Rachmaninoff: The Last Great Romantic
And what he lost and found in America.
IN THE 1965 MOVIE DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, based on Boris Pasternak’s novel, a musical enthusiast and an ever-so-knowing medical professor exchange opinions on a piano piece being played at a swank Christmas party. “But Boris, this is genius,” the lady swoons. Her companion, who can’t take any more, replies, “Really? I thought it was Rachmaninoff. I’m going for a smoke.”1 Already in the last sweet days that Russia’s haute bourgeoisie enjoyed before the Great War and the Revolution ended civilized life there, Sergei Rachmaninoff was an equivocal figure, whose stunning popularity made his accomplishment suspect among the cognoscenti. The seismic transformation of the musical landscape in the intervening century has left his reputation all the more vexed and uncertain—although perhaps, with his popularity no longer clouding our vision, we can now better judge his musical achievements on their merits.
In her 2023 book Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff in Exile, English music critic Fiona Maddocks leaves no doubt that Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) belongs to the ranks of the excellent—not only as a composer, but also as a pianist, and most impressively as a courageous, generous, and warm-hearted man. She suggests how much was lost when Rachmaninoff, in his prime at 44, left Russia behind for good in December 1917 and struck out for the West and freedom—first Sweden and Denmark for nearly a year, then America, where he arrived just as the Armistice did and in the midst of the influenza pandemic. His personal material losses receive Maddocks’s compassionate attentiveness: “He left behind many members of his family, his fortune, his apartment in Moscow, the estate of Ivanovka, his land, his horses, the trees he had planted, the lilacs he loved, his pianos, his personal belongings, the world he knew and loved.” Such sorrows, if mostly on a smaller scale, were the lot of multitudes who were fortunate enough to depart Russia and the various colonies of the twentieth-century Soviet empire while they still had the chance.
Some of those whom Rachmaninoff left behind registered their displeasure: “You abandoned Russia,” wrote Anton Chekhov’s widow, the actress and musician Olga Knipper-Chekhova, in a 1918 New Year’s letter, barely able to contain her anger and dismay, hoping there was still a chance he’d come back where he belonged when things settled down.
THERE WOULD BE NO GOING BACK. The Revolution had befouled Russian life beyond all hope of cleansing. Rachmaninoff would recollect, “I saw with terrible clearness that here was the beginning of the end—an end full of horrors the occurrence of which was merely a matter of time. The anarchy around me, the brutal uprooting of all the foundations of art, the senseless destruction of all means for its encouragement, left no hope of a normal life in Russia.” The homeland held no refuge from “this witches’ Sabbath,” although for a time Rachmaninoff was so absorbed in the work of revising his First Piano Concerto that even tuning out the ever-present revolutionary street violence, “which turned the existence of a non-proletarian into hell on earth, was comparatively easy for me. I sat at the writing table or the piano all day without troubling about the rattle of machine guns and rifle-shots. I would have greeted any intruder with the answer that Archimedes gave the conquerors of Syracuse.” (According to legend, the Syracusan polymath, deep in geometric speculation, oblivious to the Roman conquest of his city then underway, told the soldier who had come to present him before the invaders’ commander, “Do not disturb my circles.” The soldier, understandably annoyed, struck the uncooperative genius dead on the spot.)
Clearly Rachmaninoff did well to get out of Russia while the getting was good. Aesthetic raptures were a dangerous proposition in the heyday of Soviet Man. The list of those artists murdered outright, driven to suicide, or gradually frightened to death by Lenin or Stalin and their apparatchiks is a roll of honor—poets such as Osip Mandelstam, Nikolai Gumilev, and Daniil Kharms, and writer Isaac Babel, Marina Tsvetayeva, and theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold. The extraordinary defiant poet Anna Akhmatova and the great composers Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich managed to survive Stalinism, but she was forbidden publication for much of her life and the two musicians were harried into at least the appearance of conformity with socialist artistic prescriptions.
