The rock of Sergei Rachmaninoff
In the summer of 1893, a year after his brilliant graduation from the Moscow Conservatory, Sergei Rachmaninoff composed a fantasy for orchestra and gave it the opus number 7 – at that time, it did not yet bear the name The Rock. The reactions were not all positive.
At a performance in St Petersburg three years later, the critic and composer César Cui (a member of the famous group of composers known as The Five, along with Modest Mussorgsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov) wrote in a review that the work was ‘a piece of music that is not only uninteresting, but also unpleasant to listen to’. At a performance in Saint Petersburg three years later, the critic and composer César Cui (together with Modest Mussorgsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, a member of the famous group of composers known as “The Mighty Handful”) did not like the work: “Compositionally, the fantasy is a kind of mosaic consisting of several small individual parts with no connection to each other. The music constantly wants to go somewhere, but never gets there.”
With this seemingly negative criticism, however, Cui had hit the nail on the head. It was only in the preface to the printed score that Rachmaninoff revealed that he had been inspired to write the piece by the poem The Rock by the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov. The composer placed the first two verses at the beginning of his score as an epigraph:

However, that was still not the whole truth. In fact, Rachmaninoff chose these lines of poetry because Anton Chekhov had used them as the motto for his story On the Way. Chekhov spins the metaphor of the fleeting encounter between cloud and rock in Lermontov's poem into a realistic story that takes place during a snowstorm on Christmas Eve: a young woman, prevented from continuing her journey by the storm, meets a disillusioned older man in the ‘passenger room’ of an inn. After her departure the next morning, the man remains alone: ‘Soon the tracks of the runners had disappeared, and he himself, covered with snow, resembled a white rock, but his eyes were still searching for something in the snow clouds.’

Anxious longing

Rachmaninoff begins his piece with a theme that represents this rock of humanity: it begins in the barely audible quadruple piano of the low strings, briefly rises and then sinks back into the depths. Immediately afterwards, a rising, unreal, shimmering line in the violins and violas announces the theme of the young cloud like a vision. It is a carefree, ascending and descending figure on the flute, ‘sempre grazioso’. A little later, first the flute and then the rest of the woodwinds introduce what is probably the most important theme, which could be interpreted as embodying the longing and unfulfilled desires of the ‘rock’. This is ultimately about the rock's futile longing and anxious hope – the music follows its hopes and dreams, painting them in the most beautiful colours with virtuoso orchestral treatment, but in the end they are not fulfilled. Already in the middle of the piece, after a promising harmonic “colon” (in the high strings, woodwinds and especially the harp), the theme of the cloud collapses in on itself, then wanders through the woodwinds, picked apart by a tam-tam beat and triangle chimes, losing more and more of its height. The moment when everything finally shatters is both the climax and the turning point.

After a grand crescendo throughout the orchestra, so typical of Rachmaninoff, and a ritardando promising fulfilment, the collapse follows. In Lermontov's words:

Francis Poulenc's Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra

We owe the double concerto for two pianos and orchestra to the popularisation of a household item in the 19th century: the sewing machine. Francis Poulenc was friends with the patron Winnaretta Singer, known as Winnie, the heiress to her father Isaac Merritt Singer's sewing machine empire. In 1893, Winnie married Prince Edmond de Polignac, with whom she – now ‘Princess Edmond de Polignac’ – had a ‘mariage blanc’, as the couple were more attracted to partners of the same sex. Together they founded the influential Salon de Polignac, which was frequented by such renowned personalities as Jean Cocteau, Claude Monet and Marcel Proust. After her husband's death in 1901, Winnie used her inheritance to specifically promote up-and-coming artists. Among the compositions she commissioned were Igor Stravinsky's Renard, Erik Satie's Socrate, Kurt Weill's Second Symphony and Francis Poulenc's Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra.

However, there was no mention of a concerto for two pianos and orchestra in the princess's first letter of enquiry in August 1931: "Could the piece be a piano piece, similar to the concerto for Landowska [referring to Poulenc's Concert champêtre for the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska], arranged for three pianos if possible: one solo piano and two as accompaniment?” When Poulenc then suggested a concerto for two pianos and chamber orchestra, the patroness gave her consent.

However, it was not until the summer of 1932 that Poulenc returned to the work. When he finished it after two and a half months of feverish work, the planned accompaniment with chamber orchestra had been replaced by a full orchestra. The highly successful premiere took place in Venice in September 1932 with the orchestra of La Scala in Milan, with Francis Poulenc himself and his childhood friend Jacques Février as soloists. During his stay in the lagoon city, the composer lodged at a prestigious address: Winnie had invited him to the magnificent Palazzo Contarini, which she owned.

Humorous interplay of styles

Francis Poulenc belonged to the Parisian composers' group ‘Les six’ around Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau. Together they strove to renew French music, rejecting late Romanticism and Impressionism and turning to the light music of music halls and jazz. Poulenc's double concerto exemplifies this new aesthetic maxim: soon after the stormy beginning of the first movement, one suddenly hears what sounds like a toccata in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach, which is abruptly replaced by a cheerful variety show melody. This tongue-in-cheek interplay of styles characterises the entire concerto. The second movement begins with a Mozart-like melody, for which Poulenc probably found his inspiration in the theme of the slow movement from Mozart's Piano Concerto K. 537 (‘Coronation Concerto’). But of course, it doesn't stop at the graceful Mozart tone: when the second piano joins in, the theme transforms into a mildly melancholic chanson melody.

