RACHMANINOFF: The Bells, by Konstantin Balmont after Edgar Allan Poe, Opus 35 | Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Opus 27
The Bells, by Konstantin Balmont after Edgar Allan Poe, Opus 35
Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Opus 27
Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff was born at Semyonovo, district of Starorusky, Russia, on April 1, 1873, and died in Beverly Hills, California, on March 28, 1943. He began the composition of The Bells in January 1913 and completed the four movements respectively on June 28, July 13, July 30, and August 9 of that year. With soloists E.I. Popova, A.D. Alexandrov, and P.Z. Andreyev, and the chorus and orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater, Saint Petersburg, the composer conducted the first performance on December 13, 1913. The San Francisco Symphony first performed the work in February 1976 with soloists Roberta Alexander, James Atherton, and John Shirley-Quirk, with the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, and with Edo de Waart conducting; in the most recent performances, in November 1994, Christine Brewer, Kaludi Kaludov, and Dimiter Petkov were soloists, with the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, and with Herbert Blomstedt conducting. The work is dedicated to Willem Mengelberg and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra, with whom Rachmaninoff had had an exceptionally happy experience in 1908 in performances of his Piano Concerto No. 2. The score calls for soprano, tenor, and bass soloists, mixed chorus, and an orchestra of three flutes and piccolo, two oboes and English horn, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, six horns, three trumpets, three trombones, bass tuba, celesta, harp, piano, timpani, glockenspiel, triangle, tambourine, snare drum, cymbals, chimes, military drum, bass drum, tam-tam, and strings.
Rachmaninoff composed the Symphony No. 2 between October 1906 and April 1907 and conducted the first performance in Saint Petersburg on January 26, 1908. He also conducted the first American performance, which was with the Philadelphia Orchestra on November 26, 1909. Henry Hadley conducted the first San Francisco Symphony performance in November 1912; the most recent subscription performances were given in December 2000 with Michael Tilson Thomas conducting. The symphony uses three flutes and piccolo, three oboes, two clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, bass tuba, timpani, glockenspiel, bass drum, cymbals, and strings. The dedication is to Rachmaninoff’s teacher, Sergei Taneyev.
The Bells
Rachmaninoff's favorites among his own compositions were The Bells and the All-Night Vigil of 1915. The Vigil, which consists of more than an hour of music for a cappella chorus, was intended for a night-long service in Russian Orthodox churches on the eve of holy days, and the composer asked to be buried to the sound of its fifth hymn, “Now thou lettest thy servant depart in peace.” The world of secular yearning, melancholia, and virtuosity that dominates the Rachmaninoff of the piano concertos, for most of us the Rachmaninoff we know best, is far away in this rapt masterpiece. Here are chaste harmonies in block chords and simple contrapuntal motion, set out with a wondrous sense of euphony. The Bells is not quite so removed from the concertos and symphonies, the solo piano pieces and the songs, but even so, to encounter it for the first time is to have one's sense of the composer's range greatly stretched.
Today we know Rachmaninoff best as a composer, second-best as one of the most aristocratic, rhythmically exciting, and individual pianists of his time, one of the greatest in an age of great pianists. Hardly less remarkable as a conductor, he was highly regarded enough to be asked to take over the Boston and Cincinnati symphonies when he moved to America in 1918. The concentration, clarity, nobility of style, and beauty of sound of the few recordings he made with the Philadelphia Orchestra, his favorite ensemble in America—The Isle of the Dead and the Vocalise in 1929, the Symphony No. 3 ten years later—make believable every glowing account one reads about his work on the podium. Needing to support his family, he did a lot of conducting in his early years, opera as well as concert—more conducting than piano-playing, in fact—and it fatigued him as well as sometimes annoyed him because it took time from his composing.
From time to time he managed to organize an escape. Thus, for instance, he canceled a good many concerts and in December 1912 took his family to Switzerland and then to Rome. There they settled in an apartment in the Piazza di Spagna where Piotr and Modest Tchaikovsky had spent Christmas 1880. And there he also began The Bells. The Roman idyll did not last. Both Irina and Tatiana Rachmaninova, one ten, the other six, contracted typhoid fever, and the family went to Berlin for better medical care than they felt confident of finding in Italy. The girls' convalescence and The Bells were completed during the summer at Ivanovka, the estate that had been part of Rachmaninoff's wife's family property, where he had written his Piano Concerto No. 3 as well as many songs and the first set of Études-Tableaux for piano, and of which he himself had become the owner in 1910.
