Patrick Bade
Sergei Rachmaninoff: 1873-1943

Patrick Bade | Sergei Rachmaninoff 1873-1943 | 05.22.22

Visuals displayed and music played throughout presentation.

- Right, Rachmaninoff. So, he’s been one of the most loved composers of the 20th century. He’s also been one of the most critically reviled composers, certainly right up to the 1960s when I was listening to a lot of Rachmaninoff. I was very, very keen on him in my early teens and I used to get very upset when I read reviews in the newspapers talking about, “Oh, Rachmaninoff’s rich pudding sound,” subfilms, and all this kind of thing. Those attitudes have changed. It’s similar to critical attitudes to Puccini. Critics used to say, “Oh, Puccini, yes, it’s popular, but the popularity won’t last. These reputations will not last with composers like Rachmaninoff and Puccini.” Well, they were wrong, and they’ve been proved very, very wrong, and wherever those critics are in heaven or hell, I hope they’re eating humble pie now with regards to Rachmaninoff and Puccini. So, this is his parents. He was born into the minor Russian aristocracy. His mother looks quite a loving mother here, but apparently she, rather like Tchaikovsky, she was a very cruel woman, and didn’t have a warm relationship with her son. His father was a feckless type, completely irresponsible, got through all the money that he got for his wife when he married her, and they landed up in very straightened circumstances. Hmm, frozen. Why is that?

Yeah, here is Rachmaninoff age nine. He was a rather melancholy, unhappy child who didn’t seem to be interested in anything at all except playing the piano. He wasn’t good at schoolwork. And so by the time he was 13, as I said, the family were in dire financial straits. That was the end of his childhood. They realised that he had such an exceptional talent and this could be useful to them financially, and they sent the him off to this man. He’s called Nikolai Zverev. He really became a sort of substitute father for him. He was what the Germans called a pedagogue, a very high-level piano teacher, and he produced great piano virtuosi. And for seven years, he was looking after Rachmaninoff as a kind of father figure. You can see Rachmaninoff standing directly behind him, and he actually looked after all his needs. He paid for his feeding, clothing, accommodation, and gave his tuition to Rachmaninoff for free. So, Rachmaninoff certainly owed a lot to him. They eventually had a sad falling out, at least briefly, because Zverev groomed him to be a great pianist, and Rachmaninoff, that wasn’t enough. He wanted to be a composer. So, already in his early twenties, he was establishing reputation as a great pianist and as a composer. He has several early successes, notably the famous, or even notorious, “C-Sharp Minor Prelude.”

If I don’t run out of time, I’m going to finish off this talk with Rachmaninoff playing that, although he came to hate it because it was so popular. He was always in demand and he was always required to play it as an encore to every concert. 1897, he composed his first symphony, and the premiere turned into a complete fiasco. It wasn’t well rehearsed. The conductor, the composer Glazunov, was apparently drunk and he didn’t like the music, and it was savaged by the critics, and this was a real blow to Rachmaninoff. He went into a deep depression and had a couple of years of total creative block. And the symphony was never published, or not published at the time, and never performed again in his lifetime. And the parts, orchestral parts, were discovered after Rachmaninoff died, and the symphony was reconstructed, and it’s now performed, actually, quite often. You think, “What was the problem?” It’s an extraordinary piece for a very young artist. It’s very powerful, very exciting, very, very Tchaikovsky. You can hear the influence of Tchaikovsky. I’m just going to play you the opening, particularly the way the wind instruments sort of played tag with one another with bits of melody. That’s a very Tchaikovskian device.

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So, after a couple of years where, as I said, he was unable to compose, he went into therapy. He must be a real pioneer example of somebody who benefited from therapy, ‘cause just a couple of years later, Edvard Munch would also go through a crisis and come through it with the help of therapy. And so he starts to compose again, and he composed what will become one of his most widely loved works, The “Second Piano Concerto.” I’m going to play the opening of the first movement here. It starts with a series. It’s a very original, very unusual opening, just a series of chords, and then we launch into this amazing tune. I mean, we’ve heard some wonderful Russian tunes in my last few lectures. It seems to be in the Russian DNA to be able to write these very long, breathed, extensive melodies, but nobody does it quite like Rachmaninoff. This must be one of the longest melodies. Of course, the music is for, particularly for Brits of a certain generation, I suppose my generation and older, they can’t quite dissociate this music from the film “Brief Encounter,” and that was a sort of double-edge thing, I think, for Rachmaninoff. Again, it’s another reason why snobbish critics took against him.

