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announcement of impending marriage
came as a surprise to all, perhaps most
to his old friend Natalia Skalon. Rachmaninoff’s
pencilled note at the end of
a letter to her in April 1902, announcing
the marriage and begging for a large
wedding present, appears to have put an
end to their long correspondence.
The marriage was celebrated, on a
rainy day with few guests, by a military
chaplain at a barracks. This was because
the couple were first cousins and, not
being churchgoers, could not hope for
an easy exemption to the prohibition
against such marriages. As a wedding
present they received the smaller of the
two houses at Ivanovka, but they left
immediately for three months in Vienna,
Venice, Lucerne and Bayreuth, where
they had tickets offered by Siloti. Rachmaninoff
wrote steadily. His cantata
Spring, Op. 20, written for Chaliapin, has
a plot which may resonate with Canadians:
at the end of a long, hard winter
a peasant broods on his wife’s admitted
unfaithfulness. He plans to kill her, but
the knife falls from his hand with the
coming of Spring.
There is no room here to continue
a detailed account of Rachmaninoff’s
further composing career while in
Russia, though his output was prodigious.
Musical landmarks following
the Second Piano Concerto include the G
minor sonata for cello and piano Op. 19, the
Chopin Variations Op. 22, two operas, The
Miserly Knight and Francesca da Rimini,
and the masterful Second Symphony of
1907, Op. 27. There were the ten Preludes
Op. 23 and the thirteen Preludes Op. 32.
The 1910 Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom
for unaccompanied mixed chorus was
followed by the All-Night Vigil (also
known as Vespers) in 1915. This was one
of Rachmaninoff’s two personal favorite
compositions, the other being The Bells,
Op. 35 for soloists, chorus and orchestra.
The gorgeous Third Piano Concerto was
written in 1909 for the composer’s first
visit to America, and its long, sweeping
melodies seem appropriate for “spacious
skies and amber waves of grain.” There
were the six Études-Tableaux Op. 33 and
the nine Études-Tableaux Op. 39. Like
the Preludes, they were demanding of
the pianist and by no means backwardlooking
musically.
Though we must skip
over some compositions, we
must not forget to mention
Rachmaninoff’s conducting
career, begun at the
Bolshoi Opera in 1904,
acclaimed as giving new
life to that orchestra and its
productions, and continuing
in Russia until 1914 with
the Moscow Philharmonic
Society. He also conducted
in the US, starting with his
first tour in 1910.
It was his conducting
that opened the first doors
in America when the Rachmaninoffs,
practically penniless,
escaped Russia. The
Boston Symphony Orchestra
approached him with a
proposal for 110 concerts
in 36 weeks. He turned
down this and other good
offers. It was for the best
of reasons: he did not feel
he was prepared with repertoire for so
many concerts, and he knew neither
the country nor its audiences. Also, he
had not conducted much in the past few
years, and so in the end he came back to
the piano.
Two reasons are often invoked for the
huge decline in Rachmaninoff’s compositional
output after his emigration to
the United States. The first is that his
inspiration left him, as it had after the
disaster of the First Symphony. A related
suggestion is that he was tied to Russia
and the old life.
However the simplest explanation is
that he was just too busy. In 1919-20, his
first good season in the West, he played
69 concerts. In subsequent years this
hardly declined even for health reasons;
one year he gave 80 performances, and
of course this was while touring. He
continued this gruelling regime right up
to the month before his death in 1943,
becoming a very prosperous classical
musician, sufficiently well off to help
out other émigrés and send money and
medicine back to Russia.
What he did succeed in composing
included the Third Symphony, the Symphonic
Dances and the Piano Concerto No.
4, which, with the Corelli Variations, is
perhaps his most modern work. Although
Earl Wild has a fine performance of this
concerto on Chesky, it and most others
are of a drastically-cut later version, so
typical of Rachmaninoff. The first version
has been recorded by Ashkenazy on
Ondine and is well worth a comparison.
You may be able to form your own idea
about whether Rachmaninoff was right
to revise it.
According to Rachmaninoff’s biographer
Max Harrison (2005), what
especially distinguished Rachmaninoff
was a sense of the form of a composition,
which allowed him to find a new
and valid approach to any piece. He
quotes Arthur Rubinstein as saying of
Rachmaninoff’s playing that “there was
always the irresistible sensuous charm,
not unlike (violinist Fritz) Kreisler’s.”
Rachmaninoff was well-known for
the size of his hands, which allowed him
to stretch over a twelfth interval on the
keyboard. Along with these “spider fingers”
and his height, other clues suggest
he was affected by Marfan’s Syndrome,
a hereditary disorder of the connective
tissue.
Rachmaninoff was a born survivor,
and if this was a handicap, it never
showed.
ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine 69
Square Rachmaninoff in Paris
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