Sergei Vassilyevich Rachmaninov
b. 20 March/1 April 1873 in Oneg, Russia; d. 28 March 1943 in Beverly Hills, California.
Almost 67 years after the death of Sergei Rachmaninov, there is a great deal about the man that is still unknown or conjectural. The image of him, based mostly on the story of the composition of the Second Piano Concerto, is that he was prone to depression; Geoffrey Norris in the New Grove Dictionary states that any ordinary person would feel “down” after a disaster such as the premiere of Rachmaninov’s First Symphony in 1897, so that Rachmaninov could well have been thoroughly unhappy without being clinically depressed.
At the same time, Norris believes that as much as 85% of Rachmaninov’s compositions were written at Ivanovka, an estate owned by the family of his wife, an estate that provided space, peace, quiet, and close contact with nature. In the 25 years of life remaining after fleeing Russia during the October 1917 revolution, Rachmaninov finished only six compositions. Chances are that Rachmaninov was in exile emotionally as well as physically.
Vocalise, Opus 34 no. 14. Composed originally for voice and piano 1912, revised 1915.
Rachmaninov is not especially known in the West as a composer of vocal music. But the fact is that he had a substantial career in Russia conducting opera, in which his work by all accounts was of the highest quality, and he composed enough songs for voice and piano to fill three compact discs. The irony is that his best known song, at least in the West, is the Vocalise, his one song without a text.
The manuscript of the Vocalise is dated “21 September 1915, Moscow,” though a complete draft is known to have been finished before the preceding April. From its first performance in January 1916, this little gem has been known as a distillation of the composer’s melodic and expressive essence. Rachmaninov orchestrated it himself, probably for the recording of it that he made conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1929.
Formally, the Vocalise is a simple two-section shape with each section marked to be repeated. Typically for Rachmaninov, though, his use of keys and harmonies is richly colored, with several surprising turns that keep the music and its structure always sounding fresh.
Piano Concerto no. 3 in D minor, Opus 30. Composed summer 1909, age 36.
Rachmaninov is frequently described as the last of the great instrumental virtuoso-composers. But performing for Rachmaninov was nothing but a means to the end of supporting himself and his family in a comfortable lifestyle that in turn left him free to compose. Considered in this context, the Piano Concerto no. 3, composed as a showpiece to use on his first concert tour of America, was surely designed to be sufficiently close to impossible to send audiences into ecstasies at its execution and sufficiently satisfying as a composition that its composer might not get too irritated playing a few dozen rehearsals and performances of it on the tour.
It is one of the most difficult piano concertos ever written, yet it is one of the most beautiful. When considered next to Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto no. 2, the Second is more tuneful (having spawned two popular songs), but the Third is more refined, more demanding of both its performers and its audiences, and therefore it continues to be a rewarding challenge after many performances.
The concept of variation plays an exceptionally important role in this work. The entire second movement is a series of free variations on the theme played by the orchestra at the start; the “paragraph” with which the soloist enters comprises the first variation. Surprisingly, the third movement—a sonata form, like the first movement—contains a string of variations in place of a conventional development.
Rachmaninov also favored what is known as “cyclic” structures in his large works; that is, a theme introduced in the first movement returns in later movements as a kind of motto, helping to draw the movements into a tighter relationship to each other. The very first theme of the Concerto is just that, making brief appearances in both the second and third movements.
Moreover, Rachmaninov does a very “modern” thing, having a series of closely related themes throughout the Concerto that in effect are variations on a rhythmic motive (short-LONG-short short-LONG-short), that can also be called cyclic recurrences of this idea. Instead of having a simple theme whose variations are progressively more ornamented, here the effect is of progressively stripping off layers of ornamentation. In the coda of the last movement, then, this theme is at last stated in its simplest, clearest, and most beautiful form. In this case, the theme is stated at the end instead of at the beginning. Once that statement is complete, all that remains is one of Rachmaninov’s fabulously exciting endings.
Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich
b. 25 September 1906 in St. Petersburg, Russia; d. 9 August 1975 in Moscow, Russia
Symphony no. 5 in D minor, Opus 47. Premiered 21 November 1937 in Leningrad, age 31.
In 1936 Dmitri Shostakovich faced a frightening crisis. Since January 1934, when his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was premiered in independent productions in Leningrad and Moscow, productions that saw lengthy and profitable runs, the opera and its composer had been the talk of the opera world. Then in late January 1936 Josef Stalin attended a performance of the opera with a delegation of his staff.
Two days later an unsigned editorial appeared in Pravda under the title “Muddle Instead of Music” that criticized Lady Macbeth in terms Elizabeth Wilson describes as “crass.” Overnight, Russia’s leading young composer became an outcast. Shostakovich, at work on his Symphony no. 4, completed it in April 1936; it was to be premiered by the Leningrad Philharmonic in the fall. But after one of the last rehearsals for the premiere Shostakovich “withdrew” the symphony, it was said, under pressure from government officials. The Fourth Symphony was eventually performed, but not until 30 December 1961.
At the time Shostakovich was a free-lance composer with a wife and an infant daughter to support. He composed music for films to make ends meet. In the following spring he began work on a Fifth Symphony, completing the score on 20 July. The anticipation at the first performance at the end of November was intense. Wilson and biographer Laurel E. Fay in their respective books relay several accounts by members of the audience: women and also men wept during the grieving third movement; as the fourth movement was being played people rose to their feet, one by one, culminating in a “deafening ovation” when the music ended; one writer believed that the composer took “ten, twenty, maybe forty” curtain calls; at one point during the ovation the conductor, Yevgeny Mravinsky, grabbed the score of the symphony and held it aloft over his head as if to make absolutely clear who the real hero was that evening.
There is an unmistakable change in the tone of Shostakovich’s compositional voice between the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies. Richard Taruskin, examining this change in his essay, “When Serious Music Mattered,” writes: “Up to [the publication of ‘Muddle Instead of Music,’] Shostakovich had himself been a spoiled brat of sorts. . . . In the aftermath of ‘Muddle,’ Shostakovich renounced his older satirical manner and replaced it with what might best be called heroic classicism. Seemingly in keeping with official demands, he adopted a suitably exalted ‘high style’ for the properly reverential positive treatment of Soviet reality.” Shrewdly, he avoided stating his artistic intentions in words and instead encoded that intention in the music with allusions to songs or other of his compositions. What party bureaucrats and citizens in the audience found in the music largely reflected what they brought to it.
It is only in recent years that two musicologists (working separately), David Rabinovitch and Gerard McBurney, discovered encoded clues to meaning in the fourth movement of the Fifth Symphony. Shostakovich’s only “serious” composition between the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies is Four Romances on Texts of Pushkin, not actually performed until 1940; Shostakovich embedded two fragments of the first song in the fourth movement of the Symphony: the very opening of the voice part becomes the start of the first theme played in octaves at the beginning by the brass; and a repeated figure high in the piano part under the last strophe appears on the harp just before the return of the first theme in the fourth movement. The sense of Pushkin’s poem (English version by Sergei Suslov) suggests strongly that the composer viewed his recent ordeal as a refiner’s fire, consuming his delusions, however painfully, to reveal newly purified visions within:
A barbarous painter may stain a genius’s picture
With his lazy paintbrush,
And foolishly draw
His own lawless pattern over it.
But time goes on, and the wrong paint
Will peel off like worn scales,
And the genius’s masterpiece will emerge
In all its former beauty.
Likewise, delusions peel off
From my tormented soul,
Giving way to visions
Of earlier and purer days.
©2010, David Mead
