Introduction
For many people Sergei Rachmaninov is the genius responsible for creating the most mellifluous music ever written by a human being. So what better way to mark the 150th anniversary of this Romantic's birth than to consider his music’s distinctive Russian essences.
The anniversary is being marked by music lovers world-wide with special live concerts and events. For example, on 28 January in New York's Carnegie Hall, where the composer himself played and conducted, the virtuosic Chinese pianist Yuja Wang made the running in "an all-afternoon marathon" devoted exclusively to Rachmaninoff. Supported by the Philadelphia Orchestra, with which the pianist/composer himself played and recorded, this time under the baton of maestro Yannick Nézet-Séguin she played not one or two but all four of his concertos as well as his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. The concert lasted for three and a half hours (including two intermissions to take a breath and refuel).
Back in the UK, BBC Radio 3 nominated Rachmaninoff as its composer of the week to coincide with his birthday in the final week of March. One of many events on home ground was a live performance of his choral masterpiece the Vsenoshchnoe Bdenie or All Night Vigil, sometimes referred to as the Vespers. It was performed on consecutive nights by Chamber Choir Ireland and conducted by Paul Hillier in two liturgical settings, Clonard Monastery Belfast and Christ Church Cathedral Dublin.
And various academic institutions, including Queen's University in Belfast, have presented courses like the one I attended explaining the life and times of the great multi-tasker, composer pianist and conductor.
Let’s begin by reflecting on the aspects of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s music that contribute to its particularly Russian qualities. His prime influences include family, education, and the Orthodox Church.
Family, education, geography, history, culture, Orthodox Christianity
Like his forebears, Rachmaninoff was steeped in Russian culture from the start. Depending on whether the Julian or Gregorian calendar is used, he was born on 20 March or 2 April 1873 at one of his family’s estates in Semyonovo. This sits in the Staraya Russa region, some 260 miles east of Moscow. He belonged, in effect, to a family of “the privileged minority.”
This was a time of revolutionary activity with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881; an era coinciding with emancipation of serfs. Russia’s Empire had grown over the previous couple of centuries sprawling from the Black Sea all the way to the Pacific Ocean in the far east by the end of the19th century.
Rachmaninoff’s birthplace in north-western Russia was close to Novgorod, originally (like several places in Ireland) a Viking settlement, “near enough to catch the echoes of its old bells.” This quotation articulates the composer’s recall years later of “dear childhood memories” when his maternal grandmother Sophia Butakova took him to Novgorod’s Orthodox Cathedral of St Sophia with its 16th century white stone bell-tower.
Musicianship was in the Rachmaninoff family genes. Sergei’s great-grandfather Alexander Gerasimovich was a competent violinist. Alexander’s son, Arkady, was a pianist taught by John Field. This Irish virtuoso had studied with Mikhail Glinka, Russia’s first important composer. Field, who is buried in Moscow, is remembered as the originator of the piano nocturne, a form later made famous by Chopin whose music Sergei Rachmaninoff himself played as a student, as well as in middle and later life.
Sergei’s grandfather Arkady got up early every morning to practise piano for four to five hours. Likewise Arkady’s son Vassily, Sergei’s father, played piano. Sergei often programmed a piece based on a theme he recalled from his father’s playing. My QUB tutor advises that the piece was Polka de V(orW)R. Its composer was Franz Behr rather than Vassily Rachmaninoff as Sergei may have thought.
The biographer Scott says that it was Sergei’s mother who introduced him to music when she sat him, aged four, at a piano. Scott adds that her role resulted in the engagement of Anna Ornatskaya from St Petersburg Conservatoire as his first piano teacher. Interesting to observe Russian quality and seminal family influence combining from the beginning.
His subsequent musical education was delivered in Russia’s most prestigious places of learning. Aged nine, he was enrolled in the junior section of the St Petersburg Conservatoire; later transferring to Moscow’s Conservatoire under the tutelage of, among others, Russian maestro Nikolai Zverev. That latter part of his musical education led him to encounter Romantic composer and compatriot PyotrTchaikovsky (1840-1893) whom he idolised - and a mutual respect resulted.
Russian music qualities in piano compositions
Early illustrations of composition by Rachmaninoff when still a student contain aspects which attest to their Russian quality. His Russian Rhapsody for two pianos in E Minor, written improvisationally in 1891 aged 18, derives from an unspecified Slavic folk-song. It tears along for nine rhapsodic minutes, a set of variations on the folk theme, in an enthusiastic and competitive pianistic tussle.
