All Rachmaninoff - Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra

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mixed chorus, this thirty-five minute work employs and orchestra of three flutes and piccolo, three oboes and
English horn, three clarinets and bass clarinet, three bassoons and contrabassoon, six horns, three
trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, five percussionists (bass drum, cymbals, suspended cymbal, snare
drum, tambourine, tam-tam, triangle, glockenspiel, bells), harp, celesta, upright piano (pianino), organ
(optional) and strings. Zdenek Macal led the most recent series performances of the work in March 1993.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is a particularly attractive figure to American artists, for, in addition to the
intrinsic value of his poems and short stories, he was the first American whose works had a profound
influence in Europe. The musical quality of Poe’s poetry gave it particular appeal to composers. Certainly one
of Poe’s most musical poems is The Bells, written in 1848, just one year before the hard-living poet’s death
(probably from encephalitis). Born of anguished genius, his poem magically evolves with word, rhythm, image
and sound from the silver bells of childhood to the graveside’s clanging iron knell.
Recalling the genesis of his 1913 choral symphony on this poem, Rachmaninoff said: “The inspiration for The
Bells came from an unusual source. I had already during the previous summer sketched a plan for a
symphony. Then, one day I received an anonymous letter from one of those people who constantly pursue
artists with their more or less welcome attentions. The sender begged me to read [Constantin] Balmont’s
wonderful [Russian] translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, ‘The Bells,’ saying that the verses were ideally
suited for a musical setting and would particularly appeal to me. I read the enclosed verses, and decided at
once to use them for a choral symphony. The structure of the poem demanded a Symphony in four
movements. Since Tchaikovsky’s example [Symphony No. 6, “Pathetiqué”], the idea of a lugubrious and slow
finale, which seemed necessary, held nothing strange. This composition, on which I worked with feverish
ardor, is still the one I like best of all my works; after it comes my ‘Vesper Mass’—then there is a long gap
between it and the rest. But this is only by the way.”
In his biography of the composer, Rachmaninoff—The Man and His Music (Oxford University Press, NY, 1950),
John Culshaw writes:
Ironically, it was this work, more than any other, that caused the Soviet attack of 1931. Pravda, in
that year, published a bitter article describing the composer as “the former bard of the Russian
wholesale merchants and the bourgeoisie—a composer who was played out long ago and whose
music is that of an insignificant imitator and reactionary.” Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote the famous
text, is very gently treated in comparison with the unfortunate Balmont, who is called “half-idiotic,
decadent, and mystical.” Whether, in view of Rachmaninoff’s recent acquittal by the Soviet
authorities, The Bells is among those works now reinstated in the U.S.S.R. is unknown. In any case,
its lavish scoring has proved an obstacle to its regular performance anywhere.
Poe’s poem is far too well known to call for any lengthy comment, but it must be remembered that
Rachmaninoff’s music is based on Balmont’s version of the words, which differ considerably from the
original. The difference is interesting and revealing; the original is a masterly piece of imagination,
vivid, strong, and a fearfully objective as the bells whose spirit it seems to capture.… Balmont’s
version is more of a paraphrase taking for its basis only the superficial story and the birth-death
symbolism of Poe’s original. Where Poe is bitter and objective, Balmont is melodramatic and tending
toward subjectivity.
It says much for Rachmaninoff in that his setting reaches at times a degree of imagination worthy of
the original. The poem is clothed in music of remarkable power, and the setting is only a failure on
one point—it loses at once the urge, the unfailing progress of the original poem. The Bells as a poem
is short not in length but in the terrible, almost hysterical momentum with which it carries the reader
from the naïve opening to the cynical fatalism of the end. Balmont lost that momentum in a welter of
melodrama, and Rachmaninoff nearly, but not quite, restored it. He maintains the tension and
excitement by his use of the chorus, which for the larger part of the work is the most important
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