—and the actual shapes of the phrases are familiar from theintroduction. Violins and cellos carry the music forward and, though thekey is now officially G major, the yeaming for the darker E minor is strong.One of Rachmaninoff ’s beautiful everedescending melodies brings the exrposition to its quiet close.

A violin solo reminds us of the introduction. After the brief moment

exposition, and very effective it was, too. The numbers are interesting. The early and uncutBoston Symphony performances under Max Fiedler and Karl Muck took sixty—five minutes. AndréPrevin’s uncut performances average fifty—nine minutes and change. Monteux, making the twenty!nine “Stransky” cuts, came in at fifty—two, but Koussevitzky, making fewer cuts than Monteux.gave consistently quicker performances (fortyrone to forty'six minutes). So far as I know. thespeed record is held by lzler Solomon, who brought the Boston Symphony to the last double barin thirty-eight minutes!2This type of opening. so popular in works from Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony to Barto‘k'sConcerto for Orchestra, was invented by Haydn in his Symphony No. 103, the Dmmmll.

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of quiet. the music pushes forward. Slowly the bass descends from A to Gto F.5h3rp. The cellos recall the motto, the violas interject violent trem—ms, The bass skips over E—Rachmaninoff is not yet ready to re—establishthe tonic and begin the recapitulation—but sits for a long time on E'flat.Then. as the bass starts to rise again, a great crescendo begins. We hearsome triumphant fanfares, but this is just a way station. The agitated jourvney resumes: Rachmaninoff has learned well from Tchaikovsky how tobuild suspense. Through the storm, we can make out fragments of theopening theme. At last the long dominant pedal on B is resolved to E, thekeynote. We are home; the recapitulation has begun.

The fragments we heard in the tempest are as much of a return of theopening theme as we are going to get. When at last we land back in B, weare given the second theme, the one with the wind'string dialogue. Andonce home, Rachmaninoff moves swiftly into a powerful coda. The finalErminor chord is followed by a thump on low E for cellos and basses alone.

The second movement, the scherzo, is wildly energetic; it is in factrare for Rachmaninoff to write a movement so consistently athletic. It isparticularly brilliant as orchestral writings. The key is A minor, and thereason the beginning rings as it does is that the violins playing their rapidanapests get to use their open A and E strings so much. A little later theglockenspiel adds a nice edge. Midway, Rachmaninoff also gives us one ofhis broadly Romantic tunes. That provides its own pleasure, but evengreater is the delight of the quietly stalking retransition to the driving maintheme. The close is humorous disintegration.

Then the trio: as Haydn is supposed to have said of the big bang inhis Surprise Symphony, “This will make the ladies jump." The second vio-lins start a brilliant fugue, and probably every one of the violinists you hearplay this passage today had to present this excerpt at his or her audition.A swift transition leads us into the return of the scherzo, in whose codaRachmaninoff, as he was so fond of doing, cites the Dies irae (Day ofWrath) from the Gregorian Mass for the Dead. This phrase is suggested bythe horns at the opening of the movement; toward the end it becomes exvplicit.

In the beautiful Adagio we find Rachmaninoff ’s melodic genius working at full power. He begins as though in mid—phrase, with Violas windinglong garlands of triplets, over which the violins play a phrase that beginswith an unforgettable upward thrust. That one is the phrase people usuallycome out singing after this symphony. But all this is just introduction. Themain matter is a lovely clarinet solo, a wonderful instance of Rachmani-noff’s way of expanding an idea on and on. The melody takes twenty—threemeasures to have its say, never repeating itself literally, though circling, asmany Russian melodies are apt to do, around a few notes within a limited

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THE SYMPHONY: A LISTENER’S GUIDE448

compass“. It is, among other things, a reminder that Rachmaninoff was also

a marvelous songwriter. But even when the clarinet stops, the melody isnot over, and the violins carry it still further.

When this long and arresting paragraph ends, which it does with thegreat yeaming phrase that began the movement, the violins bring backtheir lamenting phrase from the symphony’s introduction, though it is nowmore than twice as fast. In fact, the introduction now yields material forthe violins, for English horn and oboe, and eventually for the full orchestrato explore. Again Rachmaninoff brings in one of his gradually descendingbass lines. This leads to a grand arrival in C major. There is a swift dropto pia'nissimo, a long silence, and then a lovely passage, full of mystery, inwhich solo instruments, one after one and beginning with the horn, brieflycaress the yearning phrase. When the flute takes its turn, the violins softlyinterject their phrase from the introduction.

This touchingly intimate passage proves to be the transition to thereturn of the great melody the clarinet played at the beginning of themovement, but which is now given to the violins. (This is one ofthe passages that used to be cut.) Woodwinds now decorate the melodywith the yearning phrase. From here, the movement sinks to a spaciousand quiet close.

The finale, back in E, but now E major, begins headlong. The firstcontrasting theme is a hushed conspiratorial march; the transition to this,with timpani, plucked low strings, and muted horns, is particularly fine.The march is just an interlude. The forceful and speedy opening musicreturns, to lead to one of Rachmaninoff’s “big tunes.” If we know theSecond and Third piano concertos, we can safely guess that this, grandlypresented, will be the material for the final cresting.

But there is much adventure before we get to that point. First comesthe surprise of a return for just six measures to the tempo of the slowmovement and to its beautiful introductory phrase. Then the high—speedtempo resumes, and in this development section Rachmaninoff gives usone of his most amazing passages, a network of descending scales, slow andfast, high and low, syncopated and straight, that generate such a swirl ofsound, that all the bells in Russia seem to be ringing. It is rather like ArvoPart eighty years ahead of time.3 From here on, matters develop much aswe would expect, with a recapitulation in whose first pages the carillonscales are not altogether forgotten, with a grand peroration based on thebig lyric tune, and a blood’stirring rush to the close, which is sealed with

3Most of the earlier conductors did not find these scales as magical as I do. At any rate, this wasa passage subjected to brutal cutting; l am sure I never heard it until Previn's uncut performancein the early 19705.

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,fi'g familiar “signature” cadence—YUM —partavTUM (this timeRachmanintSlightly, zipped up to YUMIpavtarta—TUM).

449

3 in A minor, Opus 44Symphony No.

Lento—Allegro moderatoAdagio ma non troppo—Allegro vivac

Allegro—Allegro m'vace—Allegroe—Tempo come pn'ma

rst movement of his Symphony No. 3 be—

1935, the second between 26 August and

and the third between 6 and 30 June 1936.

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he Philadelphia; Leopold Stokowski conr

made some revisions, which were com—

s reintroduced in its definite form

this time with Eugene Or—

Rachmaninoff composed the fi

tween 18 ]une and 22 August

18 September of the same year,

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his “very favorite orchestra,” t

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that fall, again by the Philadelphia Orchestra,

mandy conducting.

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four horns, three trumpets (pref;

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clarinet, two bassoons an

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tuba, timpani, xylophone, triangle,

tine, celesta, harp (preferably doubled), and strings.

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