Listening today: Concerto n°2 in Do minor op.18, S. Rachmaninov
Sunday listening — Listening to take you in
by Marialuisa Veneziano
Before you start music
Also this Sunday the proposal came from our reader.
Sergei Rachmaninoff's Second Piano and Orchestra Concerto.
There are pages for which you need to prepare your ear. For this, perhaps, you have to prepare something else.
Because Concerto No. 2 in D minor op. 18 does not just ask to be heard. He asks to be crossed.
We must accept its exaggerations, its immense melodic arches, its shadows, its sudden openings; we must allow Rachmaninoff something that we today give with some difficulty to artists: be sentimental without being superficial, passionate without shame, vulnerable without turning vulnerability into weakness.
We are in Russia between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Tchaikovsky has been dead for a few years. A generation of musicians inherited from him not a way, but almost a question: how far can life enter the musical form without destroying it?
Rachmaninoff will give one of the most powerful answers.
But before you get there, you have to cross the silence.
The man who could no longer compose
In March 1897 Rachmaninoff was twenty-three years old and assisted in St. Petersburg at the first performance of his First Symphony.
He is convinced that the score can consecrate him.
It happens otherwise.
The execution is problematic, the harsh welcome, the fierce criticism. The young composer is devastated. Years later she will remember that evening as an experience that had left it deeply changed. For about three years his compositional activity is drastically reduced: he continues to direct, play, work, but what he first seemed natural — sit down and create music — becomes terribly difficult.
Perhaps this is one of the most atrocious fears for an artist.
Don't lose success.
Losing access to yourself.
Have your hands again, know the craft again, continue to hear music in others and wonder whether that source that once existed within us has dried up.
In 1899 Rachmaninoff promises a new piano concert, but fails to write it. Pressure increases. At the beginning of 1900 he was persuaded to contact the doctor Nikolai Dahl, psychiatrist and passionate amateur musician. From January to April he meets him daily. Dahl also uses hypnotic and suggestive techniques, working on sleep, mood, trust and above all on the possibility that Rachmaninoff returns to compose. The musician will later remember that the treatment really helped him and that, with the arrival of summer, the ideas began to move again.
And here we have to stop.
Because we already know the ending of history and are tempted to turn it into a fairy tale.
The doctor treats the composer. The composer heals. The masterpiece is born.
No.
Life is not so neat.
Rachmaninoff does not enter Dahl's studio without music and comes out with the Second Concerto under his arm.
Something much more human.
He slowly began to believe he could still write.
And it's different.
The first victory was not the Concerto.
Maybe it was a joke.
Then another.
Then the feeling, forgotten for a long time, that from a sentence could arise a second one.
During the summer of 1900 the second and third movement are completed. Rachmaninoff runs them in Moscow in December and gets a huge success. Only then will he write the first movement. The full concert debuted in November 1901 with him on the piano and Aleksandr Siloti on the podium. The score carries a simple and immense dedication in its meaning:
To Nikolaj Dahl.
Not the doctor who healed me.
To him who, at a precise moment of his life, had contributed to give him a chance.
The one to start over.
🎧 Open listening. Then he keeps reading
Before starting the concert, forget for a moment his celebrity.
Forget the films that used the melodies, the legendary engravings, the pianists who turned it into an almost initiatory test of the great repertoire.
Just imagine a man in front of a piano.
For a long time he doubted he could still compose.
Now lay your hands on the keyboard.
And the concert begins.
the Concerto n°2 in Do minor op.18 by S. Rachmaninov (click on the black arrow to make the listening appear)
Inside the score
It doesn't start with a melody. Start with a heartbeat.
In the first jokes Rachmaninoff does something brilliant.
He doesn't give us one of his great themes.
It makes us wait.
The piano plays a succession of chords, more and more full and stronger.
Many have heard in those sounds a call to Russian bells, an acoustic universe that will deeply cross the imagination of Rachmaninoff. The pianist and composer Nikolaj Medtner also associated the opening of the Concert with a Russia that seems to emerge progressively in front of the listener.
But we leave Russia for a moment.
Let's just listen to them as a sound.
A deal.
Then another.
Again.
More and stronger.
It is difficult to know the history of composition and not feel something almost physical in this gesture.
Like when, after a long time left, we try to get up.
First time we don't run.
Let's check if the legs hold us.
And these agreements seem to do this.
Are you there?
Again.
You still there?
Again.
Then the orchestra enters.
And finally the music walks.
I. Moderate
The piano opens the door. But the orchestra is talking.
When the strings put the first theme in a minor, the piano does not appropriate.
This detail is wonderful.
Rachmaninoff was one of the greatest pianists of his time. He had prodigious hands, formidable technique and a full keyboard available to present himself to the world with a spectacular gesture.
He does something else.
Let the others sing.
The piano accompanies the orchestral theme with great figurations flowing under the melody. He is present everywhere, but does not claim to be the main voice.
