Rachmaninoff repeated the format for the new season which he had adopted the year before, and returned to the United States to begin a very strenuous season of fifty concerts. America was still in the depth of depression.
It was not a happy season for Rachmaninoff: concert halls suffered like everything else, and there was little profit to be made. On January 23rd in San Antonio, Texas, he gave the first performance of his transcription of the Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. But he was suffering from an attack of lumbago, so severe that at the recital he had to be helped to and from the piano. In order not to distract the audience by seeing him in pain, his entrance and exit were masked by curtains. It was the season which marked the fortieth anniversary of his debût as a pianist. His next birthday would be his sixtieth, and although he disliked a great fuss being made his friends in New York gave a reception for him on December 22nd, presenting him with a commemorative scroll and a laurel wreath. The season was over at the end of March on the eve of his birthday, after which he travelled back to Europe for further concerts. His return meant he missed the Toscanini Beethoven cycle in New York with the Philharmonic, which included an imposing Fifth Symphony on April 9th, and the ‘Emperor’ Concerto with Horowitz, and their meeting led to the pianist being introduced to Toscanini’s daughter, Wanda. They fell in love, and were married in Milan the following December.
On his European return Rachmaninoff found the political scene rapidly deteriorating. The economic depression was particularly severe in Germany: after five general elections in little over a year, Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor on January 30th. He lost no time: on February 27th the Reichstag building was burned down. The communists were blamed leading to massive pogroms and a demand from Hitler that absolute power be vested in him. On March 5th the Reichstag agreed, handing over to Hitler virtual dictatorship.
On May 5th in Paris a particularly happy occasion for Rachmaninoff was the concert at the Salle Pleyel honouring his sixtieth birthday and fortieth anniversary. Alfred Cortôt, the French pianist and conductor, spoke in his honour. Rachmaninoff’s London recital on April 29th marked the English première of the Corelli Variations, but Rachmaninoff did not report on English coughing. The second half of the season’s tours was more agreeable than the first, for Senar neared completion, and the Rachmaninoffs could see their daughters with their families once again. Apart from the occasional bout of lumbago and despite his persistent cigarette smoking, Rachmaninoff was in good health. The good wishes which had been offered him during the season did much to restore his normal demeanour, which was affected by the failures at the beginning of the season.
At Senar, Oscar von Riesemann’s publishers sent proofs of his book to Rachmaninoff. The result was not what Rachmaninoff had expected: although he had talked freely with the author, von Riesemann made no notes during the conversations. Yet the book, as proposed, contained many passages in direct quotations as though Rachmaninoff had dictated every word. Some of the comments about fellow musicians, although one is inclined to believe they were probably correct in essence, were a little too near the mark for a person of Rachmaninoff’s countenance. Although his artistic integrity was of the highest, and he was anxious to appear with the finest conductors and musicians, his innate good manners meant he would rather say nothing than to give offence when asked his opinion about fellow musicians. With von Riesemann it was a different matter, for he had known him for over twenty years, and was more free in his comments to him than to strangers. He demanded certain cuts and changes in the text all of which were complied with, and once the book was in a more acceptable state he supplied some manuscripts and wrote the foreword. Therefore the book as published was endorsed by Rachmaninoff, although he later stated in a letter that a lot of it was pure fiction. This makes von Riesemann’s book somewhat unreliable as a result, but Rachmaninoff must take some of the blame. He had, after all, allowed the book to be published with his corrections, and by allowing his name to be associated with ‘pure fiction’ he was at fault. However, von Riesemann had suffered a heart attack before publication, so Rachmaninoff was unwilling to pursue the matter. We shall never know if his later comments were made to placate someone who had taken umbrage at a passage in the book. On balance, however, the twenty years’ friendship and Rachmaninoff’s endorsement of the book make one feel it might contain more truth than is supposed. During this summer, Rachmaninoff completed the score of movements transcribed from Bach’s E major Violin Partita, and his own three-movement ‘suite’ taken from Bach’s work, comprising the Prelude, Gavotte and Gigue, was finished on September 9th. Rachmaninoff found this an effective item with which to open programmes, which he did when giving the work its première in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the following November 9th. Another innovation was the acquisition of a large speed-boat, which became a favourite toy. He spent a lot of time chasing the pleasure steamers on Lake Lucerne, and he soon became an expert pilot. His skill averted what could have been a tragedy three years later.
