Sergei Rachmaninov: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini

There is something refreshing about the self-assuredness of youth. It's almost, indeed, a requirement. Evolutionarily, we were designed to reproduce young because the life span was only about 30 years. So only the strongest and most quick-witted reproduced. I think money and class were invented for everyone else. If you couldn’t compete in tests of physical prowess, you could always become so rich or politically powerful that babes would flock to you. How else can you explain the trophy wives of Henry Kissinger, Prince Charles, and Woody Allen?

I bring this up, because as the years seem to speed faster the older I get, it makes me muse on my own contributions and those of the youth of today. Recently, a study appeared in some journal of psychology stating that an active mental life plays almost as important, if not more important, role as physical exercise in keeping Alzheimer's and senility at bay. How many people though, once they hit a certain age or certain comfort level, actually work at keeping their brains active and challenged? Is it more than just a coincidence that the ascendancy of Alzheimer's has seemed to follow the rise of television?

So far this week I've written about four pieces by Rachmaninov that feature the piano. They span his life from the age of 18 when he wrote the First Piano Concerto to age 36, when he premiered his Third. He wrote the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini when he was 61, an age at which today--even with longer life--spans, many people are already sinking into stupor and senility. What's more, the Rhapsody is arguably Rachmaninov's most incredible work, technically and melodically, and that shows his powers were virtually undiminished, indeed, even grew more impressive with the passing years.

The Rhapsody contains 24 variations on a theme by the composer and violinist, Nicolo Paganini (1782-1840). Paganini was such a master of the violin that he was accused of having sold his soul to the devil to become so. He once wrote a solo piece in which the violinist has to play 3,000 notes in just over four minutes. And listening to Rachmaninov's variations on theme, you might think that he was similarly possessed.

The piece is as long as his piano concertos and like them contains lush melodies and incendiary keyboard work. What's intriguing is how he takes the theme and varies it so many different ways that you never get tired of it. He inverts it, plays it loud, plays it soft, speeds it up, slows it down, gives it to the orchestra and then back to the pianist. In the final variations, he gives it to the pianist again and again who each time plays it even faster. It becomes almost possessed and toward the end you detect a kind of Slavic or even oriental mode, which reminds me a bit of Mussorgsky. Whenever this piece comes on the radio, for it still enjoys wide popularity, I find myself stopping whatever occupied me and giving the Rhapsody my full attention. And every time I do, new things pop out that I'd missed before.

Perhaps we are like that a bit. The older I get the more I find things falling into place. What was a puzzle at 20 suddenly became clear in my forties. Check back in 20 years and I'll tell you whether my mind is still as spry as it feels today.

• Rachmaninov bio on Boosey & Hawkes site
• Youtube (Rubenstein on early TV)
• Buy recording

Sergei Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto Number 3

Casting my mind back to my discovery of Rachmaninov in my high school days, for some reason I seem to draw almost a complete blank when it comes to his Third Piano Concerto. It's certain that I listened to it a lot, because I instantly recognized it, despite not having sat down to listen to it for nearly 20 years, when the movie, Shine came out. The "Rach Three" supposedly was the piece that the young pianist--completely dominated and then disowned by his father--became obsessed with mastering. Immediately after performing it for the first time in concert, he collapsed and went into a psychotic episode that lasted a good number of years.

In college, I took a course in abnormal psychology. Back then, the reigning theory of its etiology stated that psychotics are born with the genes that predispose them to psychosis. Should they be born into a normal family, they end up normal. Should their family turn out to be severely dysfunctional, in which the child has no emotional anchors or points of reference of sanity, they descend into the hell of psychosis.

In the movie Shine, the boy chose the concerto against his father's wishes to prove he could stand on his own. It painted the father as a sick, domineering man. In one scene you note a number tattooed on the old man's arm. Maybe he was a concentration camp survivor. Having lost all his family in the war, perhaps he felt he had to hold onto his own children--in an unnaturally controlling way--to keep from losing them. Another insidious legacy of the Nazis.

The Piano Concerto Number 3 is supposed to be one of the most difficult pieces to play. In Shine, the boy's piano teacher shows him a plaster cast of Rachmaninov's hands. They were gargantuan and that made the piece incredibly difficult to play as few pianist have that kind of span. What's more, Rachmaninov, who made his living as a concert pianist--to make up for all he lost in leaving Russia after the Revolution--wrote the piece to showcase his own virtuosity at the keyboard. The piece is so difficult that the pianist to whom Rachmaninov dedicated the work, (a Joseph Hoffman) could not even perform it. And finally, Rachmaninov wrote even more difficult passages for himself than the ones found in the published score.

Rachmaninov premiered this piece in November of 1909 in the U.S. at the age of 36. He performed it again in January the following year with the New York Symphony Society with no other titan of music as Gustav Mahler conducting. He was at the height of his powers, just past the midpoint of this life.