The charm of the unfamiliar

Given this kaleidoscope of seemingly incompatible musical stylistic elements, one of the work's particular fascinations lies in how Poulenc nevertheless manages to achieve a sense of unity. Another musical role model (besides Bach and Mozart) seems to play an important role here: Indonesian gamelan music, which Poulenc had encountered at the Paris Colonial Exhibition in 1931. The sound of this music is characterised on the one hand by the use of metal percussion instruments and on the other by the repetition of recurring patterns. Poulenc has integrated a soundscape that moves in accordance with this tradition into all three movements of his concerto: it consists of the notes of the D minor triad D – F – A, together with the secondary notes E flat and B flat, and is heard immediately after the two chord strokes at the beginning of the first movement. At the end of this movement, it returns in a slowed-down form, thereby significantly altering its character, as it does at the end of the other two movements.

The final movement of the double concerto is a kind of rondo – and at the same time a sparkling pianistic tour de force. The range of musical set pieces strung together is expanded once again: it ranges from self-quotation (Poulenc recalls one of his own little piano pieces) to popular melodies and triumphant orchestral bombast to passages in which the piano becomes percussion in the lowest register.

Peter Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony

Shortly after his wedding to Antonia Miljukowa on 6 July 1877, Peter Tchaikovsky wrote to his brother Tolya: "Tolichka, yesterday was perhaps the hardest day since 6 July. In the morning, it seemed to me that my life was ruined forever, and I had an attack of despair. Around three o'clock, a crowd of people gathered at our house [...]. We had lunch together. The terrible moment of the day came when I was left alone with my wife in the evening."

A little later, the composer fled from marital intimacy, returned, and in a new fit of despair attempted suicide. Finally, under a pretext, he travelled to his brother in St Petersburg, where a psychiatrist suggested separating from Antonia and prescribed a trip abroad. The reason for the hasty marriage was the same as the reason why the union was doomed to failure from the outset: Peter Tchaikovsky sought refuge from his homosexuality and the panic-stricken fear that it might become public knowledge in a bourgeois marriage. It was precisely during this period of severe personal crisis that he composed his Fourth Symphony.

Tchaikovsky attempted to explain the background of the first movement in particular to his close friend Nadeshda von Meck. “Basically, my symphony is an imitation of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which means that I did not imitate its musical ideas, but rather the idea underlying the symphony. How do you think Beethoven's Fifth Symphony has a programme? Of course the symphony has a programme. There is also no doubt about what it is trying to express. Basically, my symphony is based on almost the same thing, and if you don't understand me, then it just means that I am not Beethoven, which I have never doubted.”

Nadeshda von Meck, a wealthy Moscow widow, had written to Tchaikovsky at the end of 1876 with a commission for a composition. This commission developed into a close correspondence. Von Meck is also the inspiration behind Tchaikovsky's dedication of the symphony to ‘my best friend’. The metallically armoured beginning, he wrote to her, “is fate, the fateful power that prevents our pursuit of happiness and jealously watches over it, ensuring that happiness and peace never become complete and cloudless, a power that hangs like a sword of Damocles over our heads and constantly poisons our souls.” This theme of fate is followed by the restless main theme of the symphony movement, which is clearly threatened by this fate. The second, more relaxed and dance-like theme must first struggle to extricate itself from this atmosphere: it is initially played by the solo clarinet, has a somewhat awkward character and is introduced by unreal, flitting figures in the woodwinds and tremulous tremolos in the strings.

Nothing but dreams

An initially accompanying, lulling cantabile counter-theme gradually reveals itself to be the main idea of this second thematic complex. ‘In the distance,’ according to the composer, the intrusive first theme of the allegro fades away. And gradually, dreams envelop my entire soul. All that is gloomy and sad is forgotten! There it is, there it is, happiness! No! Those were dreams. Fate pulls me back into life. […] Swim across this sea until it engulfs you and drags you into the depths! – That is roughly the programme of the first movement.”

At striking moments, the fate theme breaks into the music again and again, relentlessly and almost violently, for example shortly before the end of the first movement, where it is played successively by different instruments. As if in a process of repression, this musical fate does not appear in the second movement with its song-like, beautifully melancholic theme, nor in the third. Its punchline lies in the use of different instrumental groups: "The scherzo contains a new instrumental effect that I rely on. First, the strings play pizzicato; in the trio, the woodwinds come to the fore and also play alone. The brass section alternates with them and also plays alone; at the end of the scherzo, all three sections call out short phrases to each other. It seems to me that this sound effect will be very interesting.”

Deceptive jubilation

But as is so often the case, what has been suppressed returns. The finale begins bombastically, with almost manic, racing sixteenth notes – sometimes described in this context as “noisy”. And indeed, this bombast has something ostentatious, something feigned about it. Thus, the second main musical idea of the finale, a quotation from a Russian folk song, develops threatening traits as it progresses, until the fate theme of the first movement unexpectedly bursts into the musical action. The once again exaggerated final jubilation can hardly be trusted.

Ulrich Wilker

Dr Ulrich Wilker studied musicology, German language and literature, and theatre, film and television studies at the University of Cologne. He also received his doctorate in Cologne with a thesis on Alexander Zemlinsky's one-act opera Der Zwerg (The Dwarf). After holding several academic positions, he joined the Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe as a concert dramaturg in 2022. Since 2024, he has been a dramaturg specialising in concerts at the Theater Aachen.