DEITY IN THREE PERSONS
Conducting? Playing the piano? Composing? Which of these particularly distinctive
talents should he decide on? Sergei Rachmaninov was a "deity in three persons" (Engel), continually torn between his desire to make music actively and his vocation as an imaginative creator. Whereas his piano-playing and conducting skills always remained indisputable, Rachmaninov the composer found himself caught between the cross-fire of the critics, especially following his emigration to the USA. The main accusation: in his works, Rachmaninov mainly targeted feelings, and therefore created a cheaply won euphoria, caused by a purely "culinary" reaction to the music. In short, his oeuvre was said to be a musical version of Hollywood, a kind of cinema for the ears. Objection! Especially in his middle and late creative periods, Rachmaninov's works represent a synthesis of sense and sensuality, which is so often painfully lacking in contemporary music. All one needs to do is to bypass the "hits" in his repertoire, such as his Prelude in C-sharp minor, or his Piano Concerto in C minor, and instead take a closer look at works like his Symphony No. 3 and their musical structures. Whoever does that, will discover that the dish is simply "bubbling away" beneath the surface of the music.
Regrettably, even today Rachmaninov is ranked by the Germans among the virtuoso battle-horses, which misdirects one's attention to other works. In 1941, i.e. shortly before his death and following the completion of his oeuvre, Rachmaninov once again bluntly expressed his musical credo: "I do not feel any sympathy for composers who write their works according to predefined formulas or predefined theories. Or for composers who write in a certain style, just because it is fashionable to write that way. Great music can never be produced in this manner. [...] the music of a composer should depict his motherland, his love affairs, his religion, the books that have influenced him, the paintings he loves. It should represent the entire sum of the composer's experiences." It is interesting to mention in this context that the destructive criticism which followed the première of his Symphony No. 1 in 1897 did not target conservative tendencies or even mawkish sentimentality, but rather focussed on the "modernist" tendencies of the work. In fact, in his early works Rachmaninov was clearly acutely aware of the contemporary styles of composition – however, he did not try to curry favour by following contemporary trends.
He wrote his Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 27 between October 1906 and April 1907 in Leipzig, a full nine years after his first symphonic work. Following the disastrous reception of his Symphony No. 1, Rachmaninov had submitted himself to treatments of hypnosis with psychiatrist Dr. Nikolai Dahl, and with his help he had overcome his first lengthy creative crisis; however, not without undergoing a thorough change in character. The Dresden period was carefree and extremely lucrative, from a compositional point of view. Nevertheless, Rachmaninov had a tough time working on his second symphony: the composer was constantly tormented by doubts concerning the quality of the work, he considered the work to be "terribly boring" and absolutely "repulsive". The motivic nucleus of the work is the descending and ascending second intervals in the first introductory bars, which shape the development of the entire symphony. The fact that expansive melodic phrases with great powers of design sprout from this rather rudimentary material during the further course of the symphony establishes Rachmaninov as a fantastic musical "constructor". The power of the work to develop is not "nourished" by the contrast between the themes, as is usual in symphonic composition, but rather through their similarity: the name of the game is interlinking and splitting away.
Among the representatives of the "Mighty Handful", Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was the only "professional". Apart from that, this group of composers consisted of musical laymen, who had come together to develop a national Russian idiom, as successors to Michail Glinka. As a young officer in the Russian Imperial Navy, Rimsky-Korsakov had spent a few days in Spain during a three-year tour around the world, where he came into close contact with Spanish folk music, and later brought back some ideas. A circumstance which had a certain significance for the composition of his Capriccio espagnol in 1887. After all, according to the composer, the work is based on sketches "that were destined for a virtuoso violin fantasia based on Spanish themes". The five-part work was praised by the critics for its "excellent instrumentation". The composer himself said the following: "The alternation of the colours, the felicitously chosen portrayal of the melodies and ornamentation, adapted to the character of each instrument, the tiny virtuoso cadenzas for solo instruments, the rhythmic treatment of the percussion constitute here the character of the composition and its external robing, the instrumentation.“

top