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Rachmaninoff, Serge in Oxford Music Online http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/501... Oxford Music Online 1 de 12 11/03/2012 17:37 Rachmaninoff, Serge in Oxford Music Online http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/501... Grove Music Online Rachmaninoff, Serge article url: http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com:80/subscriber/article/grove/music/50146 Rachmaninoff [Rakhmaninov, Rachmaninov], Serge [Sergey] (Vasil′yevich) (b Oneg, 20 March/1 April 1873; d Beverly Hills, CA, 28 March 1943). Russian composer, pianist and conductor. He was one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, the last great representative of Russian late Romanticism. The influences of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and other Russian composers soon gave way to a thoroughly personal idiom, with a pronounced lyrical quality, expressive breadth, structural ingenuity and a palette of rich, distinctive orchestral colours. 1. 1873–92. There remains some debate about the exact place of Rachmaninoff’s birth. A case has been made for Semyonovo (Bryantseva, 1969), but Rachmaninoff himself always thought he was born at Oneg in the Novgorod region, and other evidence indicates that that was probably the case. According to the Old Style calendar, he was born on 20 March 1873, yielding 1 April as the New Style date; but after emigrating from Russia in 1917, Rachmaninoff habitually celebrated his birthday using the 20th-century conversion principle of adding 13 days to the Old Style date. The plaque on his tomb thus bears the birthdate 2 April 1873. Rachmaninoff’s improvident father squandered the family fortune, and the family was rapidly reduced from having several homes to occupying the one estate at Oneg. It was here that Rachmaninoff had his earliest piano lessons, first from his mother, then from Anna Ornatskaya, a graduate of the St Petersburg Conservatory. In 1882 even Oneg had to be sold to settle debts, and the family moved to St Petersburg, where Rachmaninoff attended the conservatory, receiving a general education and studying the piano with Vladimir Demyansky and harmony with Aleksandr Rubets. But soon the family was again in turmoil: during an epidemic of diphtheria Rachmaninoff’s sister Sofiya died, and, to make matters worse, relations between his parents became so strained that they decided to separate. This emotional upheaval had a decisive effect on Rachmaninoff’s future career. With her increased domestic responsibilities, his mother was unable adequately to supervise his homework, and as a result he failed all his general subjects at the end-of-term examinations in 1885. The conservatory hinted that his scholarship might be withdrawn and so, on the recommendation of his cousin Aleksandr Ziloti, Rachmaninoff was sent to the Moscow Conservatory to study with the disciplinarian Nikolay Zverev. Living at Zverev’s flat together with two other young pupils, Maksimov and Presman, he was subjected to rigorous tuition, beginning practice at 6 a.m., acquiring a basic knowledge of music from four-hand arrangements of symphonies, and attending concerts in the city. It was also at Zverev’s, during his Sunday afternoon gatherings, that Rachmaninoff first encountered many of the prominent musicians of the day: namely Anton Rubinstein, Taneyev, Arensky, Safonov and, the most influential figure of his formative years, Tchaikovsky. In spring 1888 Rachmaninoff transferred to the senior department of the conservatory to study the piano with Ziloti, while still living with Zverev; in the autumn he began to study counterpoint with Taneyev and harmony with Arensky. Zverev, who was concerned solely with the development of Rachmaninoff’s piano technique, had never encouraged him to compose, though it was at Zverev’s that Rachmaninoff wrote his earliest works, a Mendelssohnian orchestral scherzo (1888), some piano pieces (1887–8) and sketches for an opera Esmeralda (1888). But his creative instincts finally led to a breach with Zverev in 1889. In the single workroom at the flat Rachmaninoff found it impossible to concentrate on composition while the others were practising; but Zverev met his request for more privacy with peremptory dismissal from the household, refusing even to speak to him for three years. Rejecting his mother’s idea that he should return to St Petersburg to study with Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninoff remained in Moscow, living for a while with a conservatory colleague, Mikhail Slonov, then with his relatives, the Satins. Here he sketched some ideas for a piano concerto (which came to 2 de 12 11/03/2012 17:37 Rachmaninoff, Serge in Oxford Music Online http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/501... nothing) and completed two movements of a string quartet (dedicated to Ziloti); and in spring 1890 he composed the six-part motet Deus meus and his earliest songs. During the summer he stayed at Ivanovka, the Satins’s country estate, where he