Rachmaninoff (eBook)

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1873–1885

Sergei Rachmaninoff was born on 20 March 18731 at Semyonovo, one of his family’s estates to the south of Lake Ilmen in the Staraya Russa region. ‘It was near enough to ancient Novgorod to catch the echoes of its old bells’,2 or so he would like to remember years later when his childhood memories were particularly dear to him. By then, this world had long been swept away. Oscar von Riesemann paints a word picture of an estate like the Rachmaninoffs at the time of his birth:

However, Riesemann’s eloquence should not disguise the fact that life in Russia in those days had another side to it, and that the Rachmaninoffs were among the privileged minority. As in France in the days of Louis XVI, or in the United Kingdom at the time of the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority was illiterate, many half-starved, and disease rampant.

According to a genealogy, ‘Historical Information About the Rachmaninoff Family’,4 it could be traced back to the days of Mongolian domination in the Middle Ages. As photographs taken in the last years of Rachmaninoff’s life suggest, there is something almost Mongolian-looking about his features – his almond-shaped eyes with heavy bags under them, his pendulous lips. Stefan IV, one of the rulers of Moldavia, had a daughter, Elena, who married the eldest son and heir of Ivan III, the Grand Duke of Moscow. Elena’s brother accompanied her to Moscow and it was his son, Vassily (nicknamed Rachmanin) from whose line the composer’s family may be traced. The name has its origins in an Old Russian word, ‘rachmany’, meaning hospitable, generous, a spendthrift. As we shall see, Rachmaninoff’s father was all of these things.

In the eighteenth century, Gerasim Rachmaninoff, the composer’s great-great-grandfather, was a Guard’s Officer in one of the Romanoff family’s many succession disputes. When Elisabeth, Peter the Great’s daughter, became Tsaritsa he was rewarded with an estate in the district of Tambov at Znameskoye. It lies in the steppes, one of the most fertile parts of Russia, situated to the southeast of Moscow. The family remained here for the next 150 years. Alexander Gerasimovich, Rachmaninoff’s great-grandfather, was a competent violinist and his wife was related to Nicolai Bakhmetev, a minor composer in the Imperial Chapel. Given how large Russia was and how poor communications were, families were obliged to make music for themselves in those days. Alexander’s son, Arkady, joined the army but retired after duty in one of the many Russo-Turkish disputes. Arkady took piano lessons from John Field, the Irish virtuoso, but by the time Field came to Russia he was in the late stages of alcoholism and his powers were in obvious decline. Mikhail Glinka, the first important Russian composer, studied with Field and wrote of his playing, ‘His fingers were like great drops of rain falling on the keys as pearls on velvet.’5

The only time Sergei met his grandfather was as a boy, but the memory of the occasion remained with him for more than half a century. ‘I played my little tunes, consisting of four or five notes and he added a beautiful and most complicated accompaniment.’6 Arkady played music at the homes of other members of the nobility and although he never pursued professional standards – as a member of the landowning class it was not necessary – a quantity of his waltzes, polkas and other salon compositions did get into print. He is the only other member of the Rachmaninoff family to merit even a footnote in history. Princess Golizin, in her memoirs,7 recalls how as soon as he got up every morning he would go straight to the piano and let nothing distract him while he practised for four or five hours. His family was large (there were nine children) and the sons were all required to follow in their father’s footsteps and join the army.

Vasily, Rachmaninoff’s father, joined the Imperial Guards in 1857 at the age of 16. For the next couple of years he was sent off to the Caucasus to suppress a nationalist uprising by the Muslim leader, Imam Shamil. In 1862 he took part in the suppression of the Polish nationalists and thereafter spent his time in a typical fashion – drinking, gambling and making love. After nine years’ military service he made a coup of his own by marrying Lyubov, the daughter and heiress of General Butakov, the head of the Araktcheyev Military College. Vassily quit the army to lead a princely life in the manner of his forebears. Like his father, Arkady, he too showed musical talent. His daughter Varvara recalls how ‘he spent hours playing the piano, not the well-known pieces, but something – God knows what, and I would listen to him to the end’.8 Years later in his recitals, Rachmaninoff would often programme a piece based on a theme he remembered his father playing, supposing it to have been written by him, Polka de W.R. (a French transliteration of his initials), but it was in fact the work of a prolific Austrian composer, Franz Behr, in the Johann Strauss mould.

Vasily Rachmaninoff’s family consisted of three daughters (Elena, Sophia and Varvara) and three sons (Vladimir, Sergei and Arkady). Sergei was raised in the traditional manner by a nurse, and took lessons from private tutors. His mother introduced him to music and he was only 4 years old when she first sat him at the piano. Like members of his father’s family, he showed an aptitude for music from an early age but it seems unlikely that his talent would ever have amounted to much without his mother. The part his mother played in securing his first piano teacher is recalled in a letter written years later to Rachmaninoff by Mlle Defert, his sisters’ Swiss governess:

As a result, Anna Ornatskaya, a young graduate of St Petersburg Conservatory, was engaged to give Sergei his first piano lessons.

Like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather, Rachmaninoff’s social position precluded his making a career as a professional musician and it was ordained that he would join the corps des pages of the Guards. However, it did not take long before economic changes in Russia began to affect the Rachmaninoffs. From his father’s youth his wealth had caused him to court pretty well every attractive woman he met, but that had not contributed to making him provident. In the first years of his marriage the income from his estates had proved more than enough to cope with, even with his profligacy; but soon there was no place left for the extravagant, often absentee, landlords of old Russia. The rapid progress of industrialisation in western Europe inevitably led to the collapse of feudal Russia: In 1861 the serfs were emancipated and for the landowners this necessitated a new and revolutionary husbanding of their resources.

By 1877, only five years after his wealthy father-in-law’s death, Vassily had managed to squander his wife’s entire inheritance. At first Lyubov’s position had been little different from the heiresses of previous generations; so long as their husbands could manage their estates competently then they had to put up with their philandering. But Vassily became bankrupt and Lyubov was faced with the prospect of having to fend for herself. She had no mind to play the role of her namesake in Chekhov’s play and sit back while the cherry orchard was taken from her. The furious rows resulting from the genteel poverty that the Rachmaninoffs were slipping into, led to Sergei’s parents separating. Lyubov moved to St Petersburg with all of the children, where her mother, Sophie Butakova, joined her. Sergei who was only ten could not have understood much of what was going on; all he knew was that his father loved him very much. He thought him kind and generous, but his mother was aware of the importance of introducing orderliness into family life. Rachmaninoff remembers her...