Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony in D Minor, Op13
NOTE: This script is the original version, but due to it overrunning our time slot, the final programme omits some of the introductory analysis. I have left it in here for interest.
This programme was fiirst broadcast in June 2012.
Cue: Extract from 2nd Movt, Piano Trio in D Minor
“If
there were a conservatory in Hell, if
one of its talented students were instructed to write a programme symphony on “The Seven Plagues of Egypt”, and if he were to compose a
symphony like Mr Rachmaninov’s, then he would have fulfilled his task
brilliantly and would bring delight to the inhabitants of Hell. But for the time being we are still living on
earth, and this music has a depressing effect on us, with its broken rhythms, obscurity
and vagueness of form, the meaningless repetition of the same short tricks, the
nasal sound of the orchestra, the intense crash of brass, and above all the
sickly, perverse hamonization and quasi-melodic outlines, and the complete lack
of simplicity and naturalness, the complete lack of themes.”
With these words were dismissed the ambitions
of a twenty-four year-old graduate pianist and composer; not just any graduate
either, but the Gold Medal-holding Sergei Vasileyevitch Rachmaninoff, lately of
the Moscow Conservatoire. This is
Classical Break, on Somer Valley FM, and I’m Rupert KIrkham. Today’s programme is given over to
Rachmaninoff’s extraordinary First Symphony, a work repudiated by him after a
disastrous premiere at St Petersburg, given by the Russian Orchestral Society
and conducted by Alexandr Glazunov.
Rachmaninoff himself tore up the score and later described it to a close friend as strained, childish and bombastic, but not wholly weak, its worse fault being bad orchestration; furthermore, he could not understand how a musician like Glazunov - one of Russia’s foremost composers and teachers, a great figure among the staff at the St Petersburg Conservatoire - could have conducted so badly. Rachmaninoff’s cousin, later his wife, claimed Glazunov had been drunk.
The First Symphony in D Minor is scored for
large orchestra. From double-basses and
(superb) tuba up to piccolo, the instrumentation is extremely well judged. The form is cyclical with a short, snarling
motto that colours or generates all the matter of its four movements. Autocratically expressive, this is possibly the first Russian symphony
to take its chapter and verse from knowledge of znameniy or Orthodox
liturgical chants as well as folk-music, and it echoes also the bells of
Mousorgsky’s Boris Gudonov. Moreover,
the Catholic chant, Dies Irae, an idée-fixe of that other pianist
composer, Franz Liszt, Is never far from the shape of things. Rachmaninoff was
to make this fate-motif his own - it occurs in almost all his large-scale works!
Cue: Extract from Piano Trio in D Minor,
Rachmaninoff
The first four notes of the
motto-theme and an element of the second subject may have been carried over deliberately
from the massive slow movement of the elegaic second Piano Trio in D Minor -
written in memory of Tchaikovsky, who had mostly been very encouraging of
Rachmaninoff’s efforts; assisted as an examiner in his
graduation and died tragically two years before the Symphony was begun. The
score is headed with the words, “Vengeance is mine (saith the Lord) I will
repay.” This quotation from the
Scriptures occurs in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, of which more
later..
The brass motto with which the symphony
opens is reminiscent of the beginning of Borodin’s Second Symphony.
Cue: Opening of Second Symphony In B Minor,
Borodin
Cue: Motto and 1st Subject,
Rachmaninoff
(1d)
Besides a hint of the Dies Irae, there’s a woody
coolness and purpose to the first subject, a continuation of the motto-theme -
clarinet and then oboe prominent - the
first subject is built up of phrases from liturgical chants, a process
his listeners would have been aware of on first hearing. The subject has kinship with the allegros of Rimsky-Korsakov, athletic,
loose-limbed only because relying on sequence, the self-repetition of Jchoice
narrow intervals, and contrapuntal entries.
Descending scalic figures - the clarinet’s being most noticeable - are
built into the material. A curious,
overshadowed quality comes with changes in dynamics and scoring. Tension rises to the hard-hitting first
brassy climax, with its repeated-note tattoo - powerful in the lower brass and
with an edge of hysteria added by the trumpet; it falls away in murmurs - and in twirls the
sinuous, feminine second subject on violins, astringent appoggiatura not
permitting sinuousness to be relaxed.
The oboe, flutes and clarinet add plangency, the swell of the theme
given the Tchaikovskian treatment - passionate first violins in unison, the
horns glowing.
Cue: Second Subject, Rachmaninoff
(Link 1e) A kind of gipsy-music or orientalism
is found in it, not unlike the orientalism of Balakirev, Borodin and
Rimsky-Korsakov - composers venerated by the St Petersburg Conservatoire. Rachmaninoff had written a stipulated one-act
opera for his graduation exercise - Aleko, a story of gipsy life. After a close - the motto murmuring - the
development begins as does that of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, The
Pathetique: with a loud crash on
brass and percussion. Here is the Tchaikovsky.
Cue: Diminuendo and Outset of 1st Movt Development of Sixth Symphony in B Minor, Tchaikovsky.
