Rachmaninoff's Complete Songs: A Companion with Texts and Translations
320
Rachmaninoff's Complete Songs: A Companion with Texts and Translations
320Hardcover(Annotated)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253353399 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/22/2014 |
| Series: | Russian Music Studies |
| Edition description: | Annotated |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.00(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Rachmaninoff's Complete Songs
A Companion with Texts and Translations
By Richard D. Sylvester
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2014 Richard D. SylvesterAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35339-9
CHAPTER 1
Early Years (1873-1892)
I.
Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff was born into a gentry family of modest means in the spring of 1873, on a family estate near Novgorod. He spent his early boyhood in that flat river and lake country in the far north with its long winter nights and its white nights in summer, near the Volkhov River and Lake Ilmen, the scene of Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Sadko. Novgorod is the oldest city in Great Russia, a city rich in medieval churches and monasteries on both sides of the river; on the right bank stands a large walled and towered Kremlin built around the eleventh-century Cathedral of St. Sophia, with its silver domes and sonorous bells. In Novgorod, as in Moscow, where the composer later lived, the sound of church bells was a constant accompaniment to daily life. In both cities, Rachmaninoff went to hear bells and came to know master bell ringers (VOR 1, II6, and LN 3, 427). Bells are a motif in such compositions as the Easter movement of the First Suite for two pianos, Op. 5 (1893), the Second Symphony, Op. 27 (1906-7), and the choral symphony The Bells, Op. 35 (1913), which Rachmaninoff considered one of his best works.
In its extended lines of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, Rachmaninoff's family situated him within a circle of kinship and acquaintance that was decisive in shaping all the important events of his formative years—the development of his musical gifts, his education, his early friendships, and even his marriage. The Rachmaninoff clan was typical of I 9th-century noble families of moderate means: they lived in the country at least part of the year, were welcome in society in town, and had a network of connections that could gain them access to just about anyone they might need or wish to meet. A century earlier, Gerasim, Rachmaninoff's great-great-grandfather, was a soldier in the Preobrazhensky Guards of Peter the Great's daughter Elizabeth, who in 1741 seized the throne with the help of her Guards. She rewarded Gerasim with officer's rank and a "diploma of nobility, which had not heretofore been given to the Rakhmaninovs," allowing him to buy land in Tambov province, where he and his descendants lived on their family estate called Znamenskoye (Keldysh, 18). Of his children, Nadezhda married Yury Alekseyevich Pushkin, whose sister was Maria Gannibal, the grandmother of Alexander Pushkin; his son Ivan translated Voltaire and opened a publishing house in St. Petersburg; and his other son, Alexander, Rachmaninoff's great-grandfather, was an officer who played the violin well, but who died in 1812 at the age of thirty trying to save a man who was freezing to death in the steppe. Military service remained the traditional form of service for most of Gerasim's sons and grandsons all the way down to Rachmaninoff's father Vasily, who was a Guards officer.
Amateur music-making was another tradition that ran in the family. Rachmaninoffs grandfather Arkady was a systematic and ambitious musician who had studied piano with John Field (1782-1837), the Irish pianist and composer. He played at musical soirées, composed romances and piano pieces, and is said to have sat down at the piano every morning of his life. Arkady's mother, Maria, was of the Bakhmetyev family, who were landed gentry too, and very active musically; she played the piano; her cousin Nikolai was a solo violinist with the serf orchestra and choir he kept on his estate; he wrote church music and romances, and for more than twenty years was director of the Imperial Court Chapel Choir. In the Rachmaninoff family lore it was said that a good singing voice and the perfect pitch that many of them possessed were inherited from Maria Bakhmetyeva (VOR 1, 14).
Rachmaninoff's father Vasily was technically a good pianist and could play with a beautiful, soft tone. He was an inventive and whimsical improviser: his sister recalled that "he would play the piano for hours, not well-known pieces, heaven only knows what they were, but you could listen to him for hours" (VOR 1, 15). He liked a certain impish polka (written by Franz Behr, though Rachmaninoff thought his father had written it); in 1911 Rachmaninoff arranged it and published it as "Polka de W. R.", spelling Vasily with a "W" (see T/N, 152 and 190). Rachmaninoff recorded this polka in 1919, 1921, and 1928 (this latter recording is on the Sergei Rachmaninoff volume, no. 81, of the "Great Pianists of the 20th Century" series of Philips CDs). Vladimir Horowitz also liked this polka and played it in his Moscow recital in 1986.
