Johannes Brahms: Piano Concerto Number 2

In my previous entry, I ended up talking about how rich cultural life was at the turn of the 20th century and how poor ours seemed by comparison. Of course, writers for thousands of years have decried the decadence of their own era and pined for the "Golden Age," that is some time in the remote past when everyone was a philosopher, ate ambrosia, and created great works of art. We think of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Florentines in Renaissance Italy, the French in the age of enlightenment, and in our own era, the fin de siecle. But a look at a few of the musicians whose lives overlapped in the last decade of the 19th Century and the first of the 20th--Puccini, Faure, Mahler, Verdi, Toscanini, Milhaud, Tchaikowsky, Brahms, Grieg, Debussy, Rachmaninov and Stravinsky--does point to a golden age.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D18AujwrQb4]
Often, I suspect the people who bemoan the sad state of the arts in their time are more often than not critics, not creators, of the arts. There's a poem by E.A. Robinson called "Miniver Cheevy" that sums up these souls. Here are a few stanzas from it:
Miniver Cheevy Child of Scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.Miniver mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.Minver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediaeval grace
Of iron clothing.
Miniver Cheevy, born too late
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.
The fact of the matter is that great works of art and philosophy that survives and from which we think we know the past was created by an educated minority. Right now over five of the Earth's six billion people live in abject poverty and have pathetically short life spans. Think of how much higher the mortality rates must have been just a hundred years ago. Would any of us who yearn for those great minds of yesteryear swap places with anyone back then?
Woody Allen recently explored this idea again, in Midnight In Paris, in which the main character, at the ringing of a bell at midnight, is transported back to the 20s, where he meets Hemingway, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel, and Picasso.  He falls in love with one of Picasso's models and together they travel back in tim to the the previous generation of Toulouse Lautrec, Degas, Gaugin and Offenbach.  She longs for that golden age and cannot see the greatness of the artists around her, just as the Woody Allen character longs for the times of the Lost Generation.
Our problem today, methinks, is glut. We're supersaturated with information. With radio, television, high literacy rates, and now the Internet, we suffer from so much information that we find it hard to separate the gold from the dross.
I am heartened though, when I look everywhere and see people in their everyday lives trying to create works of art and beauty. A friend of mine from grade school, Jayne Holsinger, has been living in New York since 1978, where she's supported herself as a waitress and graphic designer and is now exhibiting her paintings in galleries. Another friend from high school, Doug Gottberg, has been composing and playing music with his group, Kino, in Paris since the early 1980s.  A while back, at my 25th high school reunion, I met an old friend named Ralph Scutchfield, who's played bluegrass banjo since he was a boy and was then learning how to play the violin in a Suzuki class with his daughter. The hamstrung intellectuals will tell you that the arts are in bad shape, but not if you're willing to go out and do them yourself.
What does this have to do with Brahm's Piano Concerto Number Two? For a number of years, I went through my own Minver Cheevy phase. My drug, as I've said before, was music. Shy and lacking in self-confidence, I would sit in my room for hours listening to great works of music, letting my emotions flow out, feeling sorry for myself, feeling victimized. Brahm's music was particularly affecting, and this concerto became one of my favorite pieces during that time period.
Unlike other concertos it has four movements, and it really is a breathtakingly grand work. When I think of it, it seems almost like a symphony with piano, so skillfully is the piano integrated with the orchestra. One critic of the time even labeled it as a "symphony with a piano obligato," but the piano is used so expressively that comment seems like a cheap shot. Make no mistakes about it, Brahms was an incredible genius and a master of the instrument. He chose to express his genius through heart-rendingly beautiful melodies, that often brought tears to my eyes.
A high school friend--Paul Mankowsk--once told me a story that illustrates the composer's gifts. Once Brahms went into a beer hall and was asked to play a tune on the piano. While warming up, he discovered the instrument to be excruciatingly out of tune. Brahms played a few scales and memorized which notes were off. He then transposed the notes of his piece correctly as he played it so that no one could hear that the piano was bad.
I particularly love the first movement, which starts with horns playing the Romantic melody.  The piano then picks the theme up in an almost angelic manner. The second movement, an allegro, is the extra movement, and is full of passion. The third reminds me a bit of Brahm's violin concerto and often served to set me off self-wallowing sadness. Fortunately, Brahms finishes the work with a lively and upbeat Rondo, which never failed to lift me out of my doldrums.
So do I still grouse about the philistinism around me? Do I still feel like Miniver Cheevy? You tell me. What helped, I think, was taking violin lessons with my own daughter, when she started when she was around nine year old. Sure, anyone can complain about the work of others. But it is immensely humbling--and liberating--to try some creative endeavor. Should more people do so, the end of the Millenium jitters would quickly evaporate, and we'd all see, that truly, we create our own "Golden Age."

