Remembering Rachmaninoff

On March 15, I posted a blog article about this year’s Oscar winners. Today’s post is related to Geoffrey Rush, who won the best actor Oscar for his role as pianist David Helfgott in the 1996 movie Shine.

Seeing that movie was my first real awareness of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3, which was composed in the summer of 1909. Popularly known as Rach 3, it has been called one of the most difficult piano pieces ever composed. 

A small part of the score for Rach 3

Many of you know the importance of bifocals. I wore bifocal eyeglasses for many years and was happy for the ability they gave me to see things both close at hand and in the distance clearly.

It is perhaps even more important to have bifocal vision/understanding of life/reality. Over the last fifteen months, I have read and written much about what some call TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it). That is an extremely sad and depressing topic.

It is not necessary or healthy, though, to think only about the inevitable future. Daily we need to use the near vision “lenses” to see and enjoy the present. There are many ways to do that, and classical music has long been meaningful to me, regularly bringing joy to my life.

This week I have been enjoying the splendid musical compositions of Rachmaninoff, particularly his piano concertos and his captivating choral music.

Sergei Rachmaninoff was born 150 years ago today (on April 1, 1873) in Russia, and he died on March 28, 1943, (80 years ago) in California. It is fitting to remember him and his productive life, which lasted four days short of seventy years.

For decades I have considered Tchaikovsky (1840~93) to be in the top three of my favorite classical composers. More recently I have increasingly come to appreciate the music of Rachmaninoff, who was a great admirer of Tchaikovsky.*¹

Tchaikovsky, in fact, was a father figure and a mentor for Rachmaninoff when he was a student, and the older composer cheered for his young mentee from his box seat at the younger man’s concerts.

There are 45 numbered “works” of Rachmaninoff (according to this website), and 39 of those were composed in Russia before he permanently left his birth country in 1917 because of the Bolshevik revolution and the confiscation of his relative’s summer estate in Ivanovka that he loved so much.*²

Early in 1915, not long before the end of the world as he knew it in Russia, Rachmaninoff composed All-Night Vigil (or Vespers), Op. 37, a beautiful choral a cappella work. According to Chat GPT, that composition, part of which Rachmaninoff requested to be sung at his funeral, is

one of the greatest achievements of Russian sacred music. In fact, Rachmaninoff once said, "I have never written anything more religious, more Russian, or more honest than the Vespers."

(I learned about this choral work in my research for this blog article, and I have greatly enjoyed hearing/seeing it sung on YouTube.)

This year there have been several memorial concerts in appreciative remembrance of Rachmaninoff. One of the most amazing concerts was performed by Yuja Wang at Carnegie Hall on January 28. (Here is the link to a news article about that concert that lasted 3½ hours.)

Several weeks ago, June and I happened upon a YouTube video of Wang (born in Beijing in 1987) and were impressed with her skill at the piano. It was truly amazing that she could play everything Rachmaninoff wrote for piano and orchestra, including Rach 3, in that Jan. 28 concert.

Last year, Yunchan Lim, an 18-year-old South Korean man, won the 2022 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, and next month he makes his New York Philharmonic debut, playing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, which the promotional flyer says is “considered the Everest for pianists.”*³

Enjoying great music is just one of many ways to savor the present and to experience joy/peace now in spite of the dire predictions of what will likely happen this century because of the current ecological crisis.

Let’s keep making good use of our bifocal lenses!

_____

*¹ I found it interesting that on a list of “the best Russian composers of all time” (see here), Tchaikovsky was number one, followed by Rachmaninoff as number two.

*² In 2016, BBC produced “The Joy of Rachmaninoff,” and it includes a rather lengthy segment about Rachmaninoff at Ivanovka. If you have the time and interest, you may want to watch that engaging documentary here on YouTube.

*³ Here and here are links to Wang’s and Lim’s performing Rach 3, the latter at the Van Cliburn competition last year. 

In Appreciation of Dvořák

Although I am usually not willing to spend the time and especially the money to attend live performances, I am very fond of classical music. Previously, I have posted blog articles about Beethoven and Rimsky-Korsakov, and I have long wanted to write something about Bach. But this article is about Antonín Leopold Dvořák, the greatest of all Czech composers.

Dvořák’s “New World Symphony”

“From the New World,” also known as the “New World Symphony” or more technically as “Symphony No. 9 in E minor” (Op.95) has long been on my personal list of “top ten” classical music compositions. I was moved by it again as I listened to it while working on this article.

Although Dvořák was born and died in the Kingdom of Bohemia (which became the core part of Czechoslovakia in 1918), from 1892 to 1895 he was the director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City. It was during that time that he composed the captivating New World Symphony.

For a rural Czech boy, the United States was, indeed, a new world. And Dvořák seems to have set out at once to learn from his new environment. He composed his Symphony No. 9 in the first half of 1893, and he related that he was influenced and inspired by Native American music and Black spirituals when he composed that stirring symphony. 

Some of you may remember (I didn’t) that Astronaut Neil Armstrong took a tape recording of the “New World Symphony” along during the Apollo 11 mission, the first moon landing, in 1969.

Dvořák’s Old World

Born in 1841 in a humble country village, Dvořák referred to himself as “just an ordinary Czech musician.” Both his father and grandfather were butchers, but he was sent to a music school in Prague when he was 16. There he studied violin and viola.

In the 1870s, his musical compositions elicited the attention of Johannes Brahms, who was only eight years his senior but already a noted composer. That acclaim led to public recognition for his compositions inspired by the folk music of his native land.

Book One of “Slavonic Dances” (Op.46) was published in 1878. It became highly popular--and has remained so to the present.

In the following years, before going to the U.S., Dvořák composed some of his greatest pieces--works that I like almost as much as “New World Symphony”: Symphony No. 7 (Op.70 in 1885), Symphony No. 8 (Op.88 in 1890), and the Carnival Overture (Op.92 in 1891).

Dvořák’s Transcendent World

The three compositions just mentioned are exuberant pieces manifesting Dvořák’s joy of life. But he was also a man who knew sorrow and deep sadness. At such times he found solace in his Catholic faith and composed works expressive of that faith in God who, while immanent in this world, transcends the world.

In 1877 he wrote “Stabat Mater” (“Sorrowful Mother Is Standing”), a prayer about Jesus’ mother Mary by his cross.

In a short period of time, Dvořák and his wife had lost three small/infant children. But despite the personal tragedy he had experienced, he refused to allow despair to overwhelm him. Rather than resignation or hopelessness, in that masterpiece, Dvořák’s listeners look through a veil of tears and see faith in life.

Dvořák often attributed his musical talents as being “a gift from God.” Upon the completion of one of his settings of the Catholic Mass, he proclaimed, “Do not wonder that I am so religious. An artist who is not could not produce anything like this.”

A few years after returning to Prague, Dvořák died at age 62. He was buried 115 years ago today, on May 5, 1904.