PART I
The "minorness" of Rachmaninoff's
aesthetics and where (not) to
look for its origins
1. Structural principle and gesture
2. Old and New in Rachmaninoff's
Manuscript
3. Hypertrophy-but not in interpretation
4. Appassionato vs sostenuto
5. Feel-and what to do with it
6. How the “very old composer”
Rachmaninov teaches new things
PART II
Approaching the second
half of the motto
look at the old as the
new and the new as the old
2. Old and New in Rachmaninoff's Manuscript
As a composer, Rachmaninoff has no problem using old, tried-and-tested musical
situations and reaching for things that have been tried hundreds of times. Another thing is that within them he plays refined games of his musical intellect, with means reminiscent of those of the "modernists".
Just as some painters paint over old artworks, Rachmaninoff also reaches for an old
painting - a conservative musical situation - and begins to repaint it. He paints on the ground plan of 19th-century music, and I guess you could say that this is his way of dealing with the crisis of the tonal system.
While Schoenberg, for example, shook off the shackles of tonality and functionality, the pulse of consonance and dissonance, Rachmaninoff handled it differently. He took the Tristan motif into his laboratory, analysed it and brought it into the realm of some super or supra harmony, or meta harmony, meta tonality. And perhaps it was his good fortune to have this combination of progressive intellectual solutions and emotional conservatism that preserved his form. Rachmaninoff realized that to acquiesce to the principle of chromaticism, to the emergent multiplicities and incessant flows, is like smashing an atom: particles fly and, unless they are mastered in space, they radiate into the void.
Many of his works - especially smaller forms such as preludes and some etudes -
represent a paradigmatic gesture - the gesture of a nocturne, for example, the canto
accompagnato. This is a very old and natural musical situation, but Rachmaninoff’s conception of this image of singing is considerably more sophisticated.
Underneath the first layer of the pleasing quasi-nocturne, several peculiarities seep out, forming the essence of what distinguishes it from a true cliché. The minor complications, digressions and conflicts he conducts with schematic, conservative resolution seem to constantly challenge the seemingly objective musical images, giving rise even in such unambiguous lyrical compositions to the nervous poetics of a typical Rachmaninoff manuscript, a constant trembling that shines through from beneath the veneer of primordial likeability.
For example, in the objective image of a nocturne with a patterned accompagnato
introduction followed by the entrance of a cantilena - he gradually begins to deny the melodica its clear dominance, confronts it with other layers, the accompanying voices cease to be accompaniments and enter into relationships, he plays a game with the chromaticism, exaggerates an inconspicuous element, and suddenly achieves a vision of the structure in a different way. And suddenly there is a polyphony not only in the sense of material, but a polyphony of expression - which is typical of 20th century modernism.
See example no. 4: Rachmaninoff – Prelude op. 23 no. 4
See example no. 5: Rachmaninoff – Prelude op. 23 no. 1
See example no. 6: Rachmaninoff – Prelude op. 23 no. 1
See example no. 6: Rachmaninoff – Etude-Tableaux op. 39 no.2
The interpretive pitfall of this type of texture - and especially in small areas - is
incomprehensibility, and this is exactly what often happens when interpreting Rachmaninoff's works. In the great drama of the sonata, the composer otherwise builds relationships, gradations, imposes climaxes, and works in the passage of time. In the small form there is no space, it expands inwards, in depth, the time available is multi-layered. It is reduced, but all the characters, the psychological plot and the punchline need to be portrayed in the same way.
The constant attack of new events, the multidimensionality of the musical flow can make the information too much, indigestible, impossible to relax, unable to discern what is primary, what is secondary. That's when it can be dangerously attractive to reach for just the horizontal and the wide-ranging phrase as a central solution.