• Brahms Biography
• Buy on Amazon
• Download MP3s from Amazon

Gioacchino Rossini: "Largo al Factotum" from The Barber of Seville

I'm going to shift gears from writing about the passionate and romantic piano concertos that formed the subject of most of my several previous entries. Maybe this change results from a comment that my friend John Kim made, when I told him about all the gushing Romantic pieces that I listened to in high school. He said, "weren't there any fun things you listened to?" In fact there was--The Barber of Seville. So this week, I'm going to write about several arias from this opera.

A while back, here, I wrote about its overture, which I first heard used in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. For some reason I was able to memorize it, and I would use it to break the monotony of the hundreds of laps we had to swim each day on the swim team. I used to be able to whistle it as well. I learned to whistle from my father, who always seemed to have a tune on his lips. I wonder if this is genetic: my daughter when she was in middle school was often reprimanded for whistling tunes in the hall and sometimes during class at school.

The Barber of Seville probably ranks as one of the most well known and popular of all operas. Rossini actually composed 36 operas from the age of 18 until 37, many of the overtures to which also get considerable airplay. (And which have been pirated--remember the theme from the Lone Ranger? It's actually from the overture to his opera William Tell.) But theBarber which Rossini composed at the age of 24, was his ne plus ultra. Had he composed only this one piece, his reputation probably would the same.

Rossini started out as a cellist and composer, and was especially influenced by Mozart. He had a great ear for melody, of course, but he also understood the human voice. Nowhere does this show than in the The Barber of Seville in which the arias and grouping of the vocalists--duos, trios, quartets--are so masterfully composed that they soar and amaze.
What the Barber also shows is that Rossini additionally possessed a superb sense of humor coupled with a zest for life. Much of this comes out in his characters, but particularly in the pieces given to the role of Figaro, that is the barber of this work.

The aria Largo al Factotum introduces Figaro's entrance on the stage. Figaro is a "fixer," who by the end of the opera will help Count Almaviva, his old employer (from Mozart's Marriage of Figaro), capture the heart of the maiden, Rosina. We don't know of the connection between the Figaro and the Count, who has just finished paying off some musician when the barber arrives. Figaro appears singing a perky, boasting aria in which he talks about how much he loves his job as a barber and go-between. The job keeps him hopping-he shaves the faces of the rich young bloods, prepares wigs for them and for the rich young ladies and bleeds everyone-but it has its perks, especially among the young ladies, "la, la, la, la!"

The words are funny, true, but what makes it so incredible is that the baritone must sing it faster and faster as he nears the end. You normally think of the deep bass voice as being serious, but at one point, he sings in falsetto, imitating the ladies calling him for his services. And of course, there is the familiar: "Figaro! Figaro! Figaro!" which, even if you know nothing about opera, you probably have sung once in your life.

My high school friend, Paul Mankowski, whose family introduced me to many works of classical music, told me that the Barber of Seville was a good place to start listening to opera. He was the one who told me that this aria by Figaro was calledLargo al Factotum, which means "make way for the jack-of-all-trades." He also recommended a recording of it, which, since it costs a whopping $15.99 in 1972, I persuaded my parents to buy it for me as a birthday present that year. They were puzzled, but complied.

Around the time I received my copy of it, Paul told me he had recently heard the Barber on a Saturday broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera, sponsored by Texaco. During Largo al Factotum aria, the soloist actually started singing lines in English that made fun of the other singers. That caught my attention. It showed me that this serious stuff called "classical music" actually had some humorous soul who practiced it.

Needless to say, this was one of the best birthday presents I ever received, and giving it a spin today to refresh my memory, I find that it still makes me smile.