(Link 1f)
And, for the last of these brief cues, here is the Rachmaninoff:
Cue: Diminuendo and Outset of Development,
Rachmaninoff
(Link 1g)
A trumpet-shriek - the motto theme in an instant! The divided strings launch into a fugato
based on it. Their lack of support
elsewhere makes keeping their pitch tricky.
More is brewing, with vindictive fanfare-
and plainchant-like brass twitted by high woodwind, even as the motto sounds
underneath on horns. The strings
reassert themselves: in crashes a
variant of the motto, with new, perhaps ‘perverse’ brass chords of real
keenness - piccolo - and in some performances, glockenspiel -tingling atop what
seem like deepbells. The trumpets answer
trombones and horns in antiphon.
Sublimity! Yet the effect of an upward pressure narrows the
harmonic scope of the fanfare, if not the melodic.. It is an intensely personal, memorable
transformation, terse and ringing, swaying between feelings of major and minor.
The music moves on as the strings take the theme over, returning it to its
striving first subject shape.
A diminuendo. All seems indistinct, misty - and clears as
the second-subject comes in on flute. It
is now possible to hear this theme as a feminized development of the first
subject; its deeply appoggiatura-ed hesitancy and ultimate fervour, and, at
last, rich scoring remain moving in this reprise. The episode of misty indistinctness heard
earlier is altered to be like the swing of the tide, rocking. The brass - gapped chords moving up the scale
- presage the close of the movement.
Building up to a savage end derived from what went before it,
dovetailing, canons and imitations between the sections of the orchestra now
rend reticence to bits. Derived from the
first and second subject and the upward scale that accompanies
the first subject, the final cadence, several lashing blows of Fate or
impatience, is masterful.
(Link 2a) This is Classical Break on Somer Valley
FM, and I’m Rupert Kirkham. Today’s
programme is devoted to one piece, the Symphony in D Minor by
Rachmaninoff. What hectored critics
missed at the premiere was that the ‘perversity’ they perceived is a source of
great expressive power. They reacted against
the music’s commandingness, its organization, its aesthetic consistency and yet
originality. The orchestral parts
survived, mostly complete, and were exhumed from the Leningrad Conservatoire
archives in 1944. The Symphony was
performed in a typical Soviet volte-face the following year: the performance of Rachmaninoff’s works in
the Soviet Union had been banned a while after his escape from Revolutionary
Russia. A celebrity world--wide, he had
made no secret, everywhere he went, of his hatred of the crimes of
Bolshevism. He had died in Beverly Hills
the previous year, and the discovery proved that he belonged to Soviet Russia after
all... Rachmaninoff, who’d suffered from
crippling nostalgia for his country, would not have liked the irony.
(Link 2b) That quotation, Vengeance is
mine (saith the Lord) I will repay.
Rachmaninoff meant it to be a reference to Anna Karenina -
the verse is quoted in the novel, apparently - but also to a lately-concluded
affair with a married lady of gipsy blood!
The piece was dedicated to her - A.L. - Anna Alexandrovna
Lodizhenskaya.
(Link 2c)
Beginning with the motto-theme made douce, a simple, telling
transformation in context, The second movement is an intermezzo rather than
scherzo, mostly lightly scored. It seems
like woodland music, darting, as if breeze-blown among birch-trees - delicate
with woodland flowers, the viola at times wry in solos less airy than the
flute’s. It is a hypersensitive
mood-piece, a fantasy of alternate tensions on derivatives of first movement
material. There are harsh, driven
moments on brass and lower strings, the first movement’s snarl and motto-theme
never distant. Where the music is
brightest, most fine--spun, where it suggests sweetness or the slightest shade
or fragrance, is perhaps where Anna is found and dwelt on. Glazunov made a cut in this movement for the
premiere.
After the viola’s nervy solo, the dark
elements rise - only to be partly soothed and brought back to the mercurial mood and music of the opening. Contrarities die out at last in the motto and
semitonal oscillation.
Track Two: ll Allegro Animato.
(Link 3)
Another movement of kaleidoscopic orchestration, the third movement is a
beautifully-scored love song with lyrical woodwind solos and
delicate touches of appoggiatura from the violins and violas. It begins with the fate-motif and develops the
Symphony’s first and second subjects. Beauty
is interrupted by a passage of savage
foreboding in the bass of the orchestra, symbolizing jealousy with the Dies
Irae, perhaps. The viola picks up
the song where it left off, and real passion - and hypersensitivity - return to
the music, building through repetition and counterpointing of the two tunes of
the first movement, the masculine first subject smearing the outline of the
feminine second. These processes are the structure of this music. Appoggiatura in lower strings and horn-tone
seem either to soothe or to increase pain.
The music dies away overshadowed by a rocking alternation of tones on
clarinet. Dies Irae tells us that
the day of judgement is near.