Rachmaninoff with his friend Baron Nolde on Lake Lucerne.
The new season began with more concerts in the United States, including the première of the Bach ‘Suite’. During his stay he heard the welcome news that President Roosevelt had resumed diplomatic relations with the U.S.S.R. Almost immediately the Russian ban on his music had been lifted, and Vilshau reported on successful performances of his latest works. The removal of the ban on Rachmaninoff’s music was partly a result of President Roosevelt’s diplomatic moves but Stalin himself began, early in 1934, to take a hand in artistic matters. Shostakovitch’s opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk had been premièred in Leningrad on January 22nd, but later was the subject of a bitter doctrinal attack. Wishing to nominate a model for young composers to follow, Rachmaninoff’s recent Three Russian Folk-Songs was praised, showing that even composers of the old school were still inspired by the folk-roots of Russian culture, rather more in line with Soviet thinking than the modernism and sarcasm of Shostakovitch’s opera. A few months later Rachmaninoff returned to Europe, expecting to move in to Villa Senar. Before the season ended he had concerts in London (on March 10th) and in Paris the following month, when at long last the new house was finished. When they took up residence in April, Rachmaninoff was delighted with the gift of a new grand piano from Steinways, already installed in the house as a surprise. The house and its surroundings were delightful, in a spot which has attracted many musicians.
The composer at his desk at Senar
After a minor operation in Paris in May, Rachmaninoff returned to Senar and, inspired by his new environment which he endeavoured to make as much like Ivanovka as possible, he commenced work on a new composition. Working in great secrecy the score was dated July 3rd-August 18th. It was his Opus 43, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini for piano and orchestra. The première was fixed for Baltimore the following November, with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Stokowski. The new work was an instantaneous success with public, musicians and critics alike. A little over six weeks later, RCA made up for their tardiness in not recording Rachmaninoff for five years by recording the Rhapsody in Philadelphia with the original performers, on Christmas Eve. The performance, which is quite simply inimitable, went at a tremendous pace, for the published sides were all first takes. This was a particularly busy recording time for Stokowski and his orchestra for within the previous two months he had recorded for RCA Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony and Nutcracker Suite, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade (for the second time) and Dvorak’s New World Symphony (for the third time in seven years!). This activity makes Rachmaninoff’s absence from the recording studios all the more inexplicable. The recording of the Paganini Rhapsody as well as that of the Second Concerto of 1929 received the attention of the Japanese Victor engineers in 1977, and their issue of the recordings is truly startling, enabling us to hear many details which are obscured on all previous transfers and often lost on recordings made many years later. Such is the excellence of the original rec
ordings that one hears the odd wrong note from Rachmaninoff and vocal contributions to the performances either from Rachmaninoff or Stokowski. The work abounds in the most felicitous touches, from the opening (where the first variation precedes the theme) to the joke ending (the only part of Rachmaninoff’s performance which could have been remade), and the combination of the theme with the Dies Irae is another highly characteristic touch.
Bruno Walter, Thomas Mann and Arturo Toscanini
Three days after recording the Rhapsody in Philadelphia Rachmaninoff introduced it to New York, in Carnegie Hall under Bruno Walter, where it caused a sensation. In the new year, Rachmaninoff brought the Rhapsody to Europe, where in some countries it was preceded by the release of the recording. In England Rachmaninoff gave the British première in Manchester on March 7th, with the Hallé Orchestra under Nikolai Malko. The performance a fortnight later in London at a Royal Philharmonic Society concert was conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham and was, by all accounts, a brilliant success.
