If you remember the movie Shine, for which Geoffrey Rush won an Oscar, you may remember something of the reputation of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concert No. 3 in D minor. I’m no concert pianist–hell, I’m not a pianist of any kind, so I am in no way equipped to assess the degree to which that movie mythologizes the phenomenal difficulty of Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto. The film, for which actor Geoffrey Rush won an Oscar, tells the story of concert pianist David Helfgott, whose mental illness was exacerbated by his obsession with the Third Concerto and the work he had to endure to be able to perform it.

David Dubal writes, in The Essential Canon of Classical Music:

The Third Piano Concerto was composed at Ivanovka [Rachmaninoff’s country estate in Russia, a place for which he pined all his life after he and his family fled the country forever in 1917] for Rachmaninoff’s first American tour in 1909. It is terrifyingly difficult, and its challenge has become a legend among pianists. Only a hero of the keyboard should think of working on this exhausting piece, with its huge load of notes and dense harmonies. The pianist Gary Grafmann wishes he had learned it as a youngster, stating that “probably the only time when I could have learned that magnificent knucklebreaker would have been when I was still too young to know fear.” The work also needs a superlative interpreter who can fully project the almost unbearable nostalgia of Rachmaninoff’s lost Russia.

The Concerto’s first performance was conducted by Walter Damrosch, but the second was conducted by no less a figure than Gustav Mahler, then in the days of his ill-fated stint atop the New York City musical world. Even so the Third Concerto languished somewhat in popularity behind the wonderful Second, until Vladimir Horowitz came along and championed the Third with all his unique star power.

By the time Rachmaninoff was writing this work, his musical eye was focused entirely backward. Russia had not yet entered the throes of its revolutionary phase, but the cracks were certainly showing; and in the arts, Rachmaninoff was already the last of the living Russian Romantics, with Tchaikovsky gone, Rimsky-Korsakov in his last days, and the remaining “old guard” quickly aging out. Stravinsky was already pushing his Modernist vision, Sergei Prokofiev was coming of age, and though he was still a child, Dmitri Shostakovich was on his way. And in a world of his own stood Alexander Scriabin, by the 1900s and 1910s becoming more and more devoted to his own mystical vision of a world transformed by his own music.

Rachmaninoff had not left Russia by this time, but he could sense the ending of an era and the shifting of the world into something he felt ill-at-ease to recognize. Thus his music stands at odd contrast with what his contemporaries were producing…but for all that, the audiences remained on his side, for the most part; the Third Concerto, with its soaring melodies and thrilling pianistic pyrotechnics, is still a rollicking, thrilling listen.

Bonus: here’s a video that excerpts 30 different pianists, starting with Rachmaninoff himself, as they all play the exact same passage of wicked difficulty. The level of precision dexterity required to successfully navigate that passage, and make it sound good, is just mind-bending:

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One thing I’ve discovered in reading a lot about Sergei Rachmaninoff over the last few months is that while he led a rich inner life, he didn’t really like to talk much about it. Interviews with him tended to be taciturn affairs, or they would be exercises in frustration for the interviewer in which the subject would avoid any topic that might be of interest to anyone but the subject.

Here’s a case in point that ran in a Minneapolis newspaper one hundred years ago!

Transcription:

Rachmaninoff Likes Yankee Griddle Cakes, Scorns Eggs

Russian Pianist More Interested In Breakfast Than In Interview

The name of Sergei Rachmaninoff is written high in the gallery of modern musical immortals–but as he stirred his coffee at breakfast this morning in the Radisson hotel, and liberally deluged his stack of wheat cakes with maple syrup, there was nothing of the great artist about him except for his long, graceful fingers. Tonight, at the Audtorium, those same fingers will do incredible things on the piano. This morning, they grasped a coffee spoon with firmness, and stirred the contents of the cup until the coffee slopped out into the saucer.

Rachmaninoff, pianist-composer, is about as easy to interview as a Russian blizzard. He arrived at 7:30 a.m. today from Winnipeg, and at 8:30 he was still in a state of complete frigidity, so far as interviewers were concerned. It was not that the famous artist was discourteous, but simple that he appears to have a sincere distaste for being interviewed.

