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
5. Feel - and what to do with it?
"All the sediment and convention must disappear from the internal structure of your role. You must affect exclusively the core of this inner structure, the purely organic essence of emotion (MB emphasized), not the incidental embellishment attributed to this or that emotion and its corresponding action on stage."3
There is nothing worse than the intrusiveness of emotion, taught the great theatre teacher Stanislavsky. The most terrible thing in artistic creation is to sweeten the sweet, salt the salty, spice the spicy, artificially inflate and falsely exaggerate. Instead of loving, we see the artist straining.
Stanislavsky taught actors to tame passion, to realise that the artistic tension is not so much in the passion itself, but in the force that seeks to overcome it. And the power of tragedy arises precisely from the moment that the fortitude of our determination suffers a fiasco and succumbs to passion "at the right moment." But these subtle and powerful emotions in artistic creation are not to be dealt with in a merely elemental way - how could we always find the right and powerful moment? The captured advice of Stanislavsky, Gogol, and Chekhov to actors is extremely inspiring, wise, and surprisingly congruent:
“Try ... to let the viewer see your efforts to refrain from crying and not really see you cry. The impression will be several times stronger.” (…) “When you depict the unfortunate and want to make the reader sad, try to be cooler - this will create a sort of backdrop to the stranger's grief, against which it will be drawn in relief. “ 4
“In art it is important not to say anything unnecessary, to express only condensed impressions - then a strong place will make an extraordinary impression” 5
The theme of "too much emotion hidden under a mask of cold restraint" is an old
Romantic theme, from Wertherism, stretching through Villiers, Maupassant, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and into 20th century modern literature. It works in music in exactly the same way.
It is up to us, the performers, to be able to capture and decipher the subtle possibilities of texture that make up the unique emotional and intellectual content. The sediment of custom and convention - this is how it is supposed to be played, this is how it is played - is dangerous precisely because it closes our minds, our clairvoyance, and the modern outlook I keep mentioning.
“How often Rachmaninoff's compositions, which have a specific smell, are vulgarised, how pianists rush to meet the emotion, 'interpret the emotion' and thus pass it by in cheap sentimental outpourings! “6
That is why Rachmaninoff himself is constantly selecting, so to speak cooling his music. To make the perfection of structure recognizable, to make the principle appreciated, he lets the conservatism of emotional ideas, gestures and rhetoric act as a base, not as an end goal, and draws more attention to the inner rich dimension of the composition. And it is in doing so that he reveals the concentrated core, the organic essence of emotion, of which Stanislavsky spoke. What is particularly interesting is that this principle is also typical of Rachmaninoff as a performer. He always shapes the emotion in a deeply considered and distributed proportionality and hierarchy. With strict tempo and restrained dynamics, he often holds back the emotional exuberance of climaxes - the inner energy is not so much manifested in the climax itself as in its gradation, on the way to it. In the gradations it creates immense pressure, but the climax of the climax already takes place without pathos, one can say “dry”. By this contrast, the gradation gains in retrospect in strength, making its incandescence much more impressive to the listener. It is also one of the reasons why climaxes in Rachmaninoff's works often sound banal to the point of triviality in other interpretations. Despite the effect of “emotional programmaticism”, Rachmaninoff's musical thinking was “absolute”, he was interested in “pure music” and so was his playing. Sophisticated by deep concentration, analytical compositional thinking, wilful steadfastness and a kind of inner closedness.
4 KOGAN, Grigory: Voprosy pianism. Soviet Composer, Moscow 1968, p. 245-6
5 MILSTEIN, Jakov: Music is a Living Speech, in: Etudes on the Piano. Editio Supraphon, Prague 1987, p. 65
6 KOGAN, Grigory: Rachmaninoff – Pianist, in: Etudes on the Piano. Editio Supraphon, Prague 1987, p. 47