With his grandchildren Sophie Volkonsky and Alexander Conus on his estate near Lake Lucerne, c. 1936.
Although Rachmaninoff hardly spoke about his compositions, even to close friends, and managed to evade the subject when it was raised, he must have been very pleased at the success of the Paganini Rhapsody. It also afforded him the practical relief of an alternative concerto to offer, and proved he could still write music which struck home to its audience, after a lapse of seventeen years and a number of less-than-wholly successful works. It showed that his composing was far from finished, and that he was no longer wholly dependent on a kind of archetypal ‘Russian’ melody.
For Rachmaninoff the summers of 1934 and 1935 were particularly happy. He was surrounded by his daughters and his grandchildren of which he now had two, for Tatiana had given birth to a boy on March 8th 1933, named Alexander. Sophie was nine years old in 1935 and preceeding well with her piano lessons, studying with her aunt’s sister-in-law, Olga Conus. Rachmaninoff had even set some of his grand-daughter’s childish verses to music. In these happy and contented surroundings, Rachmaninoff began work on a large orchestral piece: the Third Symphony Opus 44.
In marked contrast to Rachmaninoff’s new-found peace of mind, however, were the sinister developments in Europe.
The events of 1935 moved inexorably along a tragically-familiar route. The Saar region, taken over from Germany by the Versailles Treaty, elected to return to German rule on March 1st, and on the sixteenth of that month Hitler broke the Versailles Treaty by ordering conscription.
Sir Thomas Beecham, Bart. Photo: RCA.
At that time Rachmaninoff was engaged on the second movement of the Third Symphony, having completed a draft of the first movement between June 18th and August 22nd. The second movement is dated August 26th-September 18th. The onset of the new season made Rachmaninoff postpone the composition of the third movement. With his wife he left for Paris on September 30th, before travelling on to the United States where the tour began on October 19th. The success of the Paganini Rhapsody and the work he had thus far completed on the Third Symphony found Rachmaninoff in bouyant mood, able to withstand the rigours of a particularly extended season. During the European half of the season, he travelled further East than before, with concerts in in following months, the Symphony failed to catch on as the Paganini Rhapsody had done. The public and the critics felt the work looked back a little too far for comfort, but its qualities are too great to warrant early dismissal. The three-movement structure is a symphonic innovation for Rachmaninoff: but the central movement, beginning as the slow movement, contains the scherzo, before recapitulating the slow movement. Formally, this difficult inspiration is carried off with magisterial command: not since Elgar’s First Symphony, which similarly unites movements, had a composer combined slow movement and scherzo — and a reprise of the slow movement — with such skill. The work shows true cyclical construction helped, as in the earlier symphonies, by the subtle use of a motto theme, combined almost ‘as usual’ with fleeting references to the Dies Irae. Rachmaninoff found himself yet again misunderstood by his contemporaries.
Leopold Stokowski Photo: RCA.
Warsaw, Vienna, Budapest, Paris, Switzerland and England, where he made fourteen appearances. On December 23rd Rachmaninoff recorded his first solo piano sides for six years, but they were not important pieces: the Borodin Scherzo, the Midsummer Night’s Dream Scherzo, and the Chopin A minor Mazurka Opus 68 No 2, the last of which (and most important musically) was not released. More recordings followed early in January: on the 3rd Rachmaninoff recorded Handel’s Harmonious Blacksmith Variations (from the Fifth Harpsichord Suite) and his own Serenade in E flat, for the second time, replacing the earlier acoustic Victor recording of 1922. Shortly afterwards Rachmaninoff was in London for two Courtauld-Sargent concerts, at which he played the Third Concerto with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Malcolm Sargent on March 30th and 31st. These were particularly fine performances, with Sargent showing a special affinity for Rachmaninoff’s music. News had already reached Rachmaninoff of the death in Paris of Glazunov on March 21st at the age of 70, but a greater shock was in the sudden death of Respighi aged 56, on April 18th.
