Sergei and Me, a Relationship in Four Works: 1. The Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini

Dispatches from the Forgotten Stars, #15

When I went off to college in fall of 1989 (Wartburg College, Waverly, IA, if you must know), my Rachmaninoff fandom was already in progress—though not by much, as I had only really discovered him in just the previous year of high school. All I knew at this point was two of his symphonies and one tone poem. Enter my first college roommate. His name was Dan.

Dan was a good guy, and I got along with him pretty well. It helped that we were both music majors—him a vocalist, while I was a trumpet player. He stayed in music, where I eventually left music behind, at least as my formal area of study, in favor of philosophy. (This is one of very few decisions in life I genuinely wish I could have back, but that’s for another time, if ever.) I think Dan eventually earned a Ph.D. in music and has made a career as a choral conductor and teacher. As I said, we got along pretty well for that year, but we weren’t temperamentally attuned to one another in a lot of ways, so we didn’t live together beyond that year. But for that one year we made it work pretty well, and we cross-pollenated each others’ musical tastes and knowledge in a nice way. Among other things, from him I learned a great deal about the vocal music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, and the Rachmaninoff piece I’m writing about in this newsletter. As soon as Dan played a recording of it for me, the piece entered my heart instantly, and it has never left.

The work is the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.

Dan’s own love of this piece came via its use, in small part, in the Christopher Reeve-Jane Seymour melodrama Somewhere In Time. I do not use “melodrama” as a pejorative; I like the film a great deal, though at this point I had not yet seen it. Dan told me about it and he played the soundtrack a lot. The film boasts a well-known score by John Barry, and it uses, first as a theme in a music box, one small part of Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Rhapsody.

The Rhapsody’s form is pretty simple: it’s nothing more than a theme-and-variations, in which Rachmaninoff takes a famous melody written in the 1820s by composer and violin virtuoso Niccolo Paganini, and puts it through twenty-four different variations, one of which would become one of the most famous classical excerpts of all time. It’s always interesting when a long-form piece like the Paganini Rhapsody, which in full performance takes between 25 and 30 minutes to play, becomes chiefly known for just a few minutes of its total time. Think of Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, famed the world over for its opening minutes (thanks, 2001: A Space Odyssey) and known less well for the remaining 32 minutes.

Paganini’s melody comes from one of his Caprices for solo violin, which even now, two hundred years later, comprise some of the most challenging music for any violinist. That particular melody would fuel the imagination of many composers, before and after Rachmaninoff. Liszt, Chopin, and Brahms all wrote works using the tune, and long after Rachmaninoff, rock guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen would use it as well. I got to perform another set of Paganini-inspired variations while playing with Wartburg’s Concert Band, this time by contemporary composer James Barnes. (You can hear Barnes’s band piece here. Try it! It’s good!)

But of all the visitations upon this particular melody since Paganini wrote it two hundred years ago, none is more famous than Rachmaninoff’s. It’s been a staple of the concert hall ever since Rachmaninoff premiered it in 1934.

Rachmaninoff doesn’t just write a series of compelling variations on a theme, here; he has structured the work ingeniously, grouping the variations together by tempo and mood to create the feeling of a traditional three-movement concerto, albeit one played without pause: fast, slow, fast. Another interesting thing is that Rachmaninoff presents the first variation before an actual statement of the theme itself; the work’s introduction is the first variation.

By this point in Rachmaninoff’s career, he was writing less overtly-Romantic music than that of his earlier career; his style is sparer, more economic by this point. Rachmaninoff was never a Modernist, but he couldn’t help but be influenced by Modernism, and the sparer style of his later output is the best example of that. Still, he could at times return to the sound that had made his name as a composer…and he would, in this very work.

Also notable is that the Rhapsody, as a theme-and-variations, isn’t dominated by just one main melody. Woven throughout is a second melody that fascinated Rachmaninoff for his entire life, the Dies irae, a plain-chant melody that can be dated back to the 13th century. This melody, like the Paganini Caprice theme, also fueled the imagination of many composers before and after Rachmaninoff (see the final movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique for a particularly famous example). Here Rachmaninoff at times seems to be setting the Paganini theme against the Dies irae, in a way that has led some to interpret the entire work along programmatic lines. I tend to avoid such interpretations unless specifically endorsed by the composer, but there is some justification for it here: for a time there was talk of using the Rhapsody as the basis for a ballet, though nothing came of that project.