met the three Skalon sisters, distant cousins by marriage, conceiving a calf-love for the youngest, Vera, and dedicating to her his new cello Lied . It was also for the Skalon sisters that he composed a six-hand piano Waltz (1890) and Romance (1891). This first visit to Ivanovka, deep in the Russian countryside in the Tambov region about 600 kilometres to the south east of Moscow, had a profound and lasting significance over and above any transitory amatory dalliance, for it was here, in years to come, where Rachmaninoff would do almost all his composition. The spacious, isolated estate offered him the peace and quiet he needed to collect his creative thoughts. His love of nature, which had been engendered during his Novgorod childhood, grew even further at Ivanovka, and roughly 85% of his music was conceived and developed there. Although his correspondence rarely reveals any information about progress on his works, many of his autograph manuscripts bear an Ivanovka inscription; and, with a knowledge of the dates during which he was at Ivanovka, it is possible to infer that other works had their origins there. Immediately after the 1890 Ivanovka summer, Rachmaninoff returned to the Satins’s home in Moscow. He taught for a while in a class for choir trainers, and sketched at least two movements of an orchestral piece, Manfred , possibly inspired by the Tchaikovsky symphony, which he had transcribed for piano duet in 1886. In spring 1891 Ziloti resigned from the conservatory because of constant disagreements with the director, Safonov. Rather than transfer to another teacher for the remaining year of his course, Rachmaninoff was allowed to take his piano finals a year early, and he graduated with honours on 24 May/5 June. During the summer, again at Ivanovka, he completed his First Piano Concerto (begun in 1890), and back in Moscow in December he set to work on his first symphonic poem, Knyaz′ Rostislav (‘Prince Rostislav’), which he dedicated to Arensky. Early in 1892 he gave the première of his first Trio élégiaque with Anatoly Brandukov and David Krein, and also played the first movement of his concerto at a conservatory concert on 17/29 March. Shortly afterwards he began to prepare for his finals in composition, which, like his piano examinations, he was taking a year early. The main exercise was to be a one-act opera Aleko , based on Pushkin’s poem Tsïganï (‘The Gypsies’). For his work Rachmaninoff was awarded the highest possible mark, and he graduated from the conservatory with the Great Gold Medal, previously awarded only to Koreshchenko and Taneyev. 2. 1892–1901. After his graduation Rachmaninoff signed a publishing contract with Gutheil, and in the autumn composed what was quickly to become his best-known composition, the piano prelude in C minor, a work to which Rachmaninoff owed much of his early popularity but which became for him a tiresome encore at most of his concerts. In view of its phenomenal success, he later had cause to regret that Gutheil had not secured international copyright on it, Russia not then being a signatory to the 1886 Berne Convention. He was soon to take the precaution of having his work registered both in Russia and in Germany. In Spring 1893 Aleko was given its première at the Bol′shoy. Tchaikovsky, who attended the rehearsals and the performance, was enthusiastic about it, and Kashkin, in his perceptive, not uncritical review in the Moskovskiye vedomosti (29 April/11 May 1893), commented that ‘of course there are faults, but they are far outweighed by merits, which lead one to expect much from this young composer in the future’. Spurred by his success, Rachmaninoff composed with ease during the summer and autumn: he completed his op.4 and op.8 songs, the two-piano Fantaisie-tableaux op.5, a sacred choral piece V molitvakh neusïpayushchuyu bogoroditsu (‘In our Prayers, Ever-Vigilant Mother of God’), the two op.6 violin pieces and the orchestral fantasy Utyos (‘The Rock’), which bears a quotation from Lermontov’s poem but was in fact inspired by Chekhov’s short story Na puti (‘On the Road’). Tchaikovsky wanted to conduct the piece during the following season; but in November he died, and Rachmaninoff immediately devoted himself to writing a second Trio élégiaque to his memory, clearly revealing the sincerity of his grief in the music’s overwhelming aura of gloom. In January 1895 he began work on his first substantial piece, the Symphony no.1 in D minor (which has no connection with a D minor symphonic movement written in 1891). The symphony occupied 3 de 12 11/03/2012 17:37 Rachmaninoff, Serge in Oxford Music Online http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/501... him until September, and during 1896 Belyayev agreed to include it in one of his Russian Symphony Concerts. The performance, conducted by Glazunov, was on 15/27 March 1897, and was a disaster: Cui likened the work to ‘a programme symphony on the Seven Plagues of Egypt’, though other critics acknowledged that its poor reception was due as much to the performance as to the piece itself.