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Now, that is really some tune. I think people who are completely stuck in the Austro-German formal tradition can have a problem with Rachmaninoff. 'cause that’s not how he composes. Was not how Tchaikovsky composed, either. With Rachmaninoff in the end, it all comes down to song. It’s really songful, so you don’t get that kind of dense musical argument that you might get in a piece of chamber music or a symphony of the Austro-German tradition, Rachmaninoff loved chamber music. He loved playing it, and he formed a lifetime partnership with the great Austrian violinist Fritz Kreisler and they made a number of records together. He didn’t write a lot of chamber music, but I want to play you a movement from his “Cello Sonata,” which dates from very soon after the “Second Piano Concerto,” and as you’ll hear, it’s a song, really. The cello is singing and the piano is accompanying, and it’s another drop-dead gorgeous tune.

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The second symphony, unlike the first, was a huge success, and it’s always been very popular with the public, certainly not necessarily with the critics. That review I quoted must have been in the mid-'60s that outraged me at the time about Rachmaninoff having a rich pudding sound was in a very dismissive comment on this symphony. But so yeah, it is very luscious. It’s one of his most sumptuous works. Once again, I’d like to play you the second movement, which, again, could be regarded as a song written, at least the opening of it, written for the clarinet.

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A worked that Rachmaninoff was particularly proud of, and it doesn’t involve a piano, just an orchestra, is the symphonic poem “Isle of the Dead,” and it was inspired by this painting. Well, actually, not necessarily this one 'cause there are five versions of this painting, by Arnold Bocklin called “The Isle of the Dead,” which had a huge reputation at the time, and Bocklin, he was called the Swiss Michelangelo, and he was regarded as a great genius in the years around 1900. His artistic reputation, this is Bocklin’s, was punctured by the art critic Julius Meier-Graefe, who, taking a leaf out of Nietzsche’s book, Nietzsche tried to puncture the reputation of Wagner with an essay that he called “Der Fall Wagner,” “The Wagner Case,” and Julius Meier-Graefe wrote an essay entitled “Der Fall Bocklin” in 1905, just a year or so before actually Rachmaninoff started on this work. Now a critic once said that “You feel that Beethoven, Fate knocks on the door. In the music of Rachmaninoff, Fate kicks the door in.” And I’m going to play you a passage where you won’t have any trouble, I think, when spotting the moment where Fate really kicks the door in, a very dramatic moment, and then we hear the slow, steady, menacing tread of death coming toward us exorably.

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The “Third Piano Concerto” was written in advance of a tour of United States, and it was to demonstrate Rachmaninoff’s own pianistic skills, and it has a reputation for being the most strenuous and most technically difficult of all piano concerts in his standard repertoire. It was dedicated to the great virtuoso pianist Josef Hoffman, but he took one look at it and said, “Oh, no, I’m not going to do that fact.” In fact, he never performed it. Rachmaninoff found it pretty difficult himself, and he later claimed he thought the only person who could really play it competently was Horowitz. But so here is, actually, this is neither Rachmaninoff nor Horowitz. It’s another great Russian virtuoso. This is Emil Gilels.

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That’s an awful lot of notes, and it’s the pianistic equivalent of a heavy workout at the gym. Now, another work of Rachmaninoff’s that he rated amongst his own works is, it’s really a choral symphony, entitled “The Bells,” and it’s a setting of a Russian translation of the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Well, if you’ve followed any of my earlier talks, you’ll know how important bells are in Russia. They’re really pervasive, and the of bells comes again and again in the music of Rosowsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and other Russian composers, and very excitingly here in Rachmaninoff’s symphony “The Bells.”

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As bells are essential to the sound of Russian music, so is the sound of the choruses of the orthodox liturgical tradition, and Rachmaninoff wrote one great work in this tradition, his “Vespers: Night Vigils,” of the Orthodox tradition. This was written in 1915 during the First World War, and it makes use of something pretty well unique to Russia, which is the Russian bass voice. It goes down to impossibly low notes. I don’t know how good your sound equipment is. I know it’s very variable, but if you have good sound equipment, everything around you’ll be vibrating as the basses go downwards. So, follow the bottom line of this. It’s a difficult work to perform in the West. The last time I heard it in London, they had to actually import basses from Russia and Scandinavia to reinforce the bassline.