Rachmaninoff was born on 20 March 1873 Old Style (1 April New Style) on a family estate in Novgorod province. There is disagreement about whether this estate was Oneg, near Novgorod, or Semyonovo, near Staraya Russa. The evidence for the latter is an official document, the church registry of births, marriages, and deaths, which records his baptism at Starye Degtyari, four kilometers from Semyonovo. Semyonovo was his father's house. It is so far from Novgorod that to take an infant born in Oneg to Semyonovo for baptism would have been not just unlikely but impossible, given the season and the duration of a trip of nearly two hundred kilometers over snowy or muddy roads. The director of the Rachmaninoff Museum in Novgorod believes the family was at Semyonovo when Sergei was born. Rachmaninoff, however, always gave Oneg as his place of birth, and for that reason the matter remains undecided: in the new New Grove, Geoffrey Norris gives Oneg, while Richard Taruskin (in the Opera volume) gives Semyonovo. At any rate, it was at Oneg, near Novgorod, that Rachmaninoff had his first memories of his childhood, and that is where he lived until the family left Novgorod when he was nine.
He was lucky to be born into a musical family that recognized the boy's talent early and took steps to give him regular piano lessons, first with his mother, who started teaching him to play and read music at the age of four. When his grandfather Arkady came for a visit, they played duets. When he was seven, he suggested to his sisters' French governess that if she would sing Schubert's "The Maiden's Lament" (Des Madchens Klage, D 191), he would accompany her. The piano part of this song gives the right and left hands two different repeating figures, simple but expressive; he had heard his mother play it many times. She at first didn't take him seriously, but he pleaded, and when they had finished, he asked her to sing it again twice more; she was astonished that he played it so well, from memory, his hands not big enough to play all the chords, but without a single wrong note (B/L, 3). This performance sprang from the boy's own imagination, and once they had gone through it, he wanted it to be repeated: the idea of the drama and even thrill inherent in a good song performance remained with him when he grew up and shaped his conception of the songs he wrote. The next morning news of this performance was dispatched to grandfather Arkady, who came by train from Znamenskoye and sent Vasily to St. Petersburg to bring back a teacher from the Conservatory. Anna Ornatskaya, a Conservatory graduate and friend of Rachmaninoff's mother, was brought to Oneg to live in the household and teach Sergei. She taught the boy there from 1880 to 1882, when the family moved to St. Petersburg. Many years later, in 1896, Rachmaninoff dedicated "Spring Waters," Song 32, to Anna Ornatskaya; one of his best songs, it has an especially thrilling and dramatic piano part.
Rachmaninoff's mother, Lyubov Petrovna, was the daughter of General Piotr Butakov, who taught history at the Novgorod military college. He died when Rachmaninoff was only four, but his widow, Rachmaninoff's grandmother Sophia Aleksandrovna Butakova, was important in Rachmaninoff's childhood. He was the third of six children—Vasily and Lyubov had three sons and three daughters—but of the six Sergei was Sophia's favorite. She spoiled him, but did not indulge him; she let him play and encouraged his time at the piano, but she expected him to behave himself, which he did, without rebellion; he was happy being with her and came to have the highest respect and affection for her. She was a connoisseur of church choirs, and she took him to services to hear the best liturgical singing; she knew the bell ringer "Yegorka," whom Sergei first saw in her house. When Lyubov and the children moved to St. Petersburg, she bought an estate near Novgorod, Borisovo, just so Sergei could come to live with her on his summer vacations. His time spent there was the happiest in his childhood. Her maiden name was Litvinova, and she was related by marriage to the famous soprano Felia Litvinne. Rachmaninoff and Litvinne both performed in Diaghilev's "Saison Russe" in Paris in 1907, and Rachmaninoff dedicated one of his romances to her, Song 75, "Dissonance" (1912).
Vasily Rachmaninoff planned to send his two older sons, Vladimir and Sergei, to the Corps of Pages to train as officers, but he squandered away the five estates in Lyubov's dowry, and when the family left Oneg in 1882 the marriage was breaking apart. Volodya, as eldest, did go to military school, but, for Sergei, Anna Ornatskaya arranged a scholarship to the Conservatory school, and he undertook a three-year course of study there.