The first audiences in Saint Petersburg and Moscow loved The Bells. In the latter city Rachmaninoff had a mysterious fan who sent great bouquets of white lilacs whenever he gave a concert there. This time she outdid herself. According to the account in the Rachmaninoff biography of Sergei Bertensson and Jay Leyda, “the usual floral tribute . . . was something exceptional this time: bells of all sizes hanging from a crossbeam attached to a table. These bells were made of solid masses of white lilac blossoms—and it was February.”
For that matter, a mysterious woman had played a part in the very genesis of The Bells. Mikhail Bukinik, a cellist who had been a friend of Rachmaninoff's since they were both students at the Moscow Conservatory, told the story three years after Rachmaninoff's death: “I had a cello pupil, a Miss Danilova, who once came to her lesson in great agitation; while she played, she seemed very excited and eager to tell me something. She finally revealed that Balmont's translation of Poe's poem The Bells had once made a great impression on her—she could think of it only as music—and who could write it as music but her adored Rachmaninoff! That he must do this became her idée fixe, and she wrote anonymously to her idol, suggesting that he read the poem and compose it as music. She excitedly sent off this letter; summer passed, and then in the autumn she came back to Moscow for her studies. What had now happened is that she had read a newspaper item that Rachmaninoff had composed an outstanding choral symphony based on Poe's Bells and that it was soon to be performed. Danilova was mad with joy. But someone had to be told her secret—and that's how all her emotions were unloaded during my lesson. She told me the whole story. I was astounded to think that our reserved and quite unsentimental Rachmaninoff could have been capable of being inspired by someone else's advice—to create so important a work! I kept my pupil's secret till Rachmaninoff's death.”
I have always hoped this story is true. At any rate, Rachmaninoff was fired up by Balmont's version of Poe, and if Miss Danilova was involved, blessings on her. Rachmaninoff is good at bells. They are often a presence in his instrumental music, most famously in his Prelude in C-sharp minor, but no less tellingly in such works as the Suite No. 1 (Fantaisie-Tableaux) for two pianos and the finale of the Symphony No. 2.
Poe's posthumous reputation—he died, aged forty, in 1849—was far greater in Europe than here. Emerson called him “the jingle man” (no doubt with The Bells in mind), and for James Russell Lowell he was “three-fifths genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.” On the other side of the Atlantic, his fellow poets were more responsive to the genius in him. Baudelaire and Mallarmé thought him magnificent and found him inspiring to their own work, as did such English writers as the Rossettis, Swinburne, and Stevenson, and Yeats hailed him as “always and for all lands a great lyric poet.” Debussy was obsessed for years by his desire to make operas from The Fall of the House of Usher and The Devil in the Belfry.
The Russian Symbolist poet Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont, six years older than Rachmaninoff, was another devotee. His verse was known for, among other things, its imaginative sound effects—the poet and critic Nina Berberova writes that these eventually came to seem “vain”—and he had been influenced by Poe's virtuosic onomatopoeia in The Bells. Balmont's rendering of Poe is atmospheric and free. It is rhythmically so independent that it is impossible to fit Poe's words to Rachmaninoff's music. If you want The Bells in English, you have to settle for a retranslation from the Russian by Fanny S. Copeland; that being so, you are better off with the gorgeous and satisfyingly chewy sonorities of Balmont's Russian.
When he wrote The Bells, Rachmaninoff thought of it as a choral symphony and often referred to it as his Third; however, he never gave it that title officially, and eventually, in 1935-36, he composed a “real” and purely orchestral Third Symphony. Poe-Balmont is in four parts, and the music follows that design. The first part is about the sound of silvery sleigh bells, a symbol of the beginning of life and of youth. The scoring of the opening, with its high woodwinds, muted trumpet, triangle, harp, celesta, and piano, is wonderfully imaginative, and the crescendo that leads to the first entrance of the solo tenor is superbly plotted. The irregular meters enhance the excitement. Later, Rachmaninoff has the chorus hum, which makes me wonder whether one of his recreations in Rome had been to see Madama Butterfly with its famous humming chorus. At the climax, violins and violas add a rocking motif; we shall hear it again in The Bells, but beyond that, it is an idea we encounter often in Rachmaninoff's music.
Golden wedding bells are the subject of the second movement, begun by muted violas presenting a new version of the rocking theme. We are likely to think of wedding music as joyous, but for Rachmaninoff the dominant idea is the solemnity of the sacrament and the human commitment. Yet passion has a part to play as well, and there are glorious opportunities for the solo soprano to spin out long and ecstatic musical phrases. Again, Rachmaninoff's orchestral imagination functions at an incandescent level.
