Rachmaninov Read online

  Copyright © 2010 Omnibus Press

  This edition © 2010 Omnibus Press

  (A Division of Music Sales Limited, 14-15 Berners Street, London W1T 3LJ)

  ISBN: 978-0-85712-434-0

  Cover design and art direction by Pearce Marchbank.

  Cover photography by George Taylor, Rambrandt Bros.

  Cover Styled by Annie Hanson.

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  Foreword

  This book is the story of a great composer’s life, told against the background of the country into which he was born, and against the times during which he lived. It has been written, therefore, with the general reader and music-lover, rather than the specialist, in mind. The popularity of Rachmaninoff’s music has never fallen, but the success of two or three works tended to obscure his other achievements as a composer. It is perhaps only since the centenary in 1973 that the full achievement of this remarkable musician has been revealed to the public at large. At one time, Rachmaninoff’s greatest works — the symphonies, the Symphonic Dances, the songs, the Night Vigil, the opera The Miserly Knight — were virtually unknown, but thanks to the dedicated work of Soviet musicians, recordings and publications of this music have been made available to all. Rachmaninoff was one of the first great musicians to pursue an extensive recording career, for nearly a quarter of a century, and these recordings, apart from being priceless historical documents, played an important part in Rachmaninoff’s life. I trust the attention given to them here will set this part of Rachmaninoff’s work into greater perspective.

  For the courtesy, time and information given to me, I sincerely thank the late Leopold Stokowski, and Eugene Ormandy, Vladimir Horowitz, Arthur Rubinstein, Abram Chasins, Robert Simpson, Leslie Slote, Oleg Vassiliev and his colleagues in the USSR, Jack Pfeiffer, Paul Myers, David S. Levenson, Anthony Pollard, Edward Johnson, Michael Scott, John Snashall, Bryan Crimp, R. Temple Savage, Jim Fuller, Hilary C. Thomson, Peter Wadland, Christopher Ford and Denis Hall. My thanks are also due to those organisations who have kindly permitted the use of copyright photographs and material.

  In transliterating Russian names into English, no attempt has been made to be completely consistent: I have used those forms most familiar to English-speaking people, and where alternatives exist I have endeavoured to use the forms adopted by the persons concerned. At the time of Rachmaninoff’s birth, the Julian calendar used in Russia was twelve days behind the Gregorian, used in the West. On January 1st, 1901 it increased to thirteen days, but came into line with the Gregorian calendar after the Revolution of 1917. Consequently, for events concerning Rachmaninoff’s life which took place in Russia until that time, dates are given in both forms.

  No biographical study of Rachmaninoff, however brief or however lengthy, can be undertaken without acknowledging the endeavours of previous authors in this field. The work of Bertensson and Leyda deserves pride of place, but to a greater or lesser degree I owe thanks to all who have published earlier studies of this great composer and great human being. Finally, I wish to express my deep gratitude to my wife Lynn, whose loving patience and encouragement during the writing of this book have been invaluable.

  RMW

  London SE12

  September 1979

  Contents

  Information Page

  1 Roots

  2 Childhood

  3 Conservatory Studies

  4 Triumph and Disaster

  5 New Directions

  6 Widening Horizons

  7 War

  8 Brave New World

  9 The Hectic Thirties

  10 Finale

  Sergei Rachmaninoff

  1873-1943

  Photo: RCA

  1 Roots

  By 1873 the reign of Tsar Alexander II of Russia had entered its final decade. He succeeded his father in 1855, inheriting a discredited regime, yet by immense effort he introduced long-overdue reforms which began to transform Russia from a quasi-medieval country into a reasonably modern state.

  A view of St. Petersburg in the 1880’s taken from Vasilevski Island.

  Alexander ruled his vast country from the capital, St Petersburg, a breathtakingly beautiful city founded in 1703 by Peter the Great during the Nordic War against Charles XII of Sweden. The completion of this great capital made Russia a Baltic power, with consequential development of maritime trade. It was a different city from Moscow, the old capital, being European in style: Peter visited the West in 1697-8 and for him Western models were essential to the development of his country. With an autocratic ruler, the Russian people were no better off after Peter’s death than they were before he came to the throne, and he left a legacy of absolutism which was rivalled only by Catherine the Great (1762-96). Catherine was a remarkable woman: a poorly-educated German princess, strongly influenced by the ideas of the French Enlightenment, she instituted further internal reform, and continued the expansionist policies of Peter. The people paid a heavy price: her rule, which began in the reforming spirit of a new liberalism, ended, not for the last time in Russian history, with tyranny and oppression.

  Catherine’s son Paul I (1796-1801) was quite unlike his mother. Possibly mentally abnormal, he was murdered in a Palace coup, and succeeded by the first of his two sons who were to reign after him, Alexander I (1801-25). Alexander had much in common with his grandmother, but events in Europe forced him into wars against Napoleon, which reached their climax in 1812. In June of that year, Napoleon invaded Russia and occupied Moscow for a time, before the great fire started by the Muscovites forced him to retreat. From that point on he was beaten. As Tolstoy graphically demonstrated in War and Peace, the real heroes of the 1812 victory were the Russian people themselves.