The move from the comfortable estate at Oneg to a crowded apartment in St. Petersburg near the Haymarket—the neighborhood of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment—was a further strain on the family. Vasily and Lyubov separated, and Lyubov was left with the care of the children. For Sergei, this period went badly, because his mother had no time to supervise him; she sent him to live with the Trubnikovs, a lenient aunt and uncle and their children, but he was fiercely independent and they could not control him. He refused any kind of help and insisted on doing everything himself: "ya sam" he would say, "I can do it myself," and this became his nickname at the Trubnikovs (B/L, 3). Instead of doing his homework, he played hooky on the streets. He liked the city and its opportunities for jumping on and off the trams and spending his carfare at the ice rink, but he was unhappy living away from Oneg, and he missed his grandmother especially. His father's departure was a blow, because, despite his immaturity, or perhaps owing to it, the children were happier being around him than with their mother. The only thing Sergei looked forward to was summer at Borisovo. His piano playing improved, but he failed his other subjects in 1885. His mother did not punish him and allowed him to go to grandmother's for the summer, but now something would have to be done to save him.
She turned to the family for help. One of Vasily's sisters was married to Ilya Siloti, and among their children was Alexander (Sasha) Siloti (1863-1945). Ten years older than his cousin, Siloti was embarking on a brilliant career as a pianist himself. His teachers were Nikolai Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky, and Franz Liszt. Lyubov Petrovna asked him to hear Sergei play and to test his ear, which he did. He said there was only one place to send him: to Moscow to study with Nikolai Zverev, a renowned piano teacher (who had taught Siloti) and strict housemaster who tolerated no nonsense from any of his pupils, especially the boys who lived under his roof. At the end of the summer of 1885 in Novgorod his grandmother put him on the Moscow train after taking him to a convent for a special service. She had sewn a hundred rubles into an amulet she put around his neck, and gave him her blessing. When the train pulled out, he burst into tears (VOR 1, 18-19).
2.
When Sergei appeared before Nikolai Sergeyevich Zverev (1832-1893) on the recommendation of his cousin Sasha Siloti, Zverev asked him to play something and agreed to take him as a pupil. He taught both boys and girls, but every year two or three of the boys lived on full room and board in his house near the crowded bazaar called the Smolensk Market, a twenty-minute walk from the Conservatory. Rachmaninoff had aunts he could have lived with in Moscow, but Siloti wanted Sergei to live in Zverev's house, as he had done in 1871 and for ten more years until he graduated (with a gold medal) from the Conservatory.
Zverev, a bachelor, and his sister, a spinster, ran the house with some strict rules: no fighting and no horseplay; no ice-skating or riding or rowing or other dangerous activity that could result in injury to a hand; and obligatory piano practice three hours a day, six days a week. Zverev made good money from the many pupils he had, so he did not charge his "cubs" for room and board (zver' means "wild animal" in Russian, so the boys were called zveryata, "cubs"). To develop their understanding of the performing arts he took them to concerts, the opera, and the theater, always buying good seats. The first practice period was at 6 a.m., and each of the three boys had to take that period twice a week; if they had come home late from the theater the night before, that was not an excuse to miss early practice if it was their turn. But the strict regime was relaxed on Sundays, when Zverev held open house from noon till evening. Those afternoons were, in Rachmaninoff's words, a "musical paradise," with distinguished guests from the musical world dropping in. Guests at the Sunday soirées were not invited to play, but to listen to the boys play. Zverev was hugely pleased by these performances, as Rachmaninoff later recalled: "No matter what we played, his verdict was always 'Fine! Well done! Excellent!' He let us play anything we felt like playing ... I cannot adequately describe what a spur to our ambition was this opportunity to play for the greatest musicians in Moscow, and to listen to their kindly criticism—nor what a stimulant it was to our enthusiasm" (B/L, 11). Among the guests at the soirées were Muscovites like Tchaikovsky and Sergei Taneyev, or visitors, like Anton Rubinstein, who came to Moscow early in 1886 to give a series of brilliant recitals that covered the history of piano music. Each of Rubinstein's recitals was performed in the evening for ticket holders, and the next day for students at a free matinee. Zverev's "cubs" heard every recital twice.