• Rossini Biography
• Rossini: Barber of Seville (Highlights)

Brahms: Piano Concerto Number 2

In my previous entry, I ended up talking about how rich cultural life was at the turn of the 20th century and how poor ours seemed by comparison. Of course, writers for thousands of years have decried the decadence of their own era and pined for the "Golden Age," that is some time in the remote past when everyone was a philosopher, ate ambrosia, and created great works of art. We think of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Florentines in Renaissance Italy, the French in the age of enlightenment, and in our own era, the fin de siecle. But a look at a few of the musicians whose lives overlapped in the last decade of the 19th Century and the first of the 20th--Puccini, Faure, Mahler, Verdi, Toscanini, Milhaud, Tchaikowsky, Brahms, Grieg, Debussy, Rachmaninov and Stravinsky--does point to a golden age.

Often, I suspect the people who bemoan the sad state of the arts in their time are more often than not critics, not creators, of the arts. There's a poem by E.A. Robinson called "Miniver Cheevy" that sums up these souls. Here are a few stanzas from it:

Miniver Cheevy Child of Scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.Miniver mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.Minver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediaeval grace
Of iron clothing.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.

The fact of the matter is that great works of art and philosophy that survives and from which we think we know the past was created by an educated minority. Right now over five of the Earth's six billion people live in abject poverty and have pathetically short life spans. Think of how much higher the mortality rates must have been just a hundred years ago. Would any of us who yearn for those great minds of yesteryear swap places with anyone back then?

Woody Allen recently explored this idea again, in Midnight In Paris, in which the main character, at the ringing of a bell at midnight, is transported back to the 20s, where he meets Hemingway, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel, and Picasso.  He falls in love with one of Picasso's models and together they travel back in tim to the the previous generation of Toulouse Lautrec, Degas, Gaugin and Offenbach.  She longs for that golden age and cannot see the greatness of the artists around her, just as the Woody Allen character longs for the times of the Lost Generation.

Our problem today, methinks, is glut. We're supersaturated with information. With radio, television, high literacy rates, and now the Internet, we suffer from so much information that we find it hard to separate the gold from the dross.

I am heartened though, when I look everywhere and see people in their everyday lives trying to create works of art and beauty. A friend of mine from grade school, Jayne Holsinger, has been living in New York since 1978, where she's supported herself as a waitress and graphic designer and is now exhibiting her paintings in galleries. Another friend from high school, Doug Gottberg, has been composing and playing music with his group, Kino, in Paris since the early 1980s.  A while back, at my 25th high school reunion, I met an old friend named Ralph Scutchfield, who's played bluegrass banjo since he was a boy and was then learning how to play the violin in a Suzuki class with his daughter. The hamstrung intellectuals will tell you that the arts are in bad shape, but not if you're willing to go out and do them yourself.

What does this have to do with Brahm's Piano Concerto Number Two? For a number of years, I went through my own Minver Cheevy phase. My drug, as I've said before, was music. Shy and lacking in self-confidence, I would sit in my room for hours listening to great works of music, letting my emotions flow out, feeling sorry for myself, feeling victimized. Brahm's music was particularly affecting, and this concerto became one of my favorite pieces during that time period.

Unlike other concertos it has four movements, and it really is a breathtakingly grand work. When I think of it, it seems almost like a symphony with piano, so skillfully is the piano integrated with the orchestra. One critic of the time even labeled it as a "symphony with a piano obligato," but the piano is used so expressively that comment seems like a cheap shot. Make no mistakes about it, Brahms was an incredible genius and a master of the instrument. He chose to express his genius through heart-rendingly beautiful melodies, that often brought tears to my eyes.

A high school friend--Paul Mankowsk--once told me a story that illustrates the composer's gifts. Once Brahms went into a beer hall and was asked to play a tune on the piano. While warming up, he discovered the instrument to be excruciatingly out of tune. Brahms played a few scales and memorized which notes were off. He then transposed the notes of his piece correctly as he played it so that no one could hear that the piano was bad.