Rachmaninoff was in Paris in April for a performance of the Rhapsody, conducted by Alfred Cortôt. The French government at this time was gravely concerned by the occupation of the demilitarised Rhineland zone by Germany in flagrant breach of the Locarno pact. For Rachmaninoff, the beautiful villa Senar was a perfect retreat from the portentuous happenings in the rest of Europe. Here, in peace and seclusion, he could return to the unfinished Third Symphony: first, he revised the first movement between May 18th and June 1st and the finale followed — for it was in three movements — between June 6th and 30th. Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra agreed to première the work the following November.
The composer with his wife in the 1930s.
In October Rachmaninoff was back in England. In London he played the Rhapsody, and later in Sheffield attended the long-delayed Yorkshire performance of The Bells for which he rewrote the choral parts of the scherzo at Senar before completing the Third Symphony. Both performances were conducted by Sir Henry Wood, who was interested to learn of the new Symphony. The soloists at the Sheffield performance were Isobel Baillie, Parry Jones, and Harold Williams, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Immediately after the highly successful performance, Rachmaninoff left for the United States, where he learned that Eugene Ormandy, after his five years at Minneapolis, had been appointed joint conductor — with Stokowski — of the Philadelphia Orchestra. After twenty-four years as conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Stokowski had arrived at a point where his path, and that of the orchestra, were beginning to diverge.
On November 6th Stokowski conducted the world première of Rachmaninoff’s Third Symphony at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. In spite of a Philadelphia Orchestra tour with Rachmaninoff and Ormandy, when the work was heard many times What was so new in the Third Symphony is a much greater economy of utterance: the proliferation of the first two symphonies, for example, is here replaced by a comparatively sparer style (apparent in the Paganini Rhapsody) which curiously enhances the emotional power of the work. The first movement, deeply tragic, is not morbid, but depicts a collapse so awesome in its inexorable tread that Mahler is often recalled. But unlike Mahler, Rachmaninoff’s vision has the fateful objectivity of a Greek tragedy, finally overcome in the powerful finale.
Rachmaninoff must have known that in the Third Symphony he had written another masterpiece and its failure deeply affected him. But he had lived through a great deal since the failure of the First Symphony, and his virtuoso career brought the occasional concert where everything went right, which enabled him to recapture that rare spirit of delight, in spite of his frequent complaints about the peripatetic nature of his profession. Over twenty years before, in a conversation with Marietta Shaginian, he explained:
… Later he told me that every piece he
played had a construction with a culminating ‘point’ (i.e., climax). And that he felt that one should measure and divide the whole mass of sounds so as to give depth and force in such gradation that this high point would flash, as, for instance, when the ribbon falls down at the end of a race, or when a glass breaks to pieces from a sudden blow. The culminating point could be … at the end of the piece or in the middle; it could come as thunder or very quietly, but the interpreter should approach it with absolute calculation and exactness; otherwise the whole structure of the piece would fall apart…
At each performance, therefore, Rachmaninoff strove to reveal the ‘point’, and yet this was always re-thought for each performance (even though the climax did not change). Abram Chasins recalled that his most vivid and striking recollection of Rachmaninoff was his manner of approaching each work, no matter how many times he had played it before, completely afresh as though it were a new composition. This sterling and profound musicianship was rare indeed. Therefore, there were compensations for the comparative failure of some of his works: the United States tour at the end of 1936 by Ormandy and the Philadelphias included The Bells, and in England, faithful friends such as Moiseiwitsch and Wood continued to demonstrate his unfailing hold over the public, for on December 13th in London, they performed both the Second Concerto and the Rhapsody in the same concert. On February 10th, 1937, Wood gave the first London performance of The Bells, using the revised Sheffield chorus parts, and the same soloists. This was a memorable concert, for in it Arthur Rubinstein played two concertos: Franck’s Symphonic Variations and the John Ireland Piano Concerto.
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