Almost that the first gesture of a man returned to the composition was not shouting «Here I am», but listen.
Musically, the effect is extraordinary: the melody of the arches seems to advance over an incessant current. The surface sings; below, something keeps moving.
And it's already Rachmaninoff.
Because in his music almost never a feeling is one thing.
Under serenity there may be restlessness.
Inside a bright melody survives a note that hurts.
At the moment of maximum expansion there is often something that is not resolved completely.
This is perhaps the reason why his melodies, even when they are sumptuous, they never seem happy.
Remember.
Then comes the second big theme.
And here the world changes.
The piano finally sings.
It's not a nice little phrase; it's one of those melodies that in Rachmaninoff seem to need a huge space to be able to breathe. They rise up, fall back, continually delay where we thought they would come.
This is one of the most profoundly human features of his writing.
Rachmaninoff knows the power ofharmonic waiting.
He could take us home right away.
He doesn't.
Recommend the resolution.
Puts in a tension.
It extends a note.
Makes the sentence deviate.
And just when we start desperately want that melody to finally find a place to settle, it allows it to get there.
The emotion is also born of this.
Not from the note that comes, but from all the time we waited for it.
Is it so far from life?
How many things become valuable not for what they are, but how much did we have to wait for them?
🎧 Listen to this.
Listen to the beginning and observe the relationship between piano and orchestra.
First the piano builds the space.
Then the orchestra sings.
Later it will be the piano to receive the great opera melody.
There is no dominating protagonist and an orchestra that obeys.
There is an exchange.
One argues while the other speaks.
Then they reverse.
And suddenly this huge virtuoso concert tells us something very simple:
even a very strong voice, sometimes, needs to be supported.
Development brings music to increasingly tormented regions.
The ideas we knew are broken, accelerated, pushed against each other. The orchestra grows; the piano becomes more and more physical. There comes a moment when it seems that the whole structure cannot contain the accumulated energy.
And then the initial theme returns with a huge force.
It is no longer the melody we had met at the beginning.
Notes can be recognizable, but we are no longer at the same point.
We went through something.
It is the great capacity of Romanticism: to make us understand that Returning does not mean turning back.
A melody heard after a storm is no longer the same melody.
Like a house in which we return after many years.
The door is identical.
We don't.
II. Adagio supported
Now let him breathe.
After the tension of the first movement, Rachmaninoff makes one of the most beautiful light changes in the entire repertoire.
Let's go in I'm getting better..
The piano slowly has its harping.
And above this plot the orchestra's voices begin to emerge: first the flute, then especially the clarinet, which lets appear one of the most intimate melodies of the Concerto.
Almost nothing happens here.
And everything happens.
The piano accompanies.
Harpeggi keep coming back.
They don't ask attention.
They don't want to amaze us.
They create a place.
It’s like when someone still can’t tell what happened to him and another person stays next to him without obliging him to speak.
This, for me, is one of the most human moments of the entire score.
The piano can wait.
Then he takes the melody.
And when he does, we realize that Rachmaninoff is not simply composing a "theme of love".
That label would be too small.
Inside this music there is desire, of course. There is tenderness. But there is also something much more difficult to define: the feeling of a happiness that knows to be fragile.
The melody goes up.
Sounds like something.
He almost comes to the point of confessing.
Then he comes back.
Take courage.
Come back.
This is where harmony and psychology become the same.
Harmonic tensions prevent the phrase from resting too early; modulations continually change the emotional color; what seemed stability is cracked and what seemed restless suddenly finds a support.
Rachmaninoff does not describe a feeling.
It reproduces the behavior.
Because when we are deeply moved we do exactly this.
Let's go.
We stop.
Let's go back to something.
We think we got through it.
And it's just a word for everything to start again.
The Adagio grows.
The initial quiet does not hold forever.
The piano becomes more agitated, the writing thickens, the movement reaches a climax in which what had been whispered seems no longer to remain secret.
But Rachmaninoff doesn't end there.
And that's what makes the adult page.
After touching the climax, return to intimacy.
As it happens after a real cry.
Not the film in which the world suddenly changes.
The real one.
When we stop because we no longer have tears, we dry our face and the room is still the same.
Only we breathe a little differently.
🎧 Listen to this.
Follow the piano harping without losing them.
While rumors change above, while melody passes from instruments to soloist, they continue.
Almost a heartbeat.
Almost time.
Almost the daily life that insists on moving forward even on the days when something immense has happened within us.
Perhaps for this reason the second movement moves so much.
The world does not stop while we suffer.
And sometimes, just the fact that you continue, slowly saves us.
III. Allegro joking
It's not enough to survive. At some point you have to go back to desire.
The Final changes temperature immediately.
After the intimacy of the Adagio, the movement returns. The piano recovers energy, the orchestra reacts, the rhythm becomes nervous, brilliant, sometimes impetuous.
It is easy to simply feel the formal need for an energetic ending.
But let's try to listen to him after what we know.
The first movement had to learn how to move.