In the Rhapsody’s second section, when Rachmaninoff slows the tempo, the mood becomes more introspective, even brooding. The Rhapsody’s most famous passage is heard in this section: the 18th variation, which closes out the slow section. But for me it’s the 17th and 18th taken together that form the emotional heart of the entire work. The 17th variation is almost haunting in a way that is reminiscent of a tone poem Rachmaninoff wrote almost thirty years earlier, The Isle of the Dead (a work to which we will be returning in more depth later this month). The piano here plays a series of slow minor arpeggios as the orchestra supplies the variation in muted form: chords in the winds (rarely in classical music are the trumpets more haunting than here) and tense tremolos in the strings; the piano has been removed from the task of supplying melody entirely at this point. The minor chords progress until, at the very end of the 17th variation Rachmaninoff modulates to a major key¹, with a new series of arpeggios…and then the 18th variation begins.

With this variation Rachmaninoff returns to his almost spiritual lyricism of his earlier years; the melody here—played first by the piano, all alone, while the orchestra awaits its turn—is sad and gentle, virtually a “song without words” that’s not unlike Rachmaninoff’s famous Vocalise. It doesn’t even seem to be based on Paganini at all, but in fact it is: this famous tune is simply an inversion of the Paganini theme. Rachmaninoff has literally taken the original melody and flipped it upside-down, and in so doing he gives us one of the enduring melodic moments of all of 20th century classical music. It’s a return to the heart-on-the-sleeve version of Romanticism that guided Rachmaninoff’s compositional hand through most of his productive life, the life before his forced emigration from Russia. The 18th Variation is the one part of the Rhapsody that the casual music lover is likely to have heard, or at least remember hearing. It really should be heard in context, though, as it culminates and concludes the middle section of the larger work, before the strife-filled “finale” begins with the remaining six variations to unfold.

By this point in Rachmaninoff’s life, Romanticism was almost entirely a thing of the past; tonality itself was being challenged, and the two big influences in music were Modernism and jazz. Rachmaninoff kept those musical developments at arm’s length, though he couldn’t avoid them entirely. I’ve read speculation that Rachmaninoff chose to call his work a Rhapsody as a tipping-of-his-hat to Gershwin and his Rhapsody in Blue, though there seems to be little direct evidence of that. As an exploration of a melody the Rhapsody is pure genius from start to finish, and as a concerted work (a work featuring orchestra and instrumental soloist) it is utterly seamless in its conception as a partnership between the piano and the orchestra.

Back to Dan, my old roommate. I don’t think he had ever actually heard the entire Rhapsody, except for the 18th variation as used in Somewhere In Time, until I showed up from a break at some point that year with a new CD collection of Rachmaninoff’s four piano concertos and the Rhapsody. I may be wrong, but I think that’s how it played out: we were both on a voyage of discovery in that first playing, though he at least knew at least a little of where we were going. So there we were, a guy from Buffalo and a guy from Iowa, connecting in 1989 or early 1990 with a piece written almost sixty years earlier by the last of the great Russian Romantics. “Somewhere in time,” indeed.

Thanks, Dan.

And here, at long last, is the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, by Sergei Rachmaninoff. This is the very recording Dan and I heard back then: Andre Previn conducting the London Symphony Orchestra, with Vladimir Ashkenazy as soloist.

For a more recent recording, in a live venue, here is pianist Anna Federova, accompanied by the Philharmonie Sudwestfalen, conducted by Gerard Oskamp, performed at the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam:

And here is Paganini’s original Caprice, which opens straightaway with the very tune that would inspire Rachmaninoff and so many others:

Next time: Rachmaninoff at his most impressionistic, almost Ravel-ian self. Thanks for reading!

Exeunt,
-K.

1. Don’t worry about me going too deep into music theory in these posts. Major-minor is about as far as I’m willing to indulge there, though as with all things, the deeper your knowledge, the greater your appreciation of the mastery!