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Rachmaninoff wrote three operas, none of which has really managed to establish itself. There’s just one aria from his first opera, “Aleko,” which is often done as a recital piece, and the other two operas are “The Miserly Knight” and “Francesca da Rimini.” “The Miserly Knight,” I have seen it once in a semi-staged performance during the , and actually, no, that really did disturb me and shock me 'cause the text is so extreme in its anti-Semitism. The character of the Jewish money lender is the most horrible, grotesque, antisemitic caricature, and so I think it’s actually unstageable, especially today, of course, when you have surtitles, and you couldn’t perform it in an opera house. And so why is this? Well, first of all, I’ll say this is Pushkin. It’s based on Pushkin, so Rachmaninoff is setting somebody else’s text. The only thing I can think of to say in favour of both Pushkin and Rachmaninoff as far as this opera is concerned is that all three characters are horrible. The two Christian characters are every bit as nasty, actually, as the Jewish character. And so Rachmaninoff, of course, as an aristocrat, an aristocratic Russian, would’ve imbibed anti-Semitism with his mother’s milk, or shall we say, with his wet nurse’s milk, as no aristocratic Russian woman would have breastfed her child.

But there’s no evidence apart from this opera, for me, that Rachmaninoff was ever anti-Semitic. Quite, quite the opposite. It’s not a case of some of his best friends were Jewish. Nearly all of his best friends. I think probably all the really close friends he had through his life were Jews, and they certainly came to his help when he needed it. When he fled from Russia in 1917 after the revolution, found himself stranded in Copenhagen, it was Ignatz Friedman who gave him the money to get to America. Josef Hoffman, who was a rival pianist, put him in touch with his agent. Kreisler and Efrem Zimbalist, they all rallied 'round to help him, and certainly in later years, Horowitz was, I suppose, his closest friend. Here he is on a transatlantic voyage. I’m presuming that’s somewhat later. And in the middle with his two daughters in his country house in Russia. Like so many Russians who were forced to leave, he had this terrible, terrible nostalgia for Russia for the rest of his life. I think on the whole, Rachmaninoff’s marriage was a good one and a happy one, though he seems to have had a very turbulent and passionate affair with the Jewish singer Nina Koshetz just before the revolution, or during the revolution, even, just before he left Russia. She claimed this later.

Some people have doubted what she said. I think I believe her if only because Rachmaninoff wrote a whole cycle of love songs and dedicated them to her, and they’re wonderful records. I recommend going on YouTube, Nina Koshetz, and listening to her renditions of Rachmaninoff’s songs. So, leaving Russia was a terrible, terrible wrench. You know, he was uprooted, and there’s nearly a decade of creative silence from him. I mean, one reason for that was that he had to start again from scratch. He certainly developed very expensive lifestyle tastes. He liked expensive cars, he liked smart clothes, and so on, so he needed to earn a lot of money. And the way to do that was constantly touring and giving concerts. So, it wasn’t till 1926 that he wrote another major work, which is his “Fourth Piano Concerto,” and the reception was extremely discouraging. The critics were dismissive, and in the beautiful second movement, the American public giggled. And the reason for that was there’d just been a very popular pop song based on the nursery rhyme Three Blind Mice.“

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And this is, quite by coincidence, identical to the very beautiful, very melancholy theme of the second movement, so here is Rachmaninoff playing that theme.

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In the last 20 years of his life, Rachmaninoff wrote only a handful of works. As said, the public loved him, but the critics were unrelentingly hostile. Must have been quite hard for him to keep going. The one major success he had in the later part of his career was in 1934 with the "Rhapsody on the Theme of Paganini,” and particularly the variation, it’s a set of variations, that I’m going to play you became hugely, hugely popular. This is Rachmaninoff, again, playing piano.

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So, in the interwar period, he was very peripatetic. He was travelling around the world, but he divided his life, and he never really felt comfortable in America. And when he was in America, he tried to create a little Russia around him. He mainly mixed with Russian-speaking people, he had Russian servants, and he ate Russian food, but he preferred being in Europe, and he built himself this rather extraordinary Bauhaus, modernist villa in Switzerland, which, I’ve been told, has just been acquired by the local government in Switzerland and is now going to be open to the public. This is what it looks like today. You can see him at his piano, and his piano is still there in the house today. So, he had one more great masterpiece in him, “Three Symphonic Dances,” and it’s a thrilling piece. In some ways, it’s unexpected. It doesn’t have a piano part. It shows what an extraordinary orchestrator, he’s a great, great master of orchestral colour, and you hear that in this piece, and of course, the piece I’ve just played you is very lush, isn’t it?