  Peter the Great 1672-1725

  Alexander pursued Napoleon across the border and in March 1814 he entered Paris, helping to destroy, as he put it, ‘this abomination’. For the first time Russia became a leading voice in European affairs, during the subsequent negotiations at the Congress of Vienna. The French campaign opened up a great influx of European ideas into Russia. Pushkin was caught in this excitement, and his Ruslan and Ludmila not only later inspired Glinka’s opera (1842), but was begun at a time — 1817 — when a new Russian self-awareness was beginning to manifest itself. It was in 1817 that the Irish composer and pianist John Field, then living in Russia, gave piano lessons to the 13-year-old Glinka. He also numbered among his pupils Arkady Rachmaninoff, an ex-Army officer and enthusiastic musician, who doubtless later met both Pushkin and Glinka at the home of their mutual friend Count Vielgorsky.

  The Decembrists, leaders of the revolt in December 1825.

  The death of Alexander I in 1825 threw Russia into a political turmoil. He died childless, and the throne should have passed to his brother Constantine. But Constantine had secretly decided three years before to renounce the throne, which then passed to his younger brother Nicholas.
However, Nicholas, unaware of the decree which Constantine had signed, swore allegiance to his brother, and the confusion which followed gave additional impetus to a small dissident faction opposed to Alexander’s autocratic government.

  Some army units, confused at the disorder in the Palace, refused to take the new oath of allegiance to Nicholas. As a result, fighting broke out in the morning of December 26th in the Square outside the Senate House. Night comes early in the Russian Winter, and by mid-afternoon it was already dark. In the gloom Nicholas himself gave the order to open fire on his own troops, and by five o’clock the insurrection was over. Not many were killed, but the incident was enough to light the fuse of the Revolution which smouldered intermittently until it exploded in 1917. ‘The Decembrists’, as they were called, became honoured martyrs in Soviet Russian history.

  Many composers have been inspired by the work of Russia’s greatest Romantic poet, Alexander Pushkin.

  The reign of Nicholas I thus began in bloodshed. Unlike his brother Alexander, he saw the re-imposition of autocratic dictatorship as the only way of dealing with the liberal ideas flooding in from the West. Totally out of touch with contemporary thought he formed a powerful secret police. His insular view, doubtless conditioned by the immense cost of the Napoleonic wars, resulted in fiercely reactionary oppression. Many opponents were arrested or forced to live abroad where they came to be influenced by the writings of Marx and Engels. These émigrés came to play an important part in Russian history.

  These events did little to disturb the life of Arkady Rachmaninoff, the soldier-pupil of John Field. He had married successfully, and his nine children were well looked-after on his large estate at Znamenskoe. Music played a natural part in his family’s life, for Arkady’s father Alexander had formed a small orchestra in the adjoining town.

  Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka, 1804-1857

  A frequent guest, Princess Golizin, whose father’s estate was close to that of Znamenskoe, recalled the atmosphere of the Rachmaninoff mansion:

  We used to wake up to the accompaniment of … Chopin, Field or Mendelsohn’s music, for Arkady Rachmaninoff went straight to the piano as soon as he got up … After tea in the afternoon, [he] took his place at the piano, and, striking a few chords from the song he wanted me to sing, would ask me to join him. These musicales usually began with an aria from Ruslan and Ludmila …

  With his military experience and comfortable circumstances, Arkady was able to temper his artistic dreams and to shelter his family from the outside world. However, he was anxious to ensure his sons did not remain inexperienced in worldly matters and when one of them, Vasily, volunteered for the Army at the age of 16, Arkady did nothing to stop him.

  A bastion at Sevastopol (Moscow State Museum).

  Vasily’s youthful ardour was inspired by the Crimean War, which was largely the result of Nicholas I being carried away by his own vanity. Nicholas’s authoritarian regime had borne results. Russia was certainly forged into a formidable whole, and, when confronted by what he termed as “the sick man of Europe”, Turkey, Nicholas thought he could easily expand his Empire. It was a bad mistake: England, France and Italy joined a Western alliance against Russia, together with Austria. The Western powers, unable to attack Russia directly, attacked where they could and consequently the land fighting was confined to Crimea where the siege of Sevastopol became the turning-point in the conflict. It lasted 350 days, during which time Nicholas died a broken man, defeated both by his inflexibility and by his imagined invincibility of the now bankrupt regime.

  The Crimean War marked a turning-point in European history. The way was clear for the new Tsar, Alexander II, to bring peace and much-needed reform to his country. The war proved that Russia could be beaten, and it drove a rift between Russia and Austria which eventually became one of the major causes of the First World War. Internally, however, discontent became rife. For Russia to be defeated on Russian soil was a great humiliation. However, the Western powers did not press home their success at Sevastopol, neither did Austria attack Russia. So when Alexander concluded the Peace of Paris on March 30th, 1856, the limitations imposed on Russia were few. The discontent inside Russia, made worse by the muddles of the Crimean War, was seized upon by several of her neighbours who saw an opportunity to harass Russia on the borders. Among these was the Caucasian leader Chamyl who, in the hills of Dagestan, fought a running battle with the Russian army during the years 1857-9. It was to this campaign that the newly-trained young officer, Vasily Rachmaninoff, was sent. Chamyl was defeated, the Russian Empire grew larger, and the victorious troops came home.