Soon after this, he composed five Morceaux de Fantaisie of which the Prelude in C sharp minor commanded instant attention. It remains today as a platform favourite. Sometimes called “The Bells of Moscow,” the notable Russian essence is its mindful resonances of Orthodox church bells. It is a 62-bar stand-alone piece in three sections, with the outer two being "lento" and the contrasting central part being "agitato." To say that small is beautiful understates the Prelude's magnificent impact on the senses. The composer's inspiration was taken from his own dream of bells, heard in the A section, achingly tolling at a funeral service.
These same bells recur after a 3-year period of “paralysing apathy” caused by the disastrous premiere of his Symphony number 1 in 1897. In a watershed change in style and mood, Rachmaninoff deserted “the lively style of the Russian nationalist school” reverting in his Piano Concerto number 2 to reflect the strains of the old Orthodox Russia resonant since his childhood (more under literary influences below).
This concerto's first movement, for instance, with its literally striking piano opening recalls St Sophia’s Cathedral campanology; as does its subsequent Orthodox plainchant melody played by the orchestra. The second movement reuses the opening bars of his 1891 Romance for his Skalon sister relatives at the Ivanovka country estate.
His piano concertos numbers 3 and 4 continued with the sumptuous Russian idioms sweeping listeners along expansively as if (in my ears) to mirror the geographical expanse of Russia itself. These works have captured hearts such that the third concerto received the Hollywood treatment and recognition. Topical in March given the Oscars, Geoffrey Rush won best actor gong for portrayal of pianist David Helfgott in the 1996 film “Shine.”
The fourth piano concerto, as we learned in class, exemplifies Rachmaninoff's compositional technique where the score alternates between major and his beloved minor keys, seamless shifting of the musical mood between happy and sad.
The influence of Orthodox ceremonial bells appears again in other Rachmaninoff compositions, such as and including his 1913 piano sonata number 2 opus 36.
Russian music qualities in choral compositions
One of Rachmaninoff’s favourite compositions was his Bells Symphony, also written in 1913 when he was 40 years old. The four-movement piece’s Russian qualities stem from two parallels between Rachmaninoff and his mentor at the Moscow Conservatoire, Tchaikovsky. It was explained in my QUB course that the Symphony’s first movement reflects sleigh bells; wedding bells are prominent in the second; alarm bells are heard in the third; with the tolling of funeral bells in the final movement. One parallel is that Rachmaninoff’s Bells Symphony (1913) and Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique (his sixth) mirror a picture of Russian life from birth to death, with both having slow finales which eke out sadness.
The other parallel is that Rachmaninoff wrote the Bells at the same composition desk in Rome that Tchaikovsky had used. His family were lodging in Modest (Pyotr’s brother) Tchaikovsky’s flat in Rome. Another example of Russian mentor’s musicianship combining with family, inspiring Sergei to produce high quality music.
Rachmaninoff’s other favourite from his own work is said to have been the All Night Vigil. Written in less than two weeks in early 1915 it is another work brimming with Russian qualities.
The first six of its fifteen movements set texts from the Russian Orthodox All Night Vigil ceremony, its canonical hour of Vespers. So personal was it to Rachmaninoff that he asked for the fifth, Nunc Dimittis (meaning “release now”) to be sung at his own funeral. And as if to emphasise Russian quality, he based ten of the sections on chant to comply with the Orthodox Church’s requirements.
Rachmaninoff’s Vespers culminate from two decades of interest in Russian sacred music. This interest had been initiated by Tchaikovsky’s own setting of the All Night Vigil. The biographer Max Harrison argues that whereas both composers make extensive use of traditional Russian chants, Rachmaninoff’s is more complex in its use of harmony, textual variety and polyphony. Harrison quotes Rachmaninoff’s Vespers being praised as “the greatest musical achievement of the Russian Orthodox Church.”
I concur. The Vespers was performed in Omagh’s Sacred Heart Church by the Chorus of the Mariinsky Theatre under the baton of maestro Valery Gergiev on a hot summer’s day in 2000. Recorded by BBC Radio, it was presented as St Petersburg’s sincere condolences to the victims of the 1998 bombing.
In class we learned about Rachmaninoff’s use of the low B flat. For me, this was the Mariinsky performance’s stand-out choral feature. The unique power and mesmerising beauty of Mariinsky’s bassi profundi voices is a truly Russian art-form, the privilege of a lifetime witnessed live.
Chamber Choir Ireland observe that whereas the All Night Vigil "went largely unheard until the 1960's due to Bolshevik suppression of religious music, it has since earned its rightful place in the repertory next to his symphonies concertos and piano works." I must add that CCI's recent rendition at Clonard Monastery was majestically celestial, right up there with the very best, hitting all the notes with aplomb, not least those of the deep deep basses.