The third movement, the only one without a solo singer, is the imagined symphony's scherzo. The subject is the strident alarm bells that announce the terror of fire. There is nothing comparably wild elsewhere in Rachmaninoff's music.
Finally, there is the evocation of the iron tone of funeral bells; ending thus with a slow movement, Rachmaninoff's mind must often have turned to the Symphonie pathétique of his beloved Tchaikovsky. It is for this movement that he saves the dark sound of his bass soloist. The bassoon quietly evokes the Dies irae from the Catholic Mass for the Dead, a theme that was virtually a lifelong obsession for Rachmaninoff. The Bells ends with an eloquent postlude for the orchestra.
Symphony No. 2
After finishing this symphony, Rachmaninoff swore he would never write another. It was almost thirty years before he changed his mind and began work on his third and last essay in the form. Meanwhile, the wonder was that he had written No. 2. The premiere of his Symphony No. 1 in 1897, horribly conducted by Alexander Glazunov, was such a disaster that it took three years of psychotherapy and hypnosis before Rachmaninoff could again face writing a large-scale composition. It was the instantly popular Piano Concerto No. 2 that freed him then, but even so, it was a long time before the notion of “symphony” ceased to make him shudder.
When he wrote the Symphony No. 2 he was living in Dresden, where he had gone to escape the constant clamor for his services as a conductor. There he also composed his Piano Sonata No. 1, the tone poem The Isle of the Dead, and for his first American tour in 1909, the Piano Concerto No. 3. Thirty-three years old, he was in his fifth year of contented marriage, a father (his second daughter, Tatiana, was born about the time the symphony was completed), an experienced composer in many genres, an unsurpassed and scarcely equaled pianist, and a highly esteemed conductor. As a composer he was original as well as experienced, with a tone of voice and melodic style all his own and, as many attempts have proved, particularly in film studios, inimitable. In his Preludes and “Études-Tableaux” for piano he developed an impressive skill at composing a highly economical sort of music, but in his symphonies and concertos he preferred, at least at this point in his development, a more expansive manner. That manner was expansive enough in this instance to have disturbed conductors into making many cuts, some minor and some brutal. The performances we hear at these concerts is complete.
Rachmaninoff begins in mystery, with pianissimo low strings. What the cellos and basses play here is a motto that turns out to have a large role in the symphony, sometimes on the surface, sometimes beneath it. Immediately, sonorous wind chords vary its first three notes and the violins make lachrymose response. The texture becomes more tightly woven, with imitative entrances following fast upon one another; at the same time, the melodic flow is gorgeous. The penetrating high writing for violas is especially effective. Rachmaninoff slowly works this up to an intense climax from which he then descends rapidly.
Alone, the English horn muses on these events for a moment. Strings, in softly shuddering tremolando, play a fragment of a rising scale, and the main part of the first movement has begun. The first theme, which the violins introduce, is yet another variant of the introduction’s motto, now urgent and forward-thrusting. It is presented in a broad paragraph, and Rachmaninoff’s command of such spans is very impressive indeed. Accelerating, the music moves toward a new key, G. The theme is new, yet both the design―wind chords leading to a melancholy violin response―and the actual shapes of the phrases are familiar from the introduction. Violins and cellos carry the music forward and, though the key is now officially G major, the yearning for the darker E minor is strong. One of Rachmaninoff’s beautiful ever-descending melodies brings the exposition to its quiet close.
A violin solo reminds us of the introduction. After the brief moment of quiet, the music pushes forward. Slowly the bass descends. The cellos recall the motto, the violas interject violent shudders. The bass skips over E―Rachmaninoff is not yet ready to re-establish the tonic and begin the recapitulation―but sits for a long time on E-flat. As the bass begins to rise again, a great crescendo begins. We hear some triumphant fanfares, but this is just a way-station. The agitated journey resumes: Rachmaninoff has learned well from Tchaikovsky how to build suspense. Through the storm we can make out fragments of the opening theme. At last the long dominant pedal on B is resolved to E, the keynote. We are home, and the recapitulation has begun. And once home, Rachmaninoff moves swiftly into a powerful coda.