Track Three: lll Larghetto
(Link 4a)
The last movement is lashed by brass and percussion into beginning
proudly, with dotted-note fanfares. The
first subject of the symphony returns, triumphant and sinister. It is continued by a zigeuner-like insistence
on rhythm in the cellos and double-basses in particular - the horn adds
foreboding. This music was written years
before Stravinsky’s percussive, motoric but rhythmically disruptive style
became fashionable. The feminine second
subject sweeps one on, now, with Tchaikovskian swelling horns in canon, and
castanets imitated by tambourine.
Hectoring brass breaks in with the motto fanfares; a diminuendo brings in
the oboe in Anna’s theme. It is taken up
with an accompaniment of nervous quivering in the strings - time is running
out. The deep strings add a swell to the
yearning - the horn still doesn’t achieve more than pathos - the gipsy-dance
moments drop in exhaustion. A lulling
episode is followed by a bass-led revivification of the gaunt fate-music, with
its odd rhythms and ruthlessness more marked, the violas characteristically dry
and wiry in tone.
The sweep of the movement continues -down,
the obsessive motto brushing aside gipsy tambourine, growing ever more frenetic
yet apt to its context, and now, we’re at the ferocious climax of the entire
Symphony, repeated whiplash phrases of the first subject or motto-theme
continuation more and more short, sharp and frantic, reaching the listener’s
breaking point, which comes soon enough, with the finality of drums and
tam-tam, the motto-theme sombre in slow deep waves that return us to an image
of the tide, one bleak stretch of coast; then, like a tidal wave that one has
not seen in its rising, but turns to as it topples - or the wave that one has
waited for and now throws oneself into - that last terrifying conflict, a
downward chromatic scale pitted against, and out of step with, an upward,
and broken thematic phrases in addition, the violins divided, sounding their
own semitonal clash, screaming their way down on and through those upward,
harmonized sequences of chromatic brass and other interjections until the alto
and deeper instruments harmonizes in the downward scale, the violins still out
of step - bearing down on everything.
The scale ends in a two-fold downward sequence derived from a four-note
element of the second - feminine - subject, semitone-minor-third-semitone;
in fact, the whole climax is an immense development of the feminine subject
against first subject upward scale and Dies Irae. Curiously
there is an echo of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman in there.
We are left with reiteration of the opening
of the motto-theme - altered subtlely from its other appearances - and at first
with a response-phrase reminiscent of Dies Irae. The procession is accompanied
by regularly spaced drum-beats and crashes from the tam-tam, until, after five
repetitions in the major, the movement is brought to a dead stop, by two
identical, thudded chords. Anna Karenina
dies by suicide - throwing herself under the wheels of a railway-engine. Here, antedating musique mechanique by
about thirty years, Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony ends by appearing to evoke just
such a death - one is left with the blind, remorseless force of steam driving tons of steel.
Track Four: lV Allegro Con Fuoco
(Link 4b)
Glazunov’s fluent, ingratiating First Symphony had been premiered when
he had been sixteen. It had been a
triumph. At the premiere of his
First Symphony, the twenty-four year-old Rachmaninoff left the hall to pace outside,
wringing his hands at the terrible discords he heard. Had he truly written these sounds? Of
course, he most probably had written many of them - calculated them
ruthlessly, as contapuntal clashes and
as-logical harmonic progressions.
(Link 4c)
The critique that headed our programme - was by Cesar Cui, the least
talented of the Mogoyucha Kuchka or ‘Mighty Handful’ of great St
Petersburg composers - Balakirev, Borodin, Moussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov having been
the others. Regarding themselves as the
Pan-Slavist torch-bearers for Russian music, they had been rivals to the
‘westernizing’ Nicolai Rubenstein/Tchaikovsky axis in Moscow. Years previously, Rimsky--Korsakov had
groomed Glazunov for stardom...Rachmaninoff had been groomed by Zverev, Arensky
and Taneiev, the first two figures Tchaikovskians, the last an expert in
Flemish polyphony whose counterpoint-classes had taught Rachmaninoff a great
deal. In Rachmaninoff’s last major work, the Symphonic Dances, there is
a moment where the first subject of his First Symphony rises almost as if from
the grave, shining and beautiful: and the late work - from nearly fifty years
on - builds on the quotation of an Easter chant in its later stages.
Cue from
Symphonic Dances, l Non Allegro, Rachmaninoff
Resurrection came, beyond the imagining of
the critics of that first performance - or the conscious hopes of Rachmaninoff,
himself, who had the misfortune to be a young man caught between old factions
fighting for influence over the future of Russian music, the death of
Tchaikovsky having left everything to play for! Pace Mister Cui, it is
possible not to be an inhabitant of Hell and yet see the critic as a
brilliantly perceptive bigot: his descriptions
of the symphony apt so long as one discounts his aesthetic, which leads him to
enumerate strengths as weaknesses!
You’ve been listening to Classical Break on Somer Valley FM, and I’m
Rupert Kirkham. Today’s programme was
written by Mike Burrows. We hope you
enjoyed it and will join us again soon.
Goodbye!
