‘Goodbye, Russia’ Review: Rachmaninoff, Global Citizen
The pianist Arthur Rubinstein once found himself invited to dinner in Hollywood with the Rachmaninoffs and the Stravinskys. Russia’s greatest living composers had never met before, and conversation was monosyllabic. After a while Rachmaninoff started baiting Stravinsky about how much money he had lost when the Soviet government had seized all private copyrights, including those for “Petrushka” and “Firebird.” “What about your C# minor prelude and all those concertos?” cried Stravinsky. Rubinstein reports that they spent the rest of the evening happily comparing losses, united in a common history.
“Goodbye Russia,” a biography of Rachmaninoff “in exile” by the British music critic Fiona Maddocks, has a slightly misleading title since Russian composers never stop looking back. The typically somber cover image—grim-faced over an open score, a cigarette his only comfort—is also deceptive, conveying as it does a half-life of unhappiness. That impression is swiftly dispelled by this engaging account of resilience and regeneration, of fast cars and slow cooking, of a man who struck roots wherever he went in untouched corners of the human soul.
The Sergei Rachmaninoff who left Russia on Dec. 23, 1917, was 44 years old, famous for three or four works. He had sunk his last kopeck into the family lands and arrived penniless in Copenhagen, where his wife, Natalya, blackened her hands on wood-burning cookers while Rachmaninoff limbered his fingers up to play piano for a living. [jb underlining] After a warm-up twirl of Scandinavia, he received an offer of 25 recitals in America and borrowed money to pay for the fare. Composing was no longer a priority, and inspiration was anyway drying up. The last third of his life would yield just six new scores.
Rachmaninoff arrived in New York with his wife and two daughters, age 16 and 14, checking in at the Hotel Netherland. Among those who turned out to greet him was the rebarbative Sergei Prokofiev, a generation his junior and bitterly resentful of Rachmaninoff’s acclaim. The press were told Rachmaninoff had turned down a Boston Symphony invitation to become music director, no longer interested in being a conductor.
Rachmaninoff dedicated his spare time in exile to revising his juvenile first concerto in the hope of expanding his composer portfolio. Prokofiev, who attended the premiere, dismissed the piece as “not at all stylish” and describes his colleague “trying to hide behind his wife” to avoid a stage call. Prokofiev would return to Russia in the 1930s, Rachmaninoff never.
By the end of his first season in America, Rachmaninoff was able to afford a secretary and book a summer retreat on San Francisco Bay. Invitations poured in from orchestras for him to perform his second and third piano concertos, most persistently from Philadelphia, where two successive music directors, Leopold Stokowski and Eugene Ormandy, secured first refusal on any future works.
His fourth concerto in 1926 turned out to be overlong and unoriginal. The second movement tune resembled the nursery rhyme “Three Blind Mice.” Rachmaninoff took the score back for revision, but it never caught on. He made amends in 1934 with “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” exploiting a melody that Liszt and Brahms had furnished with variations. Neither, however, came close to the tear-jerking tenderness of Rachmaninoff’s 18th variation, a solitary meditation distantly related to the funereal Russian “Dies Irae.” Its success was instantaneous. “This one is for my agent,” quipped the composer. Behind the lugubrious exterior lurked a caustic Muscovite wit.
Russia was never far from his mind. He wrote frequently to cousins left behind, to friends and fellow musicians. He sent cash and care packages, offering 50,000 German marks to the composer Nikolai Medtner and 500 French francs to a desperate librettist. Kindest of all, he supported the infirm Alexander Glazunov, a senior figure who had conducted Rachmaninoff’s first symphony in 1897 while drunk, plunging the young composer into three years of depression that was relieved only with psychiatric help. Rachmaninoff, bearing no grudge, never refused a Glazunov request. The correspondence that Ms. Maddocks brings to light reveals a sense of collegial responsibility and unassuming Christian charity.
Although America was his refuge, he maintained an annual presence in Europe, performing in prime concert halls and visiting Paris, where his older daughter, Irina, lived with her husband, Prince Peter Volkonsky. In 1925, just before the birth of Rachmaninoff’s first grandchild, Volkonsky died suddenly, age 28. Ms. Maddocks gives us delicately to understand that the prince died by suicide at an asylum while in the grip of religious mania. Rachmaninoff could not bring himself to refer to the disaster.
To support his daughters, he set up a Paris publishing company to produce Russian books and music. In the summers, he gathered the family in rented mansions in the south of France, later in a villa he built in Switzerland on the shores of Lake Lucerne. He named the house Senar, entwining the first syllable of his Christian name with his wife’s. Theirs was a symbiotic union of first cousins. In four decades of marriage, Rachmaninoff was conspicuously uxorious, never known to stray.
He liked to have young musicians stay at Senar for weeks on end. The pianist Vladimir Horowitz and violinist Nathan Milstein were regular guests. Milstein said “in those days a composer knew about everything—science, nature, philosophy. We would talk for hours. He liked me better than Horowitz—maybe because I wasn’t a pianist.” Milstein also claimed he could make Rachmaninoff laugh, uproariously. The photographic solemnity was a false front. This composer loved life to the full.
Ms. Maddocks, the author of esoteric works on the medieval Hildegard of Bingen and the postmodern composer Harrison Birtwistle, finds an unexpected affinity with the most popular of 20th-century composers, so popular that academics still cannot utter his name without a sneer. Her narrative method is bite-size, and she veers, by her own admission, “wildly off the main track,” devoting mini-chapters to a nocturnal encounter with Harpo Marx, to Rachmaninoff’s love of home cooking, and his boy-like delight in a string of motor cars that he shipped back and forth across the Atlantic to show off to friends.
World War II confined him to America. A set of “Symphonic Dances” for Philadelphia is riddled with fragments of the “Dies Irae.” Diagnosed with melanoma and depressed by war news from Russia, he died on March 28, 1943, three days short of his 70th birthday.
In the past decade Vladimir Putin’s Russia has applied to repatriate Rachmaninoff’s remains from a cemetery in Valhalla, N.Y., and to buy up his villa at Senar. Both bids were resisted, and the villa has been lately restored for public visitation. Ms. Maddocks quietly reframes Rachmaninoff’s context as a man of the world—belonging not to Russia or America but to civilization as a whole, basking in its inventions and distractions, balancing life’s joys and sorrows in his ever-enduring concertos. In the right mood, Rachmaninoff would have made a wonderful dinner guest.
Mr. Lebrecht’s latest book is “Why Beethoven: A Phenomenon in One Hundred Pieces.”
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