When Rachmaninoff arrived at Zverev's, fellow cub Matvei Presman wrote of him, "he was not well prepared technically, but what he was already playing was incomparable" (VOR 1, 152). Presman also said that the only thing Zverev taught them was to keep their hands and arms relaxed and not to saw their elbows back and forth. But there was more to it than that. It was Zverev's task to prepare his pupils in two or three years to be turned over to the piano faculty at the Conservatory who would complete their training—Taneyev, Vasily Safonov, Paul Pabst, Siloti, and others; and they had to be so well prepared that they did not have to be retrained. Zverev's pupils included eminent pianists like Siloti and Konstantin Igumnov; and pianists who were composers, too, like Feodor Keneman and Arseny Koreshchenko, who were two of Chaliapin's favorite accompanists; and Rachmaninoff's contemporary of genius Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), who was in Rachmaninoffs same class but as a day student.
The "Russian pianistic method" Zverev taught was known for its "songful melody and freedom of hand movement" (Baker's, 4046). Igumnov was admired as an artist of impeccable taste "who worked out every detail of the music to the utmost perfection" (ibid., i659).This approach to playing the piano can be traced back to John Field, who lived in Russia most of his adult life and was an enormously influential teacher there. Of those who studied with him, two were especially important in passing on his legacy: Alexander Villoing (1804-1878), who gave lessons to the Rubinstein brothers, and Alexander Dubuque (1812-1898), who taught Mily Balakirev in St. Petersburg and Nikolai Zverev in Moscow. Field's playing had "unmatched beauty of tone," "sweetness and shading," "speed, evenness and purity of embellishment"; Mikhail Glinka, who took lessons from Field, admired "his forceful, gentle, and distinct playing. It seemed that he did not strike the keys but his fingers fell on them as large raindrops and scattered like pearls on velvet." To Liszt's charge that Field's playing was "sleepy" Glinka answered that "Field's music was often full of energy, capricious and diverse, but he did not make the art of music ugly by charlatanism, and did not chop cutlets with his fingers like the majority of modern fashionable pianists." He emphasized "effortless command and equality of all fingers, slow practice, and tonal control through hand techniques far in advance of his time, the whole subordinate to musical ends" (Langley). "Feeling" is not a part of this description, and Zverev never asked his pupils to play with "feeling." He insisted on perfect knowledge of the musical text, including the "punctuation marks"; he expected clean technique, clarity in the phrasing and precision in the execution; and the player had to pay attention to the quality and tone of the sound being produced, and to learn to control it. He passed on what Dubuque had shown him was a method to master the soft, singing line, the technical ease and elegance which characterized the strong but poetic style of John Field (Keldysh, 29). These were core attributes of the "Russian piano school" as it was understood and being taught in Moscow when Rachmaninoff began his training at Zverev's in the fall of 1885.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgementsPrefaceA Note on Dates and Spelling1. Early Years (1873-1892) Nine Unpublished Songs (1890-1899)2. First Published Songs, Opus 4 (1893) Songs 10-153. Six Romances, Opus 8 (1896) Songs 16-214. Twelve Romances, Opus 14 (1896) Songs 22-33 5. Twelve Romances, Opus 21 (1902) Songs 34-45 Song 46, Without Opus (1900)6. Fifteen Romances, Opus 26 (1906) Songs 47-61 Song 62, Without Opus (1900)7. Fourteen Romances, Opus 34 (1912-1915) Songs 63-76 Song 77, Without Opus (1914)8. Six Poems, Opus 38 (1916) Songs 78-839. After Russia (1917-1943) Two Unpublished Songs (1916)BibliographyIndex of SingersIndex of Song Titles in RussianIndex of Song Titles in EnglishIndex of NamesWhat People are Saying About This
It would be difficult to imagine a more comprehensive and thorough study of Rachmaninoff's vocal heritage. Richard Sylvester supplies us with all the information one would wish to have, and it is done not only with complete knowledge of Rachmaninoff's life and creative genius, but also with genuine affection for his type of expression and with inner understanding of Rachmaninoff's idiom. One can learn very much from this unique volume—very inspiring!
In the English-speaking world, Rachmaninoff's vast output of songs for voice and piano is still relatively unknown. Richard Sylvester is our perfect guide to this dazzling repertoire. Passionate about the music and the poetry, intensely sensitive to each song taken on its own merits, he is also fascinated by the way that even the slightest musical gesture can allow us to make rich connections with the rest of Rachmaninoff's work and, beyond, with the wider context of Russian culture in the years leading up to the 1917 Revolution. This book is a delight!