Likes Minnesota Pancakes

He answers questions in monosyllables whenever possivle. Only twice did he show signs of loquacity–and then not about himself, but about his personal friend Bruno Walter of Vienna, orchestra conductor who will direct the symphony orchestra a week from Friday night, and about his other conductor-friend, Henri Verbrugghen.

“Walter is a superb conductor,” said Rachmaninoff. “I expected to meet him here, but learned to my disappointment that he will not arrive for a week.”

After this burst of gossip, Rachmaninoff busied himself again with his pancakes, and took a tentative spoonful of soft boiled egg. He pushed the egg cup away.

“Your pancakes in Minnesota are all right, but I cannot say as much for the eggs,” said Rachmaninoff. “Your soil here, too, is remarkable fertile.”

Wants to Tour Lakes

This observation, in view of the fact that the soil hereabouts is covered with a foot, more or less of now, seemed rather far-fetched until Rachmaninoff, forgetting his reticence again, explained that he learned all about soil when he was personally managing his estate in Russia. He has been in Minnesota in the summer, and expects to come back next summer, if possible, for a month or so of vacation in the state of pines and lakes.

“Do you drive?” he was asked.

“Always,” replied the composer, with the greatest vigor he displayed during the entire interview. “Do you think I would trust myself to a chauffeur? Indeed not. I have no use for them, and if I tour Minnesota, I will drive every foot of the way myself.”

Again the great Russian, who has been living in New York since the revolution exiled him from his native land, applied himself to his pancakes, and further questions elicited nothing but sounds which, coming from a less distinguished personage, would have been called grunts.

Thanks to Fillyjonk for calling this to my attention! I’ve had the picture opened in a tab for about six weeks now.

My favorite part of this is when Rachmaninoff starts to open up on the subject of driving. Rachmaninoff loved cars and would often go on long drives to calm his no-doubt jangled nerves. In this he has a major point of commonality with another of my heroes, George Lucas. This particular degree of being less-than-open for an interviewer does seem a bit extreme, even for Rachmaninoff, so one wonder just what the interviewer’s in-person deportment might have been like; the resulting article, while amusing, does seem to walk right up to the line of being rather, wall, jerkish.

But you know, I’m not sure how willing to talk I would be if someone was asking me questions while I was trying to enjoy a stack of hot pancakes, either!

It’s worth remembering, too, that Rachmaninoff was as renowned in his day as a performer as he was a composer, if not even moreso, so here’s a recording of Rachmaninoff performing not his own music, but a Nocturne by Chopin. (Opus 9, No. 2 in E-flat Major, if you must know. This is one of Chopin’s most famous works, and one with which I struggled mightily in my piano playing days. The runs in the last few pages just would not inhabit my fingers at all.)

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Of all the various forms of classical music that composers have indulged over the last few hundred years, the one about which I know the least is almost certainly the art song. These works, for voice and piano, have never made a big part of my regular listening, mainly because my main love musically tends to me large ensembles: orchestras, wind ensembles, choirs, and so on. The art song is chamber music of the most intimate kind, and it’s not really to my credit that it’s such an unexplored musical world for me.

Especially when, by all accounts, Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote one of the finest bodies of song literature in all of Russian Romanticism. Songs poured out of him while he lived in Russia, and he had his friends constantly on the lookout for poems that he might set. One of his most famous pieces is actually a wordless song–but we’ll come back to that one. For now, I’m interested in a six-song cycle, “Six Romances”, op. 38. I found an excellent musical description of these six songs here, and I recommend it highly; I find it hard to discuss songs in such concrete terms. But it’s worth noting that as a song composer, Rachmaninoff–as a piano virtuoso of the highest order–was not concerned with simply accompanying the singer. In Rachmaninoff’s songs the piano is equal partner with the vocalist; neither performer is a featured soloist, but the two work together to form a strong whole.

It’s also important to note how strongly the art song was bound, for Rachmaninoff, to Russia itself. After he fled Russia in the wake of the Revolution in 1917 with his family, eventually to settle in America, he never again wrote a song, nor did he even record one or perform one live. Leaving Russia killed the song for him, and music is all the poorer for that.

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