English Deutsch Français An introduction to Rachmaninoff's music by Geoffrey Norris
As a pianist, Rachmaninoff was lionized wherever he went; as a conductor, he was
praised to the skies. Yet he thought of himself first and foremost as a composer, and it
is in his music that his lasting legacy lies. Although, naturally enough, he became known
primarily for his piano works during his own lifetime, he transcended the traditional
image of the virtuoso/composer by writing imaginatively and idiomatically in a wide
variety of genres: aside from the four piano concertos, the
Paganini Rhapsody and
the several series of solo piano pieces, Rachmaninoff was drawn into the world of opera,
to symphonies, to the choral repertory, chamber music and song.
From his student days until he left Russia in 1918, Rachmaninoff composed more or less
continuously. After a conservatory education in Moscow which left him with the highest
accolades anybody had ever known, he swiftly made his mark: it was not only the Prelude in
C# minor that caught the public’s attention, but also his opera
Aleko, a work
that found particular favour with Tchaikovsky. Thereafter, Rachmaninoff broke loose from
the influences of Tchaikovsky and of his teachers Arensky and Taneyev, and established his
own highly individual style, based on distinctively broad, soaring melody, a harmonic
succulence and, in the orchestral works, a richness tempered with the utmost
discrimination in the choice and blending of instruments.
The critical mauling given to his First Symphony at its premiere in 1897 stemmed the
flow of music for some three years, but the success of the Second Piano Concerto in 1901
renewed his confidence, and for almost two decades Rachmaninoff found the necessary
inspiration to write the vast majority of his major works, usually while he was in the
peace and quiet of his remote estate at Ivanovka, deep in the countryside to the
south-east of Moscow.
This craving for tranquillity became even more pronounced after he left Russia and
settled in the west: his new, hectic career as a concert performer allowed him little time
to compose, but he found, in the Villa Senar, which he built on the shores of Lake
Lucerne, a similar, Ivanovka-like silence in which he could conceive his late
masterpieces. Throughout his music, wherever it was composed and however exuberant it may
sound, there are hints of darker colours, as in his symphonic poem
The Isle of the Dead,
the Second Symphony or the finale of his great choral symphony
The Bells. Even when
Rachmaninoff’s music is apparently at its most open and passionate, there is always
an intriguing, underlying strand of private emotion.
Geoffrey Norris, 1994
Max Reger
