Ohlsson Plays Rachmaninoff

Bedřich Smetana wrote the six parts of his symphonic cycle Má vlast (My Homeland) just as he reached age 50, when fame and fortune were knocking regularly at his door — and just when sudden deafness created a nearly irreconcilable gulf between him and the everyday world. These tone poems were, perhaps in part, a way for the composer to recapture and hold onto the sounds of the world around him, musically encapsulating the joy and emotion of life.

Smetana originally conceived the cycle as a four-part symphony that would extol the glories of his native Bohemia and its Czech people. Only after the initial success of its opening movements, each premiered separately, did he decide to “complete” the work by adding two final sections. Since 1952, it has been performed annually on the anniversary of Smetana’s death each May 12th as part of the Prague Spring Festival.

Despite being a cycle of connected and intertwined symphonic poems, these well-crafted works are frequently performed alone, especially the second, titled Vltava (The Moldau) after the mighty river that runs through the Czech Republic. The opening three movements are often played as a group and provide a well-focused view of Smetana’s original idea for creating a “symphony” on Czech themes.

The main musical theme of The Moldau is today a popular Czech folk song, which was not the case when Smetana wrote the piece. Smetana had, in fact, often voiced violent opposition to the idea of adopting actual folk song melodies into the national musical language he was trying to create. His borrowing, in this case, reached quite far geographically, when he adapted (perhaps subconsciously) a folk melody he had heard while teaching in Sweden. (Dvořák crossed much the same path and controversy with some of the adapted borrowings in his “New World” Symphony.)

Smetana’s words about this tone poem clearly lay out the river’s migration from mountain spring through Bohemia toward the sea:

Two springs pour forth in the shade of the Bohemian Forest, one warm and gushing, the other cold and peaceful. Their waves flow quickly over rocky beds, joining together and glistening in the morning sun. The forest brook, hastening on, becomes the river Moldau. Coursing through Bohemia’s valleys, it grows into a mighty stream. Through thick woods it flows, as the triumphant sounds of the hunt and the notes of hunters’ horns are heard ever nearer. It flows through grass-grown pastures and lowlands where a wedding feast is being celebrated in song and dance. At night, wood and water nymphs revel in its sparkling waves. Reflected on its surface are fortresses and castles — witnesses to bygone days of knightly splendor and the vanished glory of fighting times. At the St. John Rapids, the stream races ahead, winding through the cataracts, hewing out a path with its foaming waves through the rocky chasm into the broad riverbed — finally, flowing on in majestic peace toward Prague and welcomed by the time-honored castle Vyšehrad. Then it vanishes beyond our gaze.

Like Verdi and Wagner, Smetana devoted most of his creative energies to writing opera. Like them, he pioneered the art form both as music and as an expression of his country’s nationhood.  However, Smetana is best known today — especially outside his homeland — for Má vlast. And, as originally conceived, this cycle of tone poems remains closer to a traditional symphony in form and function than Smetana cared to admit.

When the whole of Má vlast was first performed as a cycle in November 1882, Smetana had been deaf for eight years. The music was greeted with great acclaim and rejoicing. Smetana heard none of it, of course, but appears to have understood — two years before his death, and just as his mind was succumbing to dementia — that he had finally been anointed the musical saint of his struggling Czech homeland.

— Eric Sellen

Eric Sellen is The Cleveland Orchestra’s Editor Emeritus. He previously was Program Book Editor for 28 seasons.

Sergei Rachmaninoff proved himself a composer at an early age, even before he had graduated from the Moscow Conservatory. This is somewhat surprising, given that his childhood was extremely unsettled — moving from place to place as his father slipped further into debt.

Rachmaninoff's musical training began at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, and his career might have been quite different if he had remained there to study with Rimsky-Korsakov and fraternize with the likes of Glazunov and Stravinsky. Instead, after some poor exam results, he was transferred to Moscow, where he studied with the disciplinarian Nikolai Zverev, met a group of talented fellow-students including Scriabin and Medtner, and above all came under the influence of Tchaikovsky.

Rachmaninoff graduated from the Conservatory’s piano class at age 19 and from the composition class a year later, by which time he had already started a symphony, completed his First Piano Concerto, and composed the Trio élégiaque No. 1, a tone poem called Prince Rostislav, and an opera, Aleko.

For five years, until the famously disastrous performance of his First Symphony in 1897, fine music continued to flow from Rachmaninoff’s pen, especially piano music and songs. Later in life, he was better known as a conductor and pianist, but it was on composition that his ambitions were focused as he approached his 20th year.

After abandoning an earlier piano concerto (in C minor), Rachmaninoff tried again in 1890 and completed the first movement. The rest was rapidly written in July 1891. He later wrote:

I could have finished it much earlier, but after the first movement I was idle for a long time and only began to write out the other movements on July 3rd. I wrote down and orchestrated the last two movements in two-and-a-half days. You can imagine what a job that was! I wrote from 5 in the morning until 8 o’clock at night.

Vasily Safonov, head of the Moscow Conservatory, agreed to conduct the first performance the following year.

It is hard to imagine that such rich, complex piano writing could fail to impress, but one early reviewer wrote: “In the first movement there was not yet any individuality, but there was taste, tension, youthful sincerity, and obvious skill; already there is much promise.”