I particularly love the first movement, which starts with horns playing the Romantic melody.  The piano then picks the theme up in an almost angelic manner. The second movement, an allegro, is the extra movement, and is full of passion. The third reminds me a bit of Brahm's violin concerto and often served to set me off self-wallowing sadness. Fortunately, Brahms finishes the work with a lively and upbeat Rondo, which never failed to lift me out of my doldrums.

So do I still grouse about the philistinism around me? Do I still feel like Miniver Cheevy? You tell me. What helped, I think, was taking violin lessons with my own daughter, when she started when she was around nine year old. Sure, anyone can complain about the work of others. But it is immensely humbling--and liberating--to try some creative endeavor. Should more people do so, the end of the Millenium jitters would quickly evaporate, and we'd all see, that truly, we create our own "Golden Age."

• Brahms Biography
• Buy on Amazon

Edvard Grieg: Piano Concerto in A Minor

Musically, the 19th century went through amazing upheavals. It started out with Beethoven at the height of his powers reinventing the symphony. He changed it from the sweet pleasant "sounding together" of what in Handel's time was a sonata for orchestra, into a great momentous format for working out the turbulence of the times. Hot on his heels came Brahms ushering in the Romantic movement with the struggles of the passionate artist finding order and creating beauty out of this chaos. The idea of the Romantic artist, laboring alone in his garret, pouring out his soul seems to match the ascendancy of the concerto as a form for giving air to the creative process. By the end of the century, Europe was in the midst of such a cultural revolution--think of Wagner and Brahms, Monet and Van Gogh, Hardy and Tolstoy--the likes of which I dare say we might not see in a long while. They were humans imitating gods, while during our century we've been trying to get machines to do that for us.

Grieg's Piano Concerto in A Minor is one of those wonderfully gushingly Romantic works from the late 1800s. He wrote it when he was 25 and when he premiered it at one of his concerts, for he was a gifted pianist, it garnered him instant acclaim and established his reputation as a major composer. His output was modest--no symphonies, no operas and no other concertos. His best known work is Peer Gynt and this Holberg Suitegets a fair amount of air play. Maybe this was due to having to run his family's business after his father went bust trying to corner the lobster market.

Here is an interesting anecdote about Grieg and two other "noteworthy composers" that gives a little of the flavor of what the cultural life was like in fin de siecle Europe:

"At the home of Adolf Brodsky, who had launced his Violin Concerto five years earlier, Tchaikovsky inadvertently walked in on a rehearsal of Brahms's Piano Trio in C minor, with the great man himself at the piano. When Tchaikovsky grew 'uneasy', evidently reluctant to pay Brahms the compliments expected of him, their hostess feared 'a difficult scene' until the day was saved by the arrival of the short, frail figure of Edvard Grieg, to whom Tchaikovsky quickly warmed. At lunch Grieg's wife Nina, finding herself seated between Brahms and Tchaikovsky, sprang from her seat after only a few minutes, exclaiming: "I can't sit between these two. It makes me too nervous." "I have the courage," said Grieg, promptly taking her place. "So the three composers sat there together, all in high spirits," recalled Mrs Brodsky. "Brahms grabbed a dish of strawberry jam, insisting that he wanted to eat it all himself, and that no-one else could have any... It was more like a children's party than a gathering of great composers." (From Tchaikovsky,by Anthony Holden).

Who among our artists, composers, and writers would we place in the same Pantheon as those who were alive 100 years ago. Frankly I'm at a loss right now, so if anyone is out there with someone they'd like to nominate, please email me. Or even nominate yourself: you've probably got a lot more going for you than Lady Gaga.

• Biography
• Purchase

Peter Ilyich Tchaikowsky: Piano Concerto Number One in B Minor

It is hard to imagine a more accessible piece for anyone wandering where to start listening to classical music than Tchaikowsky's : Piano Concerto Number One. Tchaikowsky was Rachmaninov's teacher and this work gets almost as much airplay as any of Rachmaninov's piano concertos. The first movement is so romantic and passionate that it was pirated and turned into the popular song "Tonight We Love", and you also see it listed in those compilations hawked on television. You know the ones: "The Greatest Love Themes of All Times."

