ENTRY TWELVE
THIS PIECE MADE RACHMANINOFF CRY…
In graduate school, I took a music course called “Introduction to Research and Bibliography” and the main assignment was — you guessed it — to assemble a comprehensive paper and presentation on any musical topic of my choice. It wasn’t necessarily for a doctoral dissertation, but the course was designed as a precursor to such demanding and far more important projects like that. A few weeks into the semester, my professor and I agreed that I should do a presentation and paper on Sergei Rachmaninoff’s (1873-1943) Fourth Piano Concerto, Op. 40 and explore the work’s complicated and lengthy history of its many revisions. As I did my research, I learned so much more than I could have ever expected. Not only did I compare the three different versions of the concerto; I also got some fascinating insight on the composer’s career throughout the last decades of his life.
We all know Rachmaninoff was a piano virtuoso. I mean, you should just try playing most of his compositions and you’ll know what I’m talking about. Anyway, he spent the first half of his musical career enjoying a perfect balance between performing and composing, often premiering several of his own works in solo recitals. It still blows my mind that in his programs he often included works by Chopin and other great composers before him. The year 1917, however, witnessed the Russian Revolution, and the composer’s home country became a land of social unrest and political turmoil. Amidst such turbulent times, Rachmaninoff and his family fled to Western Europe, where several nations began rebuilding after the conclusion of the first World War. What did these crazy times mean for Rachmaninoff? Well, he had to put all his composition projects on hold and instead focus on performing. Of course, he was still successful as a concert pianist and enjoyed touring throughout Western Europe and the United States, often performing his own concertos as a soloist in collaboration with the world’s most-renowned orchestras. One concert, in particular, became an emotional experience for him. Following a presumably successful performance of his own 2nd Concerto in C Minor with the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) in 1938, he took a seat to enjoy the second half of the program as a mere spectator. In that second half was the premiere of an orchestral work Serenade to Music by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), who dedicated his composition to the LSO conductor Sir Henry Joseph Wood (1869-1944). Lots of big names in one concert alone: London Symphony Orchestra, Rachmaninoff, Vaughan Williams, and Maestro Wood. Imagine watching that. In fact, imagine you could see Rachmaninoff from your own seat… and you could see him shedding tears upon listening to Serenade to Music.
Now, to be honest, I’m not quite sure how to accurately explain the premise of the orchestral work. All I know for sure is that the text of the music is loosely based on a scene from Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice. Within that scene, the characters explore the concept of “music of the spheres,” a very early scientific explanation for the movement of the sun, moon, and planets. The fundamental observation is that their trajectories in the celestial skies are consistent and can be logically understood with the support of mathematics. Think about how moon phases occur at regular time intervals (months), so there ought to be an explanation for that, right? That, right there, is just one example of such curiosity long before the Enlightenment when the greatest scientists and mathematicians got all the answers. Well, most of them, at least. So, all of that pertains to the way we observe patterns in the celestial sky. At the same time, the way we recognize certain combinations of pitches as being aurally pleasing to the ear must also be mathematically explained. For example, if you play the notes A4 and A3, then you get the interval of a “perfect eighth” which sounds very consonant. On the other hand, play two notes only a semi-tone away from each other, and you get a painfully dissonant interval of a “minor second.” In the first example, with the “perfect eighth” interval, the two frequencies of the notes provide a mathematically pleasing proportion: A4 is 440 Hz and A3 is 220 Hz. It is a very, very far-fetched connection between the fields that we know today as astronomy (movements of objects in space) and physics (soundwaves and their frequencies), but that’s the basis of the “music of the spheres” phenomenon. I think. Anyway, I really like astronomy and would love to tell you more about this after I’ve done my due research, but I need to get back to the piece in discussion here.
Serenade to Music is a love letter to music, really. It’s not just the text itself that pays homage to such art, but it’s also the fact that Vaughan Williams dedicated the piece to Maestro Wood, who was celebrating his 50-year anniversary as a professional conductor. The music itself is beautiful, of course. It begins with an orchestral statement of the theme which would intermittently recur throughout the piece. Think of it like a sonata’s “rondo” form, in which the main theme returns after a contrasting musical episode. The theme of the Serenade unifies the whole work, while different lines and phrases of Shakespeare’s text are scattered throughout. You know what it reminds me of, actually? It reminds me of this piece by J. S. Bach (1685-1750) titled "Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” The cantus firmus, a fancy term to describe the actual hymn or tune, overlaps with the underlying orchestral theme that repeats several times. That “chorale prelude” style of musical form has much resemblance in Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music. Unlike the harmonic and structural strictness of the Baroque period, the Serenade is certainly much more Impressionistic, often exploring distant tonal centers during the musical episodes that interrupt the main orchestral theme. The overall work is in D Major, but occasionally the music will temporarily shift to these very distant keys such as B-flat Major or C-sharp Minor. It sounds just as colorful as you might expect from a lush orchestral work like this one. Vaughan Williams eventually completed a separate version of the Serenade for solo violin and orchestra, which I personally prefer, but the one that Rachmaninoff heard was the version for vocal ensemble and orchestra. Again, he cried after listening to its premiere. Here it is: