The beginning of the Great War marked the end of the happiest period in Rachmaninoff’s life. He felt his need to create repressed and was tormented by thoughts about death. At the beginning of 1916, the composer’s anxiety turned into an emotional crisis accompanied by physical pain, probably psychosomatic in nature.
The war was a disaster for his country and the October Revolution was soon upon it, which forced him to permanently leave his beloved native land.
Leaving with “his hands as his only asset”, as one of his friends would say before his exile, he began a new life as a full-time piano virtuoso at the age of 44 with his friend Nikolai Medtner.
The necessity of working intensively on the instrument and of building up a repertoire distanced him from the composition. In spite of everything, his tours in the United States and Europe, which he came to think of as forced labor, allowed him to live very comfortably.
During the autumn of 1930, Sergei Rachmaninoff was 57. Although he loved nothing better than family life and only traveled owing to professional obligation, he was tired, worn out by concerts, and affected by the failure of his fourth Piano Concerto.
So, he decided to move back to Europe, where he had a house built in Switzerland which he named Sénar, from his first name and that of his wife Natalia, and ending in the “r” of Rachmaninoff. He was happy in his home, which reminded him of the house of his Satine cousins and he composed there, worked in the garden, and cared tenderly for his two grandchildren.
The last work we would like to present is a grandiose work that bears the name of Rhapsody. However, it is in reality structured on the principle of a theme and variations.
There are twenty-four of them, all based on the Caprice for Solo Violin No. 24 by Niccolò Paganini. Before Rachmaninoff, Johannes Brahms, in his Variations on a theme by Paganini, and Franz Liszt in his Six Études after Paganini, had already exploited this theme.
Although the work is designed to play by only one musician, it can be divided into three sections corresponding to the three movements of a concerto. It would therefore be quite sensible to think that this Rhapsody is in fact Rachmaninoff’s Fifth Piano Concerto in disguise.
It is above all the 18th variation which has made this work’s name, the ultimate and emblematic expression of Rachmaninoff’s late romanticism. One could believe that it has nothing to do with Paganini, yet when we look closer, we can see that the genius composer has in fact inversed the notes from the theme by Paganini, using horizontal symmetry!
The Tomplay sheet music of the Rhapsody on a theme by Paganini, Opus 43, is synchronized with a professional orchestral accompaniment studio-recorded by us: start the audio track of the orchestra alone, which will make your sheet music scroll automatically, and play accompanied by the orchestra in your own living room!
Posted from: https://tomplay.com/blog/post/8-des-plus-belles-oeuvres-de-rachmaninoff-a-jouer-au-piano