In high school, shortly after I discovered the piece, I was pleased to see it used in a comedy movie called The Tiger Makes Out." This film (circa 1967) starred Eli Wallach who plays a self-proclaimed "Superman," having gorged himself on the ideas of Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche and Sartre. He lives in a small basement apartment in Greenwich Village, New York. Like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, he believe he must perform some great act to prove his superiority. He conceives a plan for kidnapping a beautiful woman, who'll recognize his genius and become his love slave. The plan goes a bit wrong, however, when he throws a gunny sack a woman on the street. Back in his apartment, he unwraps her to find a middle-aged woman with marital problems. He screams: "What is this? Some kind of joke?" In a kind of O'Henry twist, she turns out much cleverer than he. Eventually, they fall in love and fall to the floor in a passionate embrace with Tchaikowsky's Piano Concerto Number Onewhizzing around on a portable record player next to them.

Not a bad scene, especially considering how passionate this piece is. It starts out with the horns giving a rousing blast followed by the piano that plays one-two-three chords repeatedly as the orchestra plays the melody. The piano then takes that melody and weaves lots of variations with it. The second movement starts with a single flute playing an achingly beautiful air, which the piano then takes up. The woodwinds take it back for a while and embellish it and give it back to the piano, which then does intricate wonders with it. A bash of the tympani jolt us out of our reverie in the final movement, which is marked "Con Fuoco" (with fire) which nicely sums up the energy and demanding piano work all the way through to the finale. Altogether, it is quite rousing.

I told a friend, John Kim, that after Rachmaninov, I intended to write about the other piano concertos that transfixed me during high school-those of Greig, Schumann, and Brahms. His reaction was: "Gee, you're really going right into the heart of the Romantic period then. Aren't you going to write about any light pieces?" I told him that my goal was to present the pieces in the order they came to me, and these all arrived in my late teens.

Perhaps I gravitated toward during this time period because they gave me solace amid the turbulence of those years. As I've said, I was wrestling with depression caused by and resulting in insecurity. Other people self-medicate with drugs, alcohol, sex and food. Listening to music was my way of expressing and experiencing my emotions in a controlled way.

Many of my high school friends were straight A students, gifted athletes, and the most popular kids in class. Yet when they got into drugs and alcohol, they went completely overboard. Some dropped out of school. The brother of another shattered his body in a horrible alcohol-related car wreck and lay in a coma for a month. Other got married too soon, ruining their chance of a professional career. Another went into the Navy to find the discipline could not impose on himself. Considering my personality, I don't know how I would have turned out had I not found music to assuage my growing pains.

You might say "What a bourgeois, spoiled waste of talent. Four fifths of the world's population don't have enough to eat and we in America kill ourselves with drugs." Perhaps this is true. Back then we didn't see it that way. We all thought we were supermen. We could do anything and thought we had enough good sense to pull ourselves back from the brink. Maybe our comfort gave us this false sense of security. Or maybe, having had all of our material comforts provided us, we felt we needed to take these risks to feel alive.

Seems like we could all be more efficient. Too bad "culture" gets such short shrift in our consumerist society. It used to be the glue that held society together and passed down the "lessons-learned" so you didn't have to reinvent the wheel with each generation. And it really wasn't stultifying to have to learn a discipline like music. Once you master what's gone before, you have good foundation on which to build. Just as Tchaikowsky learned from and built upon the work of Anton Rubenstein and Rimsky-Korsakov, so did his pupil, Rachmaninov, who carried on and went even further. Superman's myth--that you can leap-frog over buildings in a single bound--is decidedly false.

• Biography
• Youtube
• Recording

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 2 in C minor

The major task for all adolescents is to work out their own personality. I realize that nowadays, the nature-nurture researchers have pretty much proven that many personality traits we once thought of as learned are actually determined by the genes one inherits. From my own high school experiences, however, I don't find that to be the case.

Were I to choose a totem animal to represent my adolescent years, it would have to be the chameleon. I was exposed to so many different people in person and through books, classical music, and the popular media, that sometimes I didn't know who I really was. For example, when I went through my Russian author phase and read Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life Of Ivan Denisovich I made an aluminum spoon in my shop class, wrote the words, "Outer Mongolia" on it, and insisted on eating every meal with it. When I discovered James Joyce, I tried reading in poor light to destroy my eyesight so I could wear wire-rimmed glasses like him. When I saw Fellini's Roma, I carried my jacket over my shoulder in an attempt to look as cool as the young swell in the film.