Rachmaninoff’s parents lacked the means to establish him in a military career like his father’s; when at age 10 he won a scholarship to the St. Petersburg Conservatory, the way was prepared for an assault upon all available musical glory. There would, however, be delays on the glory road: his inclination to laziness and truancy, exacerbated by grief over the deaths of his two sisters and the separation of his parents, led to his academic failure at St. Petersburg. A second chance, in Moscow, had a happier result. On his final exams Tchaikovsky himself “added a plus sign to the highest mark available, 5.” Surviving intermittent periods of depression, self-doubt, and creative barrenness, Rachmaninoff established his musical reputation in Russia with works such as his Second Piano Concerto and his Prelude in C# minor (the latter written when he was 19 and still a student) gaining him widespread acclaim and entrée into rarefied social circles. He was also in demand as a conductor, leading the forces at the Bolshoi Theater and other grand venues, in music that ranged from Borodin and Mussorgsky to Berlioz, Bizet, Haydn, Debussy, and Richard Strauss; and he performed his own works and others’ at the piano.
In leaving Russia permanently in 1918, Rachmaninoff deliberately cut himself off from the most splendid and most enduring part of his musical vocation: no longer primarily a composer, he would stake his and his family’s future on his talents as a pianist. Fortunately, these were superb; many who know about such matters think him the foremost keyboard virtuoso of the century. Like most every immigrant fresh off the boat, he needed to make a living in the new world in a hurry, and accustomed as he was to the comforts of prosperity, that meant earning enough to afford lots of the best of everything. Rachmaninoff was already acquainted somewhat with the life of an itinerant performing artist. For the 1909–10 musical season, he had ventured to the United States, where among many engagements he had played his Third Piano Concerto in New York with Gustav Mahler conducting.
Before long he commanded top dollar. In 1920 he signed up with the Victor Talking Machine Company, agreeing to record twenty-five pieces over five years, for an ironclad annual advance against royalties of $15,000, or some $225,000 in today’s money. RCA Victor would supplement his income from performing, teaching, and composing for many years, though he had to fight off nerves in the recording studio that he did not feel in the concert hall. The unsettling thought of permanence—performing for the ages—bedeviled this most fastidious of artists, who could not stand the possibility that some imperfection might ruin his performance for all to hear, world without end.
For live performance Rachmaninoff would assume an air of mandarin imperturbability. He earned that formidable demeanor. The slothful practice habits of his youth were laid to rest, as he prepared with the utmost diligence, worked to expand his repertoire, and played in public every chance he had. For his first season following his return to America in late 1918, he agreed to twenty-five recitals as a solo pianist. In addition, the temporary absence of the Polish master Ignacy Paderewski, who took a break from performing from 1919 to 1921 to serve as the prime minister and foreign minister of the Polish republic, newly restored from foreign dominion, left Rachmaninoff in command of the concert stage. During that spell he composed only a cadenza for the Second Rhapsody by Liszt. At first the change in activity invigorated him for the work at hand. In an interview for a music magazine he declared that he was in the right place at the right time. “I am in America at present for the reason that nowhere else in the world is there such music as there is here now. You have the finest orchestras, the most musically appreciative people, and I have more opportunity to hear fine orchestral works, and more opportunity to play.”
This great opportunity got to be too much of a good thing, and rather quickly at that. His breakneck schedule—over sixty concerts in 1921–22 and over seventy the following season—ground him down; he required daily electrical therapy for headaches and pains in his hands, and above all he missed composing. To an intimate friend he confessed his unhappiness in 1922:
I dislike my occupation intensely. For this whole time I have not composed one line. I only play the piano and give a great many concerts. For four years now I practice, practice. I make some progress but actually the more I play, the more clearly do I see my inadequacies. If I ever learn this business thoroughly, it may be on the eve of my death. Materially I am quite secure. Bourgeois!
Two years later, as Rachmaninoff was vacationing in Europe, his friend the émigré composer Nikolai Medtner asked him why he didn’t compose anymore, and he answered with a question of his own: “How can I compose without melody?” America suited his business needs but the creative spontaneity of his soul was balked there. Losing Russia, he had surrendered the essence of his musical gift.