  Apart from military duties, a Russian army officer was required to participate in a full social life. Drinking, gambling and almost all other forms of licentiousness were common, and Vasily was drawn into the social conventions of his fellow-officers. He was not alone: in 1856, the 17-year-old Mussorgsky joined the Preobajensky Guards, where he quickly met Alexander Borodin, a 23-year-old doctor on the staff of the St Petersburg military hospital. The demanding social habits soon took hold of Mussorgsky — the chronic alcoholism, which killed him in 1881, began here.

  Modest Petrovitch Mussorgsky, 1839-1881 (Portrait by Repin).

  For Vasily Rachmaninoff the social requirements of military life were also damaging. He acquired the reputation of being a ladies’ man and a gambler. He was no criminal but his efforts to impress his fellow-officers were the seeds of his own downfall, like that of Mussorgsky. Vasily’s military career had its compensations for he met the family of General Peter Boutakov and, following his departure from the army and his return to civilian life when his commission expired, he eventually married the General’s daughter, Lubov. She had had a very different upbringing from her husband.

  During 1861 Alexander signed the Decree which abolished serfdom in Russia. That at least was his intention. But many landowners were loth to give up virtual slave-labour, and the effectiveness of the Decree was not complete as the peasants were obliged to remain in their villages. Though they were no longer their master’s property their emancipation made them liable for taxes, so that many peasants were actually worse off than before.

  For reactionaries the Decree went too far: for reformers it did not go far enough. But taken with Alexander’s other reforms — those of the courts, the army, the civil service, and the curtailment of the secret police — his early years as Tsar were in marked contrast to his father’s reign.

  Alexander Porphyrevitch Borodin, 1833-1887.

  The influx of European thinking during the reigns of Alexander I and Alexander II was not confined to politics. Culturally, Russia gradually came under European influence, causing serious artistic difficulties, which are best illustrated by the musical climate of the time. Until 1862, when the St Petersburg Conservatory was founded, there had not been a music college in Russia. Apart from the visits of foreign music teachers such as John Field, any Russian wishing to study music seriously had to do so in Europe, especially in Germany. This was reasonable enough up to a point; but it meant the essential features of Russian music tended to be suffocated by the influence of Germanic teaching. Anton Rubinstein, for example, born in 1829 at Podolia close to the Rumanian border, had to travel to Berlin to study composition, and those few compositions of his which are heard today could hardly be described as Russian at all. Glinka had also gained much of his early training in Berlin with the same man who, twenty-five years later, also taught Anton Rubinstein. For those younger musicians of the mid-nineteenth-century, caught up in the ferment of intellectual liberalism, this Germanic influence was as insufferable as the political restraints of Nicholas’s rule. So when the St Petersburg Conservatory of Music was founded by Anton Rubinstein in 1862 it was immediately attacked by a group of younger composers for being too cosmopolitan. This group was led by the brilliant Mily Balakirev, and included the ex-military comrades Mussorgsky and Borodin. Balakirev was a disciple of Glinka, the recent commercial failure of whose opera Ruslan and Ludmila led Rubinstein to co
mment that nationalism in music was a doomed artistic quality.

  Mily Alexeivitch Balakirev, 1837-1910 (Drawing by Léon Bakst).

  Rubinstein was mistaken in not appointing a single Russian among the first professors at the St Petersburg Conservatory, for musical teaching in Russia before 1862 had not been non-existent. John Field exerted enormous influence, and among his pupils, apart from Arkady Rachmaninoff and Glinka, was Alexander Dubuque, who became a highly-regarded piano teacher in Moscow. Among Dubuque’s pupils were Nikolai Zverev and Anton Rubinstein, as well as the latter’s younger brother, Nicholas. Balakirev also took lessons with Dubuque, so a large part of the Russian school of pianism stemmed directly from John Field. To younger musicians, anxious to study rather than become embroiled in pseudo-political rows, the opening of the conservatory was a godsend. Among its first pupils was Peter Tchaikovsky, then in his early twenties.

  For the Rachmaninoff family these were times of change as well. Arkady was seeing his large family grow up: Vasily had served in the army, and one of Arkady’s daughters Julia, a music-lover like her father, married the young Siloti in 1862. Their son Alexander was born on October 10th the following year. Although Arkady was affected by the Decree of 1861, such information as can be gleaned from descriptions of life at Znamenskoe leads one to believe he was no tyrant. The name Rachmaninoff stems from the root rachmany which, in the Moscow and Tver districts, meant ‘hospitable’ or ‘generous’, and these characteristics, so touchingly described by Princess Golizin, endeared him to his family and his servants.