The second had learned to breathe.
The third seems to ask for something more difficult:
You still want something from life?
Because coming back to life doesn't just mean quitting.
It means returning to want.
And it's much more risky.
Who does not want does not lose.
Who does not love is not abandoned.
Whoever doesn't try doesn't fail.
After a great injury, renounce can even seem like a form of intelligence.
Rachmaninoff, instead, returns to desire.
And we hear it when the great second theme of the Final appears.
It's one of the most famous melodies I wrote.
It opens naturally, grows, expands its breath and seems to ask the whole orchestra to become one huge instrument capable of singing.
Rachmaninoff doesn't smell anymore.
And fortunately.
The Late-Romantic Russian tradition to which it belongs had inherited from Tchaikovsky an extraordinary ability to transform melody into psychological experience. It is not a generic "Russian soul", suggestive but too easy formula; it is precise composition choices: very broad phrases, harmonies that delay distension, dark and deep orchestral colors, large crescendi built on a long-lasting tension.
The emotion, in short, does not replace the technique.
It is made possible by the technique.
And that's why it doesn't become sentimental.
That melody of the Final is continually hampered.
He still can't become what he wants to be.
Back the energetic material.
Music devia.
The piano fight.
The orchestra relaunches.
Rachmaninoff continues to promise us a landing and continues to postpone it.
Because if he had delivered the big final blast right away, he would have moved us for 30 seconds.
Instead it compels us to deserve it with listening.
The melody must first know the interruption.
The desire must meet a resistance.
The light must remember what the dark was.
And then it happens
Towards the conclusion, the theme returns.
But now something has changed.
The shade opens towards I.
The orchestra expands.
The piano is no longer the man only of the first jokes that tries an agreement after the other.
It is now inside the orchestra and at the same time above it; it participates, supports, conquers the space.
And that melody that he had to ask for permission to exist can finally spread throughout his own breadth.
I wouldn't call this "trionph on depression."
It would be too brutal for real life.
I'd call it another way.
The return of chance.
The chance to feel joy again.
To trust a sentence again.
To write a page again.
To still love something enough to be afraid to lose it.
The note remains
Perhaps the Second Concerto still moves us so deeply because it does not promise us a life without pain.
It promises us something more credible.
That from pain can still be born movement.
That after a long immobility we can find a gesture.
That a voice we thought lost could come back, initially uncertain, and find that we still have a lot to say.
They taught us to call this "romantic" concert.
That's true.
But "romantic" doesn't just mean love.
It means believing that human interiority is important enough to deserve an entire orchestra.
Fear.
The desire.
Memory.
Loss.
Hope.
Even the shame of needing someone.
Everything can enter the music.
And Rachmaninoff takes everything.
Maybe starting again doesn't mean returning to being the ones before.
It means finding out that, despite everything, something still exists within us capable of singing.
🔎 One thing to know
The Concert was born on the contrary
There is a detail of his story that seems almost invented for this music.
Rachmaninoff did not first compose the first movement.
In the summer of 1900 theAdagio supported and the Final. It was these two movements that were publicly performed first, in December of the same year, obtaining a warm welcome. Only later came the Moderate initial; in November 1901 the full concert was presented in Moscow with Rachmaninoff at the piano and Siloti conductor.
It's curious to think about it.
We listen to those initial agreements as if they were the door from which the whole work entered the world.
Historically, they were one of the last things to be born.
Almost Rachmaninoff, only after finding a destination, had managed to understand where the journey should begin.
And maybe this happens in life too.
Sometimes we really understand our beginning only when we've already gone far ahead.
Take him with you
Soon the last deal will end.
The D major will turn off.
The piano will return to be wood, ropes and silence.
Yet he tries to remember how it all started.
Not with a melody.
With repeated agreements.
Almost a question addressed to his own body.
Can I still?
Thirty-five minutes later, the answer does not come through a sentence.
It comes through an entire orchestra.
This is what music can do and words sometimes, no.
You can ask a question to which we cannot answer and keep it with you long enough because it changes shape.
We won't always find a solution.
Not always our minor do will become greater.
And it would be offensive to promise.
But there are days in which the miracle is much smaller.
Get up.
Phone.
Write a line.
Open the piano.
Try again.
A deal.
Then another.
And maybe that's why, more than a century later, millions of people continue to recognize themselves in Rachmaninoff's Second Concerto.
Not because you tell a man's victory over pain.
But because he tells something we all know.
That fragile and almost invisible moment in which, after believing that we have nothing to give, we feel moving something within us.
We don't know if it's gonna last.
We don't know where he'll take us.
But there is.
And that's enough for today.
🎧 One last listening
When the Concert is finished, it only returns to the first jokes.
Listen to those agreements again.
The first time you didn't know where they were coming.
I do now.
And it's impossible to listen to them the same way.
Perhaps this is one of the greatest powers of music: the final can change even the meaning of the beginning.
The notes are identical.
It's you who, meanwhile, went through something.
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