Incorruptible, straightforward, taciturn, but sincere: Sergei Wassiljewitsch Rachmaninoff (1873 to 1943). Bild: Mr
Sergei Rachmaninoff was born 150 years ago. To this day, his music is met with arrogance and contempt. He was an engineer of form, a thinker from the spirit of bells – and an upstanding opponent of Stalin.
For yesterday’s opinion leaders, Sergei Rachmaninoff was shit. Richard Strauss is said to have described his music as “emotional liquid manure”; In the C sharp minor Prélude op. 3, Theodor W. Adorno heard an infantile “Nero complex”. Frank Schneider, the former director of the Berlin Konzerthaus, remarked in 2013 after Rachmaninoff’s second symphony: he now knows again what Adorno meant by “cow warmth in music”.
Hardly any composer has provoked the brightest and best to compare feces and veterinarians like Rachmaninoff. The current situation in which Wladimir Putin doing everything to make the rest of the world lose respect for Russian culture altogether is not conducive to a rehabilitation of Rachmaninoff, especially since this year, as April 1 marks the 150th anniversary of the Russian composer and pianist’s birth, Putin is “ Rachmaninoff year”.
And yet Rachmaninoff has long been talked about and thought differently today. Wolfgang Rihm, whose orchestral work “Verwandlung 4” was on the program at the Lucerne Festival last summer together with Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, was happy about this proximity: “This is music that I love with every fiber of my heart – not just because it’s handcrafted is perfect without exhibiting the perfection academically (the accompaniments of its melodies are almost all canonical ramifications of the same, all is thematic material), but because it is felt in a deeply personal way.”
In an interview with the FAZ (October 14, 2019), Daniil Trifonov pointed out that in the first movement of the Third Piano Concerto, Rachmaninoff makes the solo cadenza the climax of the development in the sonata movement. The place of the highest manual requirement is also the place of the highest logical compression. Virtuosity is here completely in the service of mental work. Where are the ears of those who accuse Rachmaninoff of being a mere circus?!
The first movement of the second piano concerto, performed by Tom Ewell in Billy Wilder’s 1955 comedy The Seven Year Itch Marilyn Monroe was trying to get around is one of the most successful sonata movements since Beethoven’s Ninth. The music historian Charles Rosen had remarked that hardly any composer after Beethoven was able to create such tension in the development that the onset of the recapitulation once again appeared as a significant event. Rachmaninoff succeeded.
What’s more, with this movement he overcame an old formal problem that had crystallized between Schubert and Beethoven. The process of developing the sonata form seemed to call for short, future-oriented motifs like Beethoven’s and resisted closed song melodies like Schubert’s. Here Rachmaninoff uses themes of unprecedented length and lyricism (the main theme alone stretches over six pages of the score) and nevertheless unleashes a sonata process of rousing consistency with techniques of splintering and shortening. An engineer and architect mastered a limit value problem.
There is a third factor: Rachmaninoff’s music is pervaded by the sound of bells and the liturgical ringing patterns of Russian Orthodox churches, which his teacher Stepan Smolenski first systematically researched. The second piano concerto begins as a soloist with a typical Blagowest chime, calling the faithful to worship.
Rachmaninoff developed his harmonics from the sound of the bells
In the use of dissonance, Rachmaninoff initially even depicts the difference between the striking tone and the buzzing tone, which is typical for bells; its harmonies often arise from an attempt to transfer the “unclean” spectra of the vibrating bell metal into a well-tempered intonation system. Rachmaninoff is an ethnologist of forms of ritual and a spectrologist of idiophones in one. In the recapitulation, at the climax, we hear a triswon chime in the piano, as is customary for high festivals and at the Lord’s Supper. In the second piano concerto, Rachmaninoff overwrites the western sonata form with the liturgy of the orthodox church service, thus not only relating Russia and western Europe to one another, but at the same time a form of discourse to one of piety.
The fact that Rachmaninov’s Paganini Rhapsody aroused the admiration of modernists like Bartók and Lutosławski is studiously overlooked by his detractors. Sviatoslav Richter pointed out that Prokofiev despised Rachmaninov only because he owed everything to his piano style, the sharpness of the Etudes-tableaux.
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Rachmaninoff defended his Jewish friend Matvey Presman against anti-Semitic intrigues by the Imperial Russian Music Society. He helped Ivan Bunin with money when he was robbed while emigrating. And he became – much more resolutely than Prokofiev and Shostakovich ever could or wanted – an upstanding anti-Stalin opponent in American exile when, together with Ilya Tolstoy in 1931 in the “New York Times”, he shared the terrible “yoke of a numerically insignificant but perfect organized gangs of communists” who “impose their misrule on the Russian people by means of red terror”. A little later George Bernhard Shaw went to the Soviet Union and sang the praises of Stalin at the time of the Holodomor. However, Shaw described his contemporary Rachmaninoff as a “vulgar toner”.
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote his “Hours Book” from 1899 to 1903 under the impression of his trip to Russia. In the first part, in the “Book of Monastic Life”, it says: “I want to develop myself. / Nowhere do I want to remain bent, / for there I am a lie where I am bent. / And I want my meaning true before you.” Rachmaninoff and his work cannot be summed up more aptly: it is unbent music by an unbent man.
What: FAZ