Few 20th-century classical composers infiltrated popular culture like Rachmaninoff. His music has appeared in many films, for good reason. Would the love affair in David Lean’s “Brief Encounter” (1945) have been as emotionally powerful without the lush melodies of “Piano Concerto No. 2” swirling in the background?
In the classic comedy “Groundhog Day,” Phil Connors (Bill Murray) endlessly repeats the same 24 hours. As he sees the errors of his ways and decides to change his selfish behaviors, he takes up the piano. In a key scene, he surprises his love interest by playing Variation 18 from “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.” Rachmaninoff helped Phil become a better person.
Rachmaninoff wasn’t the first composer to write variations on Paganini’s “Carice No. 24 in A minor.” Paganini himself had done so on the violin, and Liszt and Brahms had made piano arrangements. It’s Rachmaninoff’s variations, though, that are best known today. The piece is one of his most enduring works.
Struggling to Find Respect
Rachmaninoff was born Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff to an aristocratic Russian family in 1873. He fled his home country after the Russian Revolution, in 1918.For years there was a ban on his music in Russia. As an exile, he was viewed with suspicion. In addition, Rachmaninoff’s romantic style wasn’t in accord with the ideas of Soviet art, which championed social consciousness and (supposedly) working-class values.
Performing the ‘Rhapsody’
Rachmaninoff eventually settled down with his family after building a home on Lake Lucerne, in Switzerland. It was here that he decided to write the “Rhapsody” in the summer of 1934. Beginning in early July, he rose in the morning to compose and didn’t put down his pen until night. For nearly two months he kept this up, completing the work in late August.
A few weeks later he wrote to a friend in Moscow, Vladimir Vilshau, that he had completed “a very long piece, about twenty to twenty-five minutes … the size of a piano concerto. … I am going to try it out in New York and London.”
The “Rhapsody” makes many technical demands on the solo performer, exhausting the capacities of the piano. Rachmaninoff wondered whether he was up to the task. “Often it is too difficult for me to play. I have become old,” he told Vilshau. Despite the piece’s complexity, he performed it many times.
From his late 50s onward, Rachmaninoff composed very little. He made his living as a performer, and his schedule made demands upon his “old” fingers. The concert season in which the “Rhapsody” was to premiere was his busiest yet. He wrote Vilshau that he typically performed about 40 concerts annually; over the next year, he was to give nearly 70. “Will I survive?” he asked.
Structure of the ‘Rhapsody’
The “Rhapsody” is one of Rachmaninoff’s best works. Dazzling in its technical virtuosity, it finally satisfied the Western highbrows who considered him a reactionary who wrote merely “nice” melodies. The reason it’s still popular, of course, is because of the lovely melody interwoven throughout each piece.The composition overall has a classical structure. The 24 variations are each divided into three groups of eight. Each variation, though related to the theme, is a whole piece unto itself. The most enduring of these pieces is the 18th, which is often excerpted separately in performances today.
Darker Undertones
The composer does something else in this work as well: A “Dies Irae” theme is incorporated throughout. This was a medieval chant from the Latin requiem Mass, associated with Judgment Day. In Variation 18, this foreboding tune is subtly woven into the melodic inversion, giving it a dark undercurrent.Why did Rachmaninoff incorporate this theme? Well, an old legend about Niccolò Paganini’s life was that the famous violinist sold his soul to the devil to achieve artistic greatness and gain the love of a woman. The myth has a heavy Faustian influence that persisted in Paganini’s popular image, so Rachmaninoff included it in his variations.
Three years after composing “Rhapsody,” Rachmaninoff wrote to Mikhail Fokine, a Russian ballet choreographer, expressing interest in using it for a stage work about Paganini. Rachmaninoff explained his dramatic ideas in the letter. The “Dies Irae” theme, he said, would represent an “evil spirit,” introduced in variation No. 7 and developed in the next three variations. Variations 11 to 19 would represent the developing love story between Paganini and the woman whose heart he wins. In the last variations, “personages representing the evil spirit” would return “as caricatures resembling Paganini,” playing violins in the struggle for his soul. After outlining his proposition, Rachmaninoff asked Fokine, “You are not going to laugh at me, are you?”
Longing for Home
In 1934, the year Rachmaninoff wrote the “Rhapsody,” the Soviet elites lifted the ban on his music. While several of his other works were performed to success there in his lifetime, the “Rhapsody” was not among them. It was only years after his death that the first performance took place.In performances, Rachmaninoff often appeared dour, an emotional state attributed to his yearning for home. Two Russian audience members, Ilya Ilif and Eugene Petrov, once described him on stage at New York’s Carnegie Hall: “tall, bent, and thin, with a long sad face.” They speculated that “His expression seemed to say: ‘Yes, I am an unfortunate exile and am obliged to play before you.'”
