BORN 1873, DIED 1943, reborn circa 1975. This is as neat a précis of Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff’s existence as can be imagined. During the 1950s and 1960s, a scholarly assessment of Rachmaninoff would certainly have been unprintable, and would probably have been unwriteable, so great was establishmentarian contempt for him. After the 1973 centenary of his birth, matters improved; two eminent pianist-conductors, Vladimir Ashkenazy and André Previn, played noble parts in enriching the composer’s discography with idiomatic, textually scrupulous performances. Yet only in 1990 did a comprehensive academic dissertation on Rachmaninoff’s accomplishments, by Scottish pedagogue Barrie Martyn, appear in our language. To describe Martyn’s expertise and archival industry, words fail: he really has produced the Rachmaninoffian’s bible. Unfortunately for the indigent and the weak-muscled, it runs to 600 pages. There thus remained a clear requirement for something smaller, aimed at readers sympathetic towards buying a book on Rachmaninoff, yet understandably reluctant either to go broke in the process or to acquire a hernia.

English musicologist Max Harrison has met this obvious need. His earlier titles treated artists as different from one another, and from Rachmaninoff, as Brahms and Charlie Parker; his new publication, which Ashkenazy has already honored with justified praise, confirms the allure of wholly diverse approaches to sustained musical comment. If Edmund Morris’s Beethoven guide - eulogized in TAC’s January 16 issue - is fire, Harrison’s Rachmaninoff guide is ice. Over and over again, Harrison reveals profound comprehension of Rachmaninoff the musical architect, who almost always deserved far better than to be dismissed as a lachrymose middlebrow. Accordingly, Harrison shuns the adolescent gush that characterizes too many Rachmaninoff defenders (adolescent spite characterizes too many Rachmaninoff detractors). Gusher-in-chief must be Ayn Rand, whose ululations - unhampered by historical literacy or score-reading skill - included the insistence that Rachmaninoff far outshone Bach and Beethoven. Even a marginal acquaintance with Rachmaninoff’s own attitudes will indicate how horrified he himself would have been at so reckless a judgment. (Rachmaninoff and Ayn Rand now lie in the same New York graveyard. This increases the moral validity of recent moves to transfer Rachmaninoff’s corpse back to Mother Russia.)

Harrison, a militant and refreshing anti-Freudian from his first pages, observes: “The present writer is not a partisan of the ‘revelatory’, still less of the ‘psychological’, biography ... in truth the life of even the greatest artist, if shorn of its central purposes, is likely to seem a chronicle of trivialities.” A little later: “He [Rachmaninoff] was a very private man, seemingly incapable of the usual vanities of fame, and to know enough about him is to admire a life of prodigious hard work ... his domestic life seems to have been uncommonly happy.” Almost alone among great musical creators, Rachmaninoff possessed an aristocratic background - a 15th-century forebear of his had married a son of Grand Duke Ivan III - and aristocratic reticence to match. More stoic over his gravest sufferings than Mahler would have been over an ingrown toenail, Rachmaninoff lacked even the fin de race glamour which one might expect in a golden youth of late Tsarism.

“Golden” is, in his instance, the operative word. At 19, he won his Moscow music school’s gold medal, along with the title of “Free Artist”, the latter being a specifically imperial award devised by Catherine the Great. Already a marvelous pianist, he had also attained enough early success with composing to win Tchaikovsky’s respect. He did well to enjoy such initial acclaim while he could, because long before the Bolshevik coup ripped his life apart, fate - in a phenomenon subsequently bemoaned by England’s great tragic sage, Bertie Wooster - “was quietly slipping the lead into the boxing glove.”

The knockout blow came in 1896, its venue being the St. Petersburg première of Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony. This performance’s disastrous conductor, Alexander Glazunov, had already embarked on that heroic alcoholism which still awed his pupil Shostakovich as late as the 1920s; he appears to have been totally drunk during this concert as well. Furthermore, Russian music criticism, well before Stalin became its leading practitioner, aimed less at shedding light than at kicking heads. Local panjandrum César Cui greeted Rachmaninoff’s piece with downright rage:

“If there were a conservatoire in Hell and one of its gifted students were given the task of writing a program symphony on the Seven Plagues of Egypt and if he were to compose a symphony like Rachmaninoff’s, then he would have succeeded brilliantly and enchanted the inmates of Hell.”

So much can be found in many a general reference work. What Harrison accentuates, as too few others have done, is the delay between this public shaming and Rachmaninoff’s well-known nervous collapse. Harrison makes a good case for concluding that Rachmaninoff’s largely ignored dedication of the symphony to a married female friend, Anna Lodizhenskaya, indicated deep feelings on his part for her. Did these feelings, more than the dreadful concert, precipitate his breakdown? No evidence points to actual impropriety on Rachmaninoff’s part, but his manuscript’s citation of a quote from Anna Karenina is curious (and untypical).