The first movement starts out with a beautiful, brooding, Slavic theme in the D minor key. The incredibly fluid runs of the second movement stuck in my mind where they played over and over again during the countless laps I swam while practicing on my swim team. The final movement starts with a bang and then runs off full of life and energy until the orchestra kicks in with a lush melody. The piano then takes this theme and weaves it around in intricate curlicues, fast but playful and pretty. The orchestra swells up, which slows the pianist down for a while, but it eventually finds ways of bursting out with joy and energy. Toward the end, it starts to sound a bit like Rimsky-Korsakov's Russian Easter Overture and the Slavic feeling comes back rushing in to carry us along in a troika to the glorious ending.

Here is a cute story about Rachmaninov, from Today in the World, December 15, 1992:

Sergey Rachmaninoff was once honored at a dinner hosted by fellow pianist Arthur Rubinstein. During the course of the evening, Rachmaninoff said he thought the Grieg piano concerto the greatest ever written. When Rubinstein said he had just recorded it, Rachmaninoff insisted on hearing it then and there. During coffee, Rubinstein put on the proofs of the record and Rachmaninoff, closing his eyes, settled down to listen. He listened right through without saying a word. At the end of the concerto he opened his eyes and said, "Piano out of tune."

It seems like in the past, every so often, a god would come down and walk among us poor mortals. I think of Albert Schweitzer, the good doctor, Bach scholar and interpreter. Or Ghandi, who practiced non-violence to move an empire. Rachmaninov surely sits on Mount Olympus now with his peers, not for having performed great feats of altruism, but for being such a genius who didn't keep it to himself and gave us some of the most wonderful, exciting, life affirming music, despite his brush with mental illness. I wonder how long our current "cult of the victim" is going to last, and when the next Rachmaninov is going to arrive. I hope he or she shows up soon.

• Rachmaninov Bio
• Watch on Youtube
• Recording With Horowitz (supposedly the best

Sergei Rachmaninov: Prelude in C-sharp minor, Op.3 No.2

In high school, when I told my friend Paul Mankowski, whose family seemed to know everything about classical music, that I really liked Rachmaninov, he told me I had to listen to the Prelude in C-sharp minor. Never had I heard anything like this piece. It sounded to me like pure madness-wrestled with, captured, and channeled into music. This piece so impressed me that I decided that I had to learn how to play it on the piano.

Now, of course you realize, I did not know how to play the piano. But being young and naïve, I thought that if I bought the sheet music and found a willing teacher, they could just teach me that one piece. I wasn't actually asking for that much, I reasoned. It wasn't like I wanted to learn how to play every piece of music on the piano. Just this one piece. So I went out in search of the music and a teacher.

I already had a piano. "Wait," you might say. "Didn't he once write that his parents had made him play the clarinet?" Yes, they did, but we also had an old upright piano that we bought for $25 from the elementary school across the street from my house, when they upgraded their pianos. This was back in the late 1960s and my mother was into crafts and furniture refinishing at the time. She painted it a light, dusty green and then started to "antique" by rubbing on some kind of strange stain. She lost steam somewhere during the project and never did finish it. It ended up in our TV room in our old farm-house, where it remained silent for the most part, yielding up "chopsticks" from time to time when we had visitors.

I only heard a real song played on our piano twice. The first time was right after it arrived. My parents hired a piano tuner to come and give it the once over. I watched with great interest as he lifted the lid and with a special crank and tuning fork proceed turn transform it from a tinny toy piano into a beautiful instrument. He sat down afterwards and played a short tune for me.

The second time took place on a visit to our house that my father's sister, Aunt Julia, and her husband John paid us. John was a thin man with a pencil mustache, emphysema, and a gentle nature. They had met in New York and he had a Bronx accent, I think. When he saw the piano, he became nostalgic and said he had played piano in a speak-easy when he was a young man (maybe 30 or 40 years before the time this happened.) He sat down and started to play a piece that he said was a kind of honky-tonk song. It saddened me to watch his performance. His hands moved in a rhythmic way, it looked as if there was some purpose behind the keys he aimed at. But the result w unrecognizable as music. I marveled at how he could have forgotten. "Surely," I thought, "it had to be like riding a bicycle. Once you learn, you never forget."

The local music store ordered the sheet music for me. I smirked at the cashier--a girl from my high school--when I paid for it. She didn't say anything about the Prelude in C-sharp minoror my good taste in purchasing it, so I knew she was unfamiliar with it. "How could they hire someone to work in a music store, who didn't know about Rachmaninov?" I asked my self.

It was easy to find a piano teacher. Almost every other girl in my school took piano lessons, an one of them, a cute little blonde named Jeanie, sat next to me in French class. I told her of my plan to play the preludeand asked if she could teach me. "I don't know the piece," but she said she'd look at the sheet music and then tell me. She seemed to avoid me for a while after that, and when I finally got a chance to ask her about it, she said: "I can't teach you that. It's too hard. I can't even play it. You'd need to have studied piano for years." I was crushed but fortunately didn't become bitter about it, and continued to love Rachmaninov's with just as much intensity for years.

• Rachmaninov bio on Wikipedia
• Youtube Performance
• Recording