The authorities in the motherland treated the fugitive master with open contempt; his semi-serious self-castigating outcry “Bourgeois!” parodied the boilerplate animadversions of the cultural commissars. Dismissed as a “reactionary,” he was becoming a musical non-person in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, in the United States, his refined artistry was being subjected to the blandishments of popular culture at its most piercingly vulgar. Tin Pan Alley hacks, as well as some more respected composers, latched onto his C# minor Prelude and made it peculiarly their own: ragtime, foxtrot, and jazz versions tickled American ears. Maddocks writes, “After Duke Ellington’s jam session was broadcast live from New York’s Cotton Club in 1938, the press reported that he had played a swing version of the ‘immortal Prelude in C sharp minor,’ an old piece written by Rachmaninoff ‘in the eighteenth Century.’”
RACHMANINOFF’S MUSICAL TASTE was rather old-fashioned, if not as antique as that unwitting journalistic gibe suggests. As Maddocks writes, Liszt, Chopin, and Schumann made up his basic repertoire, while he left the emerging—and increasingly established—modernist composers, from Stravinsky to Bartok to Copland, to the ministrations of other pianists. He happened to share this preference for the great Romantics with the leading Russian pianists, as became clear when a tentative political thaw enabled some Soviet artists to appear in the United States.
In due course, with the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War, as the traditional monuments of Russian culture were invoked as sources of militant uplift for the masses, Rachmaninoff became respectable in the Soviet Union. At the same time, American critics and certain waspish colleagues were ever more severe in their appraisal of what Maddocks calls, without meaning to cast aspersions, Rachmaninoff’s “retrograde” style. Stravinsky, who was Rachmaninoff’s neighbor in Beverly Hills, believed that in his latest works his colleague had “sold out to the sound of Hollywood,” in Maddocks’s words.
For Rachmaninoff had broken his long silence and begun writing music again—intermittently but in earnest, and in his familiar Romantic mode. The six works that he wrote in exile between 1926 and 1940 are worthy of the Russian artist who gave us such prerevolutionary masterpieces of high Romanticism as his Second Symphony, Second and Third Piano Concertos, “All-Night Vigil,” and the one-act opera Francesca da Rimini. Of the six later pieces, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (1934), Symphony no. 3 in A minor (1936), and Symphonic Dances (1940) are especially strong. His early successes and his final ones are of a piece.
Rachmaninoff’s sound world was ever the arena of extravagant extremes, where intense feeling is everything; and that means exploiting the full resources of his melodic gift is his principal concern. Striking dynamic contrasts and sudden variability in tempo shape his emotional highs and lows. Orchestral storms of hectic magnificence all but disappear into silence as flamboyant crescendos give way to equally histrionic diminuendos, songful flights accelerating almost wildly yield to languorous rallentandos, and these lovely long phrases in turn diminish in length and volume to collapse into weary resignation, from which ardent hopes are slowly built once more, the volatile suffering Russian soul passing through all the Stations of the Cross on the way to Resurrection time and again. Maddocks cites the composer’s fondness for “upward-sweeping” passages, while the critic Michael Steinberg has the same passages in mind when he praises Rachmaninoff’s “expansive” music. One might further call such melodic genius magniloquent: the gift of sheer beauty unabashed by accusations of wretched excess from those who do not want to understand.
The power of beautiful melody is at the heart of Rachmaninoff’s music, which he sets in defiant opposition to the modernist preference for provoking aural uneasiness and even inducing pain. He is unique in his time. Gustav Mahler shares Rachmaninoff’s penchant for the gorgeous and ravishing, but Mahler also turns grotesquerie or ugliness to his own purposes, inserting bits of klezmer music or popular tunes such as Frère Jacques hard by the most exquisite or sublime melodies. Mahler wants to create music that takes in everything, while Rachmaninoff’s reach is shorter by comparison, his exorbitance of feeling constrained by the vocabulary and syntax of his illustrious Romantic predecessors, which do not admit the twentieth century’s expressionist grimacing, scratching the itch to expose the most tormented and disturbing aspects of the modern psychic underside.
Rachmaninoff wanted to recreate the world as it once was. He was the last of the great Romantic composers. Fortunately, there are still pianists and conductors and listeners and critics such as Fiona Maddocks who partake of the same nature and who ensure that this stupendous throwback remains vital and vigorous.
In Goodbye Russia, Fiona Maddocks retails this Zhivago bit and adds a kicker: “Pasternak, a musician himself, was more of a Scriabin man.”
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