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| Chamber Choir Ireland sing Rachmaninoff's All Night Vigil at Clonard Monastery Belfast on 31 March 2023 |
Russian literary influences
Apart from the influence of composers like his compatriot Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff's works also took inspiration from giants of Russian literature. An early example is the first of his three one-act operas, written in 1892, Aleko based on a 569-line poem The Gypsies by the Romantic Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837).
Aleko’s theme is a jealousy-based crime of passion (nothing exclusively Russian there). In Pushkin’s day, however, during Nicholas I’s régime gypsy orchestras had special allure. Zverev used to take his students, Rachmaninoff included, to fashionable restaurants to hear gypsies play friskas on their cimbaloms.
Aleko’s quality ensured that Rachmaninoff passed his Conservatoire finals with flying colours, a Grand Gold Medal, marking a successful end to his student days. The work was highly admired by both Zverev and by Tchaikovsky.
The other two operas by Rachmaninoff were The Miserly Knight and Francesca Da Rimini, both written in 1904.
Another Rachmaninoff composition was based on the poem “Along the Way” by his contemporary Anton Chekhov (1860-1904, famous for his short stories and for plays like Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard). Rachmaninoff based his composition The Crag on Chekhov’s poem. According to Bertensson, it is set on Christmas Eve in a roadside inn, featuring an encounter between an old man/giant crag and a young lady, all travellers in a waiting room, but travelling in opposite directions - like a tale of unrequited ardour, as are the best love songs.
Orthodox liturgy combines with another Russian literary giant to influence a different work by Rachmaninoff. Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) is referenced, enigmatically at least, at the end of the score in Symphony number 1 in D Minor. “Vengeance is mine I will repay” is the same biblical quotation inscribed in the novelist’s 1878 masterpiece Anna Karenina.
The adverse reaction from Russia’s music establishment to the first symphony’s disastrous 1897 premiere led Rachmaninoff, as we heard above, into a period of “paralysing apathy” - three years of abstinence from composing; and, as if that wasn't punishment enough, it also led to the work’s full quality remaining unrecognised for 70 years.
The October Revolution 1917
All I know is that after working on postponed revisions to his first piano concerto as the Revolution convulsed outside, Rachmaninoff decided on October 25 to leave Russia. Biographer Scott writes that circumstances were scarcely conducive to beginning new compositions; after which, fortuitously, he was invited to tour Scandanavia. Scott adds with pathos that "the family's revolution-disrupted exit meant travelling north through Finland in a peasant sledge to reach the Swedish frontier."
A Belfast-based Russian lady piano teacher recently told me that Rachmaninoff’s compositional muse declined after he fled to America. If the indignant lady is correct, I wonder how he could have composed gorgeous works like the piano concerto number 4, the Corelli Variations, and other works like the Rhapsody on a theme by Paganini. Could Rachmaninoff's compositions in his final 25 years of exile in America and in Europe exhibit American or non-Russian qualities?
The premiere in 1936 of his Symphony number three performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra was dubbed, according to our QUB tutor, by one American critic at the time as "Rachmaninoff's Russian Symphony." In similar vein, an expert commentator on BBC Radio 3's Rachmaninoff anniversary week (01 04 2023) opined that his 1940 composition, the beautiful and boistrous Symphonic Dances, illustrate his nostalgia for Russia. In class we learned that the Dances symphony represents a meeting of the young and older composer using Russian musical idioms alongside brassy traces of American jazz.
It's well known that Rachmaninoff's celebrity preceeded him, so much so that the words "punishing" and "touring schedule" with performances across Europe and the USA are likely to have reduced compositional time. So even if the Russian Romantic composed a smaller quantity of music while in exile, its quality adhered to the highest standards evoking even greater international appreciation and recognition all these years later.
©Michael McSorley 2023
Bibliography
Encyclopoedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/place/Russia/From-Alexander-II-to-Nicholas-II
https://www.history.com/news/vikings-in-russia-kiev-rus-varangians-prince-oleg
Pushkin The Gypsies https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aleksandr-Sergeyevich-Pushkin#ref202053
Friska, Hungarian - Oxford English Dictionary - a fast section in the music of folk-dance or in music of this style
Rachmaninoff Michael Scott (2008)
Sergei Rachmaninoff: a Lifetime in Music Sergei Bertensson and Jay Leyda (1956)
MariinskyOrchestra, notes by Daniel Jaffé, CD by Denis Matsuev, conductor Valery Gergiev Piano Concerto no.2
Rachmaninoff; Life Works Recordings Max Harrison (2006)