Perhaps I was too influenced by the stronger personalities--usually the intellectuals--in my high school who became my role models. I say "too influenced," because though they knew a lot about books and music, they weren't always the wisest in the way of relationships and human emotions. Intellectuals for one thing don't always get the girls, and so have a lot of anger at the injustice of life (and at all those alpha male athletes who do score.) Intellectuals at this age also have another problem, they think that thinking can solve all the world's (and one's personal) problems. So they would not necessarily be sympathetic to, say, psychological counseling though they might desperately need it. Let me give you an example, which relates to today's piece.

Critics had not liked Rachmaninov First Symphony and he became depressed and went into a lethargic slump. He would not compose or perform. The Royal Philharmonic Society in London had commissioned him to write a piano concerto, but his mental state kept him from doing so. His relatives became so concerned that they persuaded him to seek the help of a noted psychologist named Dr. Nikolay Dahl. Dr. Dahl used hypnotism and the power of suggestion to restore Rachmaninov's self-confidence. During their sessions, the doctor would repeat to Rachmaninov: "You will begin to write your concerto.. you will work with great facility…the concerto will be of excellent quality." Rachmaninov stated that the good doctor's cure worked and by 1900 he had started working on the Second Piano Concerto. It remains the most popular of the four concertos that he wrote.

In high school, I had another friend named Eric Tollar who also loved Rachmaninov's work. He originally told me this story about Rachmaninov's cure. When I said it was neat, he said something like "No, it's not. It's stupid!" I think his point was that if Rachmaninov needed someone to repeat mindless phrases to him over and over again, he wasn't really a genius, and his work probably wasn't that great after all.

Unfortunately, that tended to color my own attitude toward depression, which had grave consequences for me. When I became depressed in high school and college, I believed it would be a sign of weakness to seek treatment. If I couldn't work it out for myself, then I was weak and certainly no intellectual. As I later learned reading Listening to Prozac if one doesn't seek external treatment for depression, one usually ends up self-medicating-either through drugs, alcohol or addictive behaviors. Thus, I spent the next 20 years battling depression.

According to the research presented in that book, there is a kindling effect associated with depression. The emotion of depression are associated with certain chemical imbalances in the brain. If you repeatedly get depressed and don't get treatment eventually your brain chemistry changes so that you become even more susceptible to it--like dry kindling is to fire. Eventually, I tried therapy, which helped a great deal for about a year, but then I fell back into depression.  After reading the book, I sought treatment from a psychiatrist who prescribed Prozac. Prozac, it's said, has the ability to somehow reset the brain chemistry back to the state before the depression started. Now I feel more productive than ever before in my life.

Fortunately--maybe because of my own experience with depression--I never thought less of Rachmaninov because of his treatment and therefore still enjoy his works. Every time I hear the Piano Concerto Number 2 it perks me up. It starts out with a beautiful romantic melody with a Slavic feel to it. The piano and the orchestra go back and forth for about half of the movement and then the piano takes off and plays some of the most incredibly fast passages probably every written. Near the end, the piano leads the way through several mysterious sounding key changes, which still give me chills. The second movement has one of the most beautiful melodies ever written, which some minimally talented singer stole back in the 1970s and incorporated into his pop song, "All by Myself." Sheer dreck.

The last movement starts out with a little march that then picks up, sounding a bit like Tchaikowsky (under whom Rachmaninov studied). Then the strings play one of the most heart-rendingly beautiful melody of all times, which the piano then picks up. The movement then unfolds into dialogs, solos, contrasts, harmonies, explosions, and tenderness. It really is one of the great works of all times.

Isolated, airy, dry intellect is certainly alluring. Sometimes we poke fun of the "ivory tower" intellectual, divorced and removed from the world. What shame is there in asking for help when one truly needs it? Didn't someone once say "Pride goeth before the fall?" Imagine what would have happened had Rachmaninov not gone to the good Dr. Dahl? We all would have been deprived of this wonderful work.

Rachmaninov Bio

Youtube (Van Cliburn Performing in 1958 in Moscow)

Recording by Van Cliburn