But I would say the three dances is more acerbic, more hard-edged than the image that most people have of Rachmaninoff. Now, I think it was last year, the American Record Company of Marston published a very extraordinary document, an incredible thing to come to light after all this time. Rachmaninoff didn’t have great confidence in the conductor Eugene Ormandy, who’d taken over the Philadelphia Orchestra from Stokowski, and he was going to give the premiere and he wasn’t really sure that Ormandy was up to it, so he offered to go to Ormandy’s house and play it through for him on the piano, and rather sneakily, Eugene Normandy secretly recorded him. Rachmaninoff never knew that this recording had been made and would probably be very upset to know that it existed and has now been published, but for any geeks like me who like historical recordings and are into all of this stuff, this is the most amazing document. You can hear him talking and explaining things and there are certain points where he starts to sing along with the melodies. So, here is a bit of this secret recording made of Rachmaninoff demonstrating his “Three Symphonic Dances.”

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Here is the same passage played on the orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, with Ormandy who gave the premiere.

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Rachmaninoff wrote a number of very beautiful songs. He’s a great songwriter like Tchaikovsky and this is my absolute favourite. In fact, I think it’s my favourite song by any Russian composer. It’s normally translated as “Cease thy singing, maiden fair,” but here it’s, “Oh, never sing to me again,” and we’re going to hear again the wonderful Latvian soprano Inese Galante.

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It’s a great test, as you shall hear, of the ability of the singer to find down the voice and float voice and do a beautiful diminuendo. She has to do it at the end.

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So, Russian actors had those great inflammatory outbursts of gut-wrenching emotion, and then the lovely, exquisite downfall. Now, I have to finish, of course, with the piece that Rachmaninoff finished almost every concert he ever gave, which is the famous “C-Sharp Minor Prelude,” although he came to dread it, and this is a piece that has very personal memories for me. When I was at boarding school, I did have piano lessons, but I was very un-gifted and I was very lazy and I never practised the pieces I was supposed to play for my lesson, and I got out of it 'cause I had the most delightful young piano teacher, Ms. Barnes, and every week, I would turn up knowing I hadn’t prepared the piece that I was supposed to play, and I’d say to her, “Oh, please, please, please, play me the 'C-Sharp Minor Prelude.’ I so need to hear the ‘C-Sharp Minor Prelude,’” and she would play me the “C-Sharp Minor Prelude,” and then she’d move on to something else. And so my piano lessons became private recitals week after week, and I think I did benefit from it, but not quite in the way intended, but here is Rachmaninoff playing the famous “C-Sharp Minor Prelude.”

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Good, well, let’s see what you have to say.

Q&A and Comments

Thank you, Jennifer. Yes, he was famously austere, and as you say, that’s a contrast with the lushness of some of the music. Harriet, yes, well, of course, I agree with you. I mean, there’s a whole ‘nother issue, of course, as even if Mengelberg had been a terrible collaborator, ban him. I mean, I heard the most extraordinary discussion on the radio recently, I could hardly believe my ears, of James Levine. Should we ever listen to his recordings again because he’s been accused of being a paedophile? I thought, “What is this? That’s crazy. That’s really crazy to me.” Thank you. Thank you, Harriet and Cheryl. Was Rachman, yes, you’re quite right. The “anger of God theme,” I should have pointed out, 'cause you heard it in “The Isle of the Dead.” You know, it was repeated in that moment where you have the idea of death coming towards you in a slow tread. That’s the repeat of the theme, and Rachmaninoff man does use it in a lot of his works. “Not sure if I still like his music.” Oh dear. That’s sad. “The Bells” was written just before the First World War. It does sound very modern. It’s actually ahead of “The Rite of Spring,” and it doesn’t sound such a different sound world.

