Amiable Ghost

The enormous popular success some few of Rachmaninov’s works had in his lifetime is not likely to last, and musicians never regarded it with much favor.

Talk about wrongheaded prognostication. That’s Eric Blom on Rachmaninoff in the 1954 edition of Grove’s Dictionary, that multivolume chronicle of the academic party line. With the passage of time, audiences have continued to hold Rachmaninoff dear while even some academics and critics have begrudgingly allowed that he might have been something more than a gush machine. Nevertheless, the academy remains suspicious of Rachmaninoff. Some of it comes down to the sheer attractiveness of the music, erotic beauty being among those musical attributes that tend to elicit shudders from cerebral types. Too sweet, they say, too flavorful, too lyrical, too melodic, too rich. As if anybody outside the academy is upset by stuff that’s sweetly flavorful, lyrically melodic, and rich.

Even if the brickbats don’t fly with quite the abandon of the past, Rachmaninoff still comes in for his share of critical thwocks and thwacks apropos his modern-ness, or lack of same. To hear some of those commentators go on, you’d think that old Sergei listened to Stravinsky and Schoenberg and Bartók and decided that he didn’t like any of that crackly stuff and he wasn’t going to write any of it, and they couldn’t make him nyah-nyah-nyah. To be sure, nobody with half a brain would claim that Rachmaninoff was particularly interested in or sympathetic to music of the 1920s or later. He wasn’t.

But accusations of stylistic out-of-whackness are mere propaganda, based on nothing other than misplaced snobbery and moonshine. The critics forget—conveniently or otherwise—that although Rachmaninoff lived until the days of the Second World War, his compositional career was by and large over before WWI broke out. He became a more or less full-time pianist around 1913, at age 40, and remained so until his death in 1943. A few compositions date from the 1930s—the wonderful Symphonic Dances, the popular Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, and the fine Third Symphony—but for the most part he belongs, compositionally at least, with the generation that flourished around the turn of the century, not the folks who came into their own during the ‘20s and ‘30s. Consider that he began writing while Tchaikovsky was still alive and kicking, and that his early writing was strongly influenced not only by the great Russian master, but by Rimsky-Korsakov as well, as one listen to his cute Caprice bohémien of 1894—he was 21 years old—will attest. Rachmaninoff’s first surviving orchestral composition is a Scherzo in D Minor that comes from 1887, when he was all of 14. It’s charming, it’s derivative, it sounds like Mendelssohn on vodka.

Symphony No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 13 dates from 1895 when Rachmaninoff was 22. It’s still a student-ish work, clearly modelled on Tchaikovsky but nonetheless undeserving of the drubbing it received in the critical press. Some, but not all, of the negativity stemmed from the dreadful 1897 premiere with Glazunov on the podium. A near-amateur conductor without effective rehearsal skills or coherent baton technique, Glazunov made unwarranted cuts in the score, tinkered with the orchestration, left passages unrehearsed, then added insult to injury by (reportedly) conducting the concert in an alcoholic fog. The most vicious criticism came from César Cui, a member of the kuchka, or “mighty five” that had declared itself in implacable opposition to all things Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky. Rachmaninoff, as a clear successor to the Tchaikovskian tradition, was not about to escape a sharp spanking from the waspish, politically-soaked Cui. The infamous “conservatory in hell” review was a nastily bigoted assessment of a symphony that was actually more in sympathy with kuchka ideals than Cui’s shrivelled and narrow mind could perceive.

The wounds inflicted by the symphony’s failure were devastating. Rachmaninoff plunged into a clinical depression that caused a crippling writer’s block. Four months of skilled psychotherapy brought about healing and Rachmaninoff returned to composition, with the perennially popular Second Piano Concerto the result. As Rachmaninoff’s biggest hit and best-known work, it has come up against more than its share of critical carping. But consider the date: 1901. Here’s what else was going on in 1901: Mahler’s 4th Symphony, Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsodies, Dvorak’s opera Russalka, Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet, and Grisélidis, a late bloom from that flowery French Romantic, Jules Massenet. Rach2 was no throwback. It was very much an artifact of its own age.