The second movement, the scherzo, is wildly energetic, particularly brilliant orchestral writing. The key is A minor, and the reason the opening rings the way it does is that the violins playing their rapid anapests get to use their open A and E strings so much. A little later the glockenspiel adds a nice edge. Midway, Rachmaninoff also gives us one of his broadly Romantic tunes. That provides its own pleasure, but even greater is the delight of the quietly stalking retransition to the driving main theme. The close is humorous disintegration. Then the trio: As Haydn is supposed to have said of the big bang in his Surprise Symphony, “this will make the women jump.” The second violins start a brilliant fugue. A swift transition leads us into the return of the scherzo, in whose coda Rachmaninoff, as he was so fond of doing, cites the Dies irae (Day of Wrath) from the Gregorian Mass for the Dead. This phrase is suggested by the horns at the opening of the movement; toward the end it becomes explicit.
In the beautiful Adagio we find Rachmaninoff’s melodic genius working at full power. He starts as though in mid-phrase with violas winding long garlands of triplets, over which the violins play a phrase that begins with an unforgettable upward thrust. That one is the phrase people usually come out singing after this symphony. But all this is just introduction. The main matter is a lovely clarinet solo, a wonderful instance of Rachmaninoff’s way of expanding an idea on and on. The melody takes twenty-three measures to say its say, never repeating itself literally, though circling about a few notes within a limited compass. It is, among other things, a reminder that Rachmaninoff was also a marvelous songwriter. But even when the clarinet stops, the melody is not over, and the violins carry it still further.
When this long and arresting paragraph ends, which it does with the great yearning phrase that began the movement, the violins bring back their lamenting phrase from the symphony’s introduction, though it is now more than twice as fast. In fact, the introduction now yields material for the violins, for English horn and oboe, and eventually for the full orchestra to explore. Again Rachmaninoff brings in one of his gradually descending bass lines. This leads to a grand arrival in C major. There is a swift drop to pianissimo, a long silence, and then a lovely passage, full of mystery, in which solo instruments, one after one and beginning with the horn, briefly caress the yearning phrase. When the flute takes its turn, the violins softly interject their phrase from the introduction. This intimate passage proves to be the transition to the return of the great melody that the clarinet played at the beginning of the movement, now given to the violins. Woodwinds decorate the melody with the yearning phrase. From here, the movement sinks to a spacious and quiet close.
The finale, back in E but now E major, begins headlong. The first contrasting theme is a quietly conspiratorial march; the transition to this, with timpani, plucked low strings, and muted horns is particularly fine. The march is just an interlude. The forceful and speedy opening music returns, to lead to one of Rachmaninoff’s “big tunes.” If we know the Second and Third piano concertos, we can safely guess that this, grandly presented, will be the material for the final cresting.
But there is much adventure before we get to that point. First comes the surprise of a return for just six measures to the tempo of the slow movement and to its beautiful introductory phrase. Then the high-speed movement resumes, and in this development section Rachmaninoff gives us one of his most amazing passages, a network of descending scales, slow and fast, high and low, syncopated and straight, that generate such a swirl of sound that all the bells in Russia seem to be ringing. From here on, matters develop much as we would expect, with a recapitulation in whose first pages the carillon scales are not altogether forgotten, with a grand peroration based on the big lyric tune, and a blood-stirring rush to the close, which is sealed with Rachmaninoff’s familiar “signature” cadence―YUM-pa-ta-TUM (this time slightly zipped up to YUM-pa-ta-ta-TUM).
—Michael Steinberg
Michael Steinberg, the San Francisco Symphony's program annotator from 1979 to 1999 and a contributing writer to our program book until his death in July, was one of the nation's pre-eminent writers on music. We are privileged to continue publishing his program notes. His books are available at the Symphony Store in Davies Symphony Hall.
More About the Music
RECORDINGS: Both The Bells and Symphony No. 2 are included on a DVD and performed by the Cologne West German Radio Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Semyon Bychkov, who leads our concerts in this music (Arthaus Musik).
For The Bells—Semyon Bychkov conducting the Cologne West German Radio Symphony Orchestra, Lege Artis Chamber Choir and the West German Radio Chorus (Profil) ) | André Previn conducting Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and Chorus (Decca) | Charles Dutoit conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra and Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia (Decca) | Neeme Järvi conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra and Scottish National Chorus (Chandos)
For the Symphony—Alasdair Neale leads the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra in a wonderful traversal of this music, recorded live in Prague’s Dvořák Hall on the YO’s 1998 European tour | Mariss Jansons conducting the St. Petersburg Philharmonic (EMI Classics Encore) | Mikhail Pletnev conducting the Russian National Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon)
READING: Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music, by Sergei Bertensson and Jay Leyda (Indiana University Press) | Rakhmaninov, by Geoffrey Norris (Oxford Master Musicians series) | Rachmaninov, by Patrick Piggott (Faber)