Yes, the film “Shine,” of course, with David Helfgott about his struggle with mental health and his wish to play “Rach Three,” the most difficult of all the concertos. Can, I explain? I don’t know why Russian basses. It’s a physical thing in their DNA. “Fourth movement, entire theme of Rachmaninoff "Fantasy Two Pianos” named is of church bells.“ Actually, funnily enough, it’s one piece by Rachmaninoff I don’t think I’ve ever heard. For the premiere of "Vespers,” I think the auditions across Russia could only hire 12 basses who could sing them, so even in Russia, yes, there’s a famous quote, isn’t there? Somebody’s telling Rachmaninoff that the basses he wants are “as rare as asparagus in December,” somebody said to him. Wonderful performance of “Vespers” in New York’s Voices of Ascension in 2015. They had to engage additional bass voices, too. Oh, the blizzard, that must have really added to it. Oh, I’m sure there’s only been one performance of “The Miserly Knight” at the Albert Hall, Joan, so it must have been the same performance we saw, and I wonder if you had the same reaction to it as I did. I played the Gilels’s “Rach Three.” I know there’s several, aren’t there? And the one I played is conducted by Andre Cluytens. How much of the Rachmaninoff discography comes from the, I didn’t play any of those piano roll recordings. All the recordings I played were conventional recordings with a microphone. I’m not totally convinced by those, and because, you know, they’re mechanical pianos. It seems to me that, I mean, they capture certain things, but they don’t really capture the touch of the pianist.

Q: “What was the Paganini theme on which he wrote his variations?” A: It’s the same thing, 'cause it’s been used again and again, that Paganini theme. Brahms used it as well.

The secret recording, yes. Well, I urge you all to buy it from Marston Records. It’s a two-disc set. It’s very, very interesting if you love Rachmaninoff.

It says there’s a two-piano arrangement of “Symphonic Dances.” Yes, well, it’s a very complex piece. I think you need two pianos. This is Sheila saying her younger sister, a very successful musical student who won big scholarships singing, piano, and opera, that she was too small to make it a concert pianist. Yes, 'cause Rachmaninoff, of course, famously had these absolutely enormous hands. I read an article recently that was saying that he was some kind of medical freak, and there was actually a particular medical condition he had that was responsible for the huge size of his hands. He’s certainly one of the greatest pianists of all time, and not only in his own music. If you ask me what is the greatest piano recording of anything, it would probably be the Rachmaninoff version of the Chopin “B-Flat-Minor Sonata,” another thing you should definitely look out for. It’s an incredible performance.

Q: Is that the the most famous of the Paganini variations? A: In fact, another… I’m not sure. I’ll try and find that. I need to investigate that.

It’s an interesting idea. Yes, those melancholy, sighing melodies. Thank you. Thank you very much, Marcel.

Q: “What happens to those very gifted singers whose life was their voice when they get old?” A: God, that’s a thing. That is such a thing. It’s very, very difficult for singers to know when to retire, as well. Many singers go on too long and spoil their reputations.

Yes, his wife and his children went with him to Denmark and the USA and to Switzerland. They did indeed. He was 1873 to 1943, his dates.

Q: “Was Rachmaninoff’s music played in Russia?” A: That’s interesting. It was initially played in Russia, then he signed some kind of petition against something that was happening under Stalin, and his music was banned for several years. But once America and Russia were allies again, his music was performed again during the Second World War.

“He was also a teacher. Professor Alexander Sverjensky, head of the Sydney Conservatorium, invited me to study with him when I was young. His teaching style was very much in tune as Rachmaninoff’s approach.” I didn’t know that. That’s interesting. Well, I think I’ve answered the question about Stalin. Thank you, Lynette. I don’t know of any other, I mean, quite the opposite. As I said, Rachmaninoff clearly had a profound sympathy or affection for Jews. That’s very clear from everything I know about him. I don’t know of any, and that’s exceptional, I would say, of somebody from a Russian aristocratic background of that generation. Andrew Lloyd Weber. Secret Ormandy recording. I’m glad you all like that. Right.

Thank you all for your very nice comments. Oh, I think Rachmaninoff really needs to take the credit. The three greatest pianists. The clear winner was Rachmaninoff ahead of Rubinstein and Horowitz. That’s very interesting. Thank you. Yes, that’s what I was talking about. The medical condition is Marfan’s syndrome. I read an article about that. And well, it’s lovely for me to have something to do on a Sunday since I certainly don’t go to church. Dinu Lipatti. Oh, now there is, of course, a very different kind of pianist, but just out-of-this-world, angelic playing, Dinu Lipatti.

So, that’s it for today, and then I’m onto the very exciting subject of Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes in this coming week.

Thank you, everybody. Bye-Bye.