The same holds true for Rachmaninoff’s return to symphonic writing with his masterful Symphony No. 2 in E Minor, Op. 27, completed in 1906 and premiered in 1908. I’ve heard people diss the work as being a 19th-century dinosaur lumbering through the 20th-century landscape, but let’s seek clarity via other works premiered in 1908. Consider that Edward Elgar’s Symphony No. 1—surely the king of English Romantic symphonies—was premiered in 1908, as was the Mahler 7th, as was Alexander Scriabin’s Poème d’Extase. None of those have much to do with Schoenberg, Stravinsky, or the like. To avoid any charges of convenient selectivity, I should point out that Stravinsky’s early tone poem Fireworks—written under Rimsky-Korsakov’s guidance—is a 1908 work, as is Anton Webern’s post-Romantic Passacaglia for orchestra, as is Béla Bartók’s Lisztian first Violin Concerto. (Maybe it’s worth mentioning that two long-lasting popular songs made their debuts in 1908 as well: Take Me Out to the Ball Game and Shine On Harvest Moon.) Overall, the Rachmaninoff 2nd Symphony fits in perfectly with its surroundings, a worthy companion to its distinguished partners.

When crying dinosaur, be sure to compare triceratops to triceratops, not pterodactyl to velociraptor. There’s no point in comparing Rachmaninoff circa 1908 to Stravinsky circa 1930. Consider that a Stravinsky who stopped composing around 1913, as did Rachmaninoff (for the most part), would be seen as a post-Romantic with just one little last-minute fauvist fling (Le Sacre du Printemps), but otherwise would be represented by The Firebird, Petrushka, Fireworks, and that oh-so Tchaikovskian Symphony in E-flat.

Rachmaninoff was a senior citizen when he returned (warily) to composition in the 1930s. Not surprisingly, he mostly retained his late-Romantic mindset and style. To do otherwise would have been career suicide. Unlike Stravinsky, Bartók, Schoenberg, and other colleagues who were just barely scraping by, Rachmaninoff was a superstar. Whereas his contemporaries were enduring public hostility for their mediocre performances with short-lived contemporary music groups and pickup orchestras in grubby halls, Rachmaninoff had the greatest orchestras of the world at his disposal and routinely sold out the highest and holiest temples of Western music. He had a lot on the line, not just a upper-class lifestyle, but also his legacy as a titan of the piano and one of his era’s most beloved composers. He knew that he had a gigantic and appreciative following. Those millions of devoted fans deserved his care and attention; it was they, not the new music journals or the sniping critics, who had elevated him to his Olympian stature. That his language had grown a bit leaner does not necessarily reflect any desire on his part to embrace the overriding musical austerity of the period. After all, most composers prune their style in their later years—think Beethoven, think Verdi, think Sibelius. Rachmaninoff was 60 when he wrote the Paganini Variations, 63 for the Third Symphony, 67 for the Symphonic Dances. His later works pleased nobody at the time—too lean for his Carnegie Hall crowds, too attractive for the eggheads. It would have been easy for him to cough up another Second Piano Concerto or Vocalise, but he didn’t; he stayed true to his convictions. (Stravinsky, on the other hand, did not.)

Rachmaninoff passed away just four days short of his 70th birthday, after a hopeless battle with a rapidly-spreading cancer. Nowadays it’s mostly the aggressive modernist stuff from the 1930s that seems outdated and quaint, while the Rachmaninoff Third Symphony, the Symphonic Dances, and all his lusciously tuneful earlier works are reaching larger and more appreciative audiences than ever before. Even the eggheads show some faint signs of relenting, but let’s not get too carried away here. No matter how the wheels of musical fashion turn, Rachmaninoff’s best work will remain forever beautiful, elegantly crafted, and radiant with innate loveability. And what hardcore academic could ever tolerate that?

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.