Reviewed by: Sergei Rachmaninoffby Rebecca Mitchell Simon Morrison Mitchell, Rebecca. Sergei Rachmaninoff. Critical Lives. Reaktion Books, London, 2022. 237 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Further reading. Select discography. £12.99 (paperback). P artof a series of fast-paced, illustrated biographies, Sergei Rachmaninofffocuses as much on Rakhmaninov's posthumous reputation as on his life and music. Rather than describing the composer at work, the performer wowing American audiences as a virtuoso pianist, or the conductor leading an orchestra from the podium at the Bolshoi, Rebecca Mitchell begins from the end, by detailing the downturn in his critical reputation after he died of lung cancer in 1943, age 69. Rakhmaninov has been trivialized as a nostalgic exile who never recovered from the loss of Russia in 1917 and of the estate he called home until the Bolsheviks confiscated it. He supposedly remained a nineteenth-century composer out of sync with modernism, disdainful of decadent rule-breaking, abstraction and formalism, preferring the luxurious harmonies and long-breathed melodies of German Romanticism while remaining more classical (Apollonian) in his formal designs than his immediate predecessors. His critical appraisal has suffered because he appealed to the masses. Music so popular, with such affecting treatments of the flat-seventh scale degree, cannot be serious. There is truth in this received story, but beginning with the negative and assuming a defensive posture is risky. The critiques guide the argument from the start. Had the naysaying come in at the end, its biases would have been exposed. Modernism in music has been defined as much by academics as composers, [End Page 165]including those committed to undermining it. Mitchell is aware of the paradox and she deals with it by patiently correcting the record, demonstrating that Rakhmaninov liked the high life of the 1920s and '30s — automobiles, first-class travel, luxurious surroundings — and proved himself a savvy businessman, notably in numerous successful publishing ventures. Tragedies happened around him, not to him. (An obvious instance: 'the Bolshevik execution of at least 15,000 [starving] peasants' in the Tambov region where Rakhmaninov maintained his estate, p. 142.) According to the construction that Mitchell challenges here, because he was a great artist and 'soul' of his nation Rakhmaninov suffered too, an idea she negates less through polemics than engagement with the scores in their context. She explains how Rakhmaninov's music enriched the Orthodox template for religious expression, rethought nationalism, and addressed trauma, exile and estrangement by surmounting them all (rather than succumbing to them). He overused bell sounds and liturgical chants (though his favourite chant, the Dies Irae, is not part of the Orthodox rite) — like Charles Ives used the sounds of Concord, Massachusetts in his cosmic scores — to demonstrate the interconnectedness of things at the micro and macrocosmic level. His art was contemporary in its turbulence and more aligned with the Silver Age than critics have hitherto noticed. As Mitchell declares at the end of her book, 'By resituating Rakhmaninov's career within a multilayered experience of uprootedness (rather than timelessly drifting outside of it), his stature as a genuinely modern figure becomes clear' (p. 199). Mitchell is an excellent guide to Rakhmaninov's shorter piano pieces as well as the songs, and she includes some amusing information about the enormous fame of the C-sharp minor Prelude. Rakhmaninov profited less from it than its publisher — he received 40 rubles, while Gutheil raked in 500,000 — and insisted that its big chords came out of the blue. According to the composer, the piece represents nothing beyond its own C-sharp minor-ness; it has no secret programme, even if an American listener, a 'young lady' in his thrall, interpreted it as the sound of someone being buried alive (p. 50). She asked Rakhmaninov if that was his intent; he demurred. Other interpretations included the masses rallying to the banner of the pretender during the Time of Troubles. Mitchell features the fiasco of the premiere of his First Symphony, allowing her to demolish the myth that its negative reception sank the composer into a protracted depression and creative paralysis that only a hypnotist could cure. She shows that the chronology is off; he never actually stopped composing, and there...
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Apr 19, 2024
Gennady Y Karpenko 
Open Access