Rachmaninoff himself was not entirely satisfied, and before long he was hinting that he would like to revise the concerto. He did not do so, however, for another quarter century, until the world-shaking days of 1917 when the Tsar’s abdication in the spring caused the composer to celebrate being at last in a “free country.” Still, as the threat of further revolution came closer, Rachmaninoff felt less comfortable and made plans to go abroad. Working still in Moscow, he wrote out a new version of the concerto, completing it just two weeks after the October Revolution broke out in Petrograd. At a fortunate moment, Rachmaninoff received an invitation to give some concerts in Stockholm, and he was able to get the necessary visas. Just before Christmas, he and his family left Russia, never to return.

Hallmarks of Rachmaninoff’s mature style appear in both the original version and the 1917 revision of the concerto — the rich harmonic progressions, the wealth of melody woven into cascading torrents of notes in the solo part, the subtle orchestration. The music is restless, never retaining a single tempo for long, often interrupted by magnificent decorative swirls in the piano, and unfailingly rich in texture. The melodies have his stamp of authorship, but they do not extend into the long snakelike themes of his later music; here they are still always built a few measures at a time.

The tempo markings, by which we conventionally list the concerto’s three movements, tell only part of the story of this music. The Vivace first movement’s main theme, for instance, is first heard at a surprisingly moderate pace. And, yes, the slow movement (marked Andante) starts at a slow speed, but its end is so full of filigree notes that it feels almost like a scherzo, echoing the slow movement of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. And the fast finale includes a section marked “Andante ma non troppo,” lovingly decorated by the soloist before returning to the up-tempo music.

Perhaps the strongest impression this concerto leaves is of Rachmaninoff the improviser. He feels his way towards his themes before stating them, and then immediately adds decorations and variations that pull the tempo and the texture in different directions, almost as if he was playing the piece for the first time. Indeed, perhaps this is a clue towards explaining the concerto’s eternal freshness.

— Hugh Macdonald

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.

Perhaps in reaction to Antonín Dvořák’s nickname for his Ninth Symphony, “From the New World,” his Eighth Symphony has occasionally been called the “London” Symphony, taking its place alongside symphonies by Haydn and Vaughan Williams named for the great city. But Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony has little reason to be associated with London other than the fact that it was published there by Novello, as Dvořák had temporarily fallen out with his longtime Berlin publisher, Simrock.

In truth, the Seventh has a greater claim to an association with London than the Eighth, since, like Beethoven’s Ninth, it was commissioned by London’s Philharmonic Society. Unlike Beethoven’s Ninth, Dvořák’s Seventh was first performed in London at a time when the composer was making frequent visits to England, appearing in cities across the country and making many friends among British musicians.

The Eighth, in contrast, was not commissioned by anyone and was written during summer 1889 at Dvořák’s country retreat in the Bohemian hills, where he always felt happy and productive.

Dvořák biographer John Clapham has called this the happiest of the composer’s symphonies and notes that, by this point in his career and life, Dvořák was no longer striving to impress an audience or emulate another composer; he was just allowing his playful invention to sprinkle ideas over four movements, to create a symphony that spoke to himself.

Dvořák finished the score on Novem­ber 8, 1889, and conducted the first performance in Prague the following February. He conducted it again in London in the same month, then in Frankfurt in November, and again in Cambridge when he received an honorary degree in June 1891.

Pretty soon, the symphony had been played to great success across Europe, demonstrating how highly Dvořák was regarded in art music circles at the time. Brahms, never easy to please, admired the work when he heard it in Vienna in January 1891. He called it “musically captivating and beautiful,” despite his ongoing misgivings about Dvořák’s idiosyncratic approach to symphonic form.

In that vein, Brahms may have been disconcerted by the opening of the first movement. Though marked Allegro con brio, it actually proceeds at a leisurely pace with a minor-key tune presented by two clarinets, one bassoon, two horns, and all the cellos — an extraordinarily inventive bit of scoring. Even when a solo flute offers a quite different, major-key theme, it scarcely feels like a symphonic allegro movement. Rapid activity soon infiltrates the texture, however, and the music builds to a robust, full declaration of the flute’s theme, the point at which the body of the first movement is definitively launched.

More important themes make their appearance, establishing a strong body of material for symphonic development. The movement’s development section begins in earnest with a trick Dvořák may have taken from Brahms. The music appears to be going back to the beginning with a literal repeat of the minor-key music and the flute’s major-key solo. This is not, however, a repetition of the exposition, as Mozart or Beethoven might have indicated. Instead, an exploration of new territory begins. The movement eventually concludes in unmistakably high spirits.

Next comes the symphony’s slow movement, also notable for moving from minor to major, with the latter episode marked again by a solo flute, played over an enchanting series of descending octave scales. This is the kind of music that lingers in memory long after a performance. Toward the end of the movement, tensions build before falling back to sweet, quiet tones as if nothing had happened.

The third movement is an elegant waltz, and its trio section seems to have been created especially to define the word “lilt.”

The fourth-movement finale, on the other hand, defies definition, beyond appearing to be a set of crazy variations on a lovely theme played by the cellos. The opening trumpet fanfare — perhaps in imitation of a bugle call to arms — is sufficient warning that no orthodox finale should be expected. Only in the famous Slavonic Dances do we get such a clear sense that Dvořák is composing entirely for his own enjoyment. This is fun-filled and jovial music of a special character, to which the trombones at the end contribute a hearty “Amen.”

— Hugh Macdonald

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.