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Fin de siècle:
A Total Opera
The 19th century ended in a mood of restlessness, pregnant with possibilities: in every field the search was on for the style and face to fit the age. Debussy celebrated the first years of the twentieth century with Pelléas et Mélisande. In France “L’Art Nouveau”, in Germany the “Jugendstil” brought forth a world of objects and designs without relief, from whence sprang figures of animals and plants. In painting, fauvism, cubism and futurism lent lustre to a variegated contest between colours and style, a turmoil of bodies transfixed in the moment of expression. In architecture, the building of the Sagrada Familia, the Barcelona cathedral designed by Antonio Gaudi, revealed a religious edifice composed of volcanic shapes set with mineral colours, of rails of hammered iron through which the fabric is woven in multiple convulsions. From 1900 to 1913, the rhythm was universal and sculpture advanced in concert with music. At the moment when the Ballets Russes and their glittering harmonies first burst on Paris, architects and decorators were feeling the initial pangs of what rapidly became a romantic passion for industry and machinery. In 1912 Vienna resounded to Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and the mysteries of atonal sound. Then came Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the precursor of jazz, which was to regenerate the period after the Great War and transform percussion into a rhythmic act. The 20th century thus revealed itself like a score in which each voice embodied a singular art taking its place in the universal polyphony. This explains the “musicalist” attempt by Kandinsky and Kupka to create a total opera by painting the music at the point where the scenery would contribute to the balance of the score, and to found a visible link between the body of the painter, on the watch for colour, and that of the musician, perceived as a sound box reverberating with rhythm and melody.
At the time when this era was asserting its character and influence, Rachmaninov was considered a musician of the past, a folklorist of the Russian soul in the tradition of Anton Rubinstein and Tchaikowsky. His determination to defend a romanticism submerged by the rise in atonal music passed for a rearguard action. Did he not denounce Debussy and Prokofiev for their “absence of melody”? He proclaimed that “the heart is in the process of becoming an atrophied organ, it is no longer used and will soon be no more than a simple curiosity”. And yet Rachmaninov adored jazz. In 1924, he was passionately enthusiastic about Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which he applauded in New York with Stravinsky, Heifetz and Kreisler. In 1915, during a series of concerts devoted to Scriabin, Rachmaninov renewed his contacts with the other aspect of his genius: the art of the piano. He was a leading performer until he was 70. He had an immense physical presence; his fingering was a lesson in interpretation, the best way of exploring his instrumental vision. His hand could stretch intervals of a twelfth without prejudice to a single note. The character of each finger stood out clearly, and every gesture was in perfect accord with the meaning of the music. For Rachmaninov, a successful interpretation must inexorably lead to the point of balance, the central axis of the work on which the structure and the vigour of the score are focused. It is the pianist’s role to build up his performance in order to reveal this point with the utmost naturalness, creating this “germination by the fingers” that fertilises the keyboard, producing a momentum that, in Rachmaninov’s own words, “is like bursting through the tape at the end of a race”.
The music of an
“emotional athlete”
The two sonatas composed between 1900 and 1913 are an extravagant example of his pianistic ability and the world of sounds he created. They illustrate the struggle of a composer who is rediscovering his instrument as he brings the art of the piano in line with the spirit of the century. Rachmaninov pushed the instrument to the limits of its possibilities. This is the creation of an “emotional athlete” as defined by Antonín Artaud: a pianist who through composition and interpretation “uses his emotions as the wrestler uses his muscles”.
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In these two sonatas, Rachmaninov has often been accused of abandoning simplicity in favour of a riot of effects and a profusion of ornament, but listen to what Lydia Jardon has to say. “In these two works, the performer is confronted with monumental phrases and despite the enormous, over-loaded left hands, he must make them live without getting bogged down in the breakdown of the themes. It is impossible to give everything value without sacrificing the supremacy of the song of the right hand, haunted by a sort of cerebral orientalism. When I began to work, these repetitive phrasings and harmonic obsessions left me perplexed. I wondered how to occupy the exceptional density of the score without creating boredom, since in the second sonata, and still more in the first, the same themes return unceasingly in different tonalities. There are bass notes in these two sonatas which one has to search for right to the farthest notes of the piano. It seemed to me the danger lay in giving them an importance that would damage the cohesion and the sound balance and make the construction noisy rather than expressive. To avoid that, I determined to build up my entire interpretation as a true study of tone.”
Sonata N° 1
Rachmaninov himself found it interminable. The work professes to be a synthesis between the romantic sonata, as composed by Schumann and Chopin and the programmed symphony, modelled on Liszt’s Faust Symphony. From Dresden, he wrote to his friend Morozov that its dimensions were linked to its guiding theme: “Through each movement in turn it is intended to bring forth three contrasting human types: Faust, Marguerite, Mephisto.” He even thought of adapting it into a symphony, but the purely pianistic style of the work resisted orchestration. Jacques Emmanuel Fousnaquer wrote that “this sonata is a body of sound in perpetual ebullition, an absurd and sulphurous poem”, from the middle of which arises the familiar theme of the Dies Irae. Rachmaninov was to use this often during this period in Dresden, where he composed the Second Symphony and the Isle of the Dead, inspired by the picture painted by Arnold Böcklin. The first movement invades the ear like an impromptu fantasy on motifs of fifths and the play of seconds. The second movement closes in on itself, as if Rachmaninov deliberately wanted to erase all thematic contrast in order to withdraw into himself through a closed world of sound. The melody of the theme is based on a play of seconds around a repetitive tonality in the manner of old Russian religious music. The virtuosity of the third movement overwhelms the hearer and destroys all relief. It underlines a slow passage, interwoven by an inexorable pulse-beat, based on a total mastery of polyphony.
Sonata N° 2
Composed in Rome, when he had postponed the orchestration of the Cloches to the following summer, Rachmaninov compared this sonata to Chopin’s second sonata “which lasts nineteen minutes during which it says everything…” It is a direct descendant of the first sonata: the same three-part edifice, the same counterpoint, the same ornamental profusion used to emphasise rhythm. Jacques Emmanuel Fousnaquer again writes: “A strange telluric vigour emanates from the first and third movements, which could well have been Prokofiev’s inspiration for the “war sonatas”. In 1931 Rachmaninov tried to give it a lighter dimension. In 1942 Horowitz made a third version, which was a synthesis of the first two. It is the 1931 version that has been restored for us by Lydia Jardon.
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