In any event, viewing himself as a complete failure, he wanted to give up composing for good. Since every other problem in Nicholas II’s Russia could be, and was, routinely made worse by Tolstoy’s intervention, it is unsurprising that Anna Karenina’s author, after hearing some of the young man’s output, “asked Rachmaninoff point-blank: ‘Tell me, is such music needed by anyone?’.” With equal offhandedness, Tolstoy dismissed Beethoven, Pushkin, Lermontov and Shakespeare as “nonsense”. This fact moves Harrison to an especially sardonic remark: “A more secure personality than Rachmaninoff might have welcomed being consigned to the scrapheap in such company.”

Great credit for Rachmaninoff’s resumption of the composing life belongs to Nikolai Dahl, a hypnotist - never, pace most musical histories, a psychiatrist - who, by gentle and repetitive suasion, assisted greatly in restoring his patient’s musical self-belief. Therapists’ record for competence is not so impressive that we can afford to ignore a single example where overt benefits resulted. Yet other factors aided Rachmaninoff’s recuperation: above all, perhaps, the unexpected appearance (after a Chaliapin recital) of a small bearded gentleman who told the composer: “you will be a great man one day.”

This diminutive prophet turned out to be Chekhov, whose kindness Rachmaninoff always cherished. Temperamentally both men shared much. In the gallery of Russian culture, Rachmaninoff inhabited - so to speak - the West Wing: the wing he shared with Chekhov himself, with Tchaikovsky, and with Turgenev. He had little interest in hordes of Slavophils frenziedly proclaiming that the idiot = the genius = Satan = Christ. An impassioned patriot, whose every composition bears the subtext “To Russia With Love”, Rachmaninoff had too subtle a mind to embrace Russian nationalism. Not for nothing did he conduct for three years, by all accounts extremely well, in Dresden.

The day Lenin grabbed power, Rachmaninoff - undeterred by nearby gunfire - busied himself with revising his First Piano Concerto, a preoccupation which Harrison understandably praises: “An artist should concern himself with what is enduring and universal, not with what is contingent and immediate.” (Harrison quotes with waggish approval Clemenceau’s response to Paderewski’s assumption of Poland’s prime ministry: “What a come-down [Quelle chute]!”) The composer’s abstractedness did not last, though. Having discerned Communism’s nature with a clarity which continues to elude nine-tenths of 21st-century Western intellectuals, Rachmaninoff and his immediate family fled their homeland within weeks of Bolshevism’s triumph; he never again saw his native soil, let alone most of his personal belongings. (The irrepressible Glazunov stayed put throughout Lenin’s rule, happy that revolution had left his vodka supplies unimpeded.)

One notably shocking aspect of Rachmaninoff’s hardships, although he avoided the worst of émigré destitution, is how little money his own compositions brought him. Those libertarians who demand that intellectual property be abolished because it is sometimes abused - presumably fatherhood should likewise be abolished because some fathers abuse their children - should note how the lack of intellectual property protection immiserated Rachmaninoff. He foolishly sold his most adored hit, the Prelude in C Sharp Minor, for the equivalent of $25. Even in Tsarist Russia, which never signed the Berne Convention, he could and should have fared better than this. Expatriated at the age of 44, unable to speak English, he had 39 opus numbers under his belt, and no hopes of profiting from any of them.

America - where he arrived in 1918 after a brief Scandinavian interlude - saved his life and his soul, rather to his own surprise. He had visited the States in 1909, without notable pleasure. Nor were his American neighbors invariably persons whom he would have chosen; one of them, Harpo Marx, infuriated him by repeatedly playing the C Sharp Minor Prelude’s opening passage on his harp for two solid hours. Despite such annoyances, it took only a few years for Rachmaninoff to become a delighted advocate for his adopted nation. Harrison cites a letter of Rachmaninoff’s to a Danish confidante during a 1922 London visit: “I think of America very often. I extol America to all the English and they get so angry!”

He immeasurably boosted his renown through his diligence in recording his performances: not only via the piano-roll medium, about which Harrison is especially fascinating, but on 78s issued by the Victor Talking Machine Company, afterwards RCA. Edward Elgar excepted, Rachmaninoff was the first major composer who committed great chunks of his own writing to disc. The results, easily available on CD, demonstrate how bad several much-touted later executants are at capturing his pianistic style. Where they dawdle, Rachmaninoff presses ahead; where they drool over purple passages, Rachmaninoff sounds positively curt. The sole trouble with too many of his records is that, plagued by self-reproach, he acceded to - and sometimes himself effected - uniformly ruinous cuts in his bigger works: cuts which Harrison rightly deplores, but which remained standard with other interpreters till only a generation back. Thus, caveat emptor applies to any Rachmaninoff concerto or (in particular) symphony recording made before the last three decades. Even the late Eugene Ormandy - conductor of Rachmaninoff’s beloved Philadelphia Orchestra - had, as Harrison reveals, much to answer for through his overuse of the pruning shears.

Meanwhile Rachmaninoff the concert artist resembled Sisyphus. Aged 49, he complained from Locust Point, near New York, that in four years “I have not composed one line ... the more I play the more clearly do I see my inadequacies. If I ever learn this business thoroughly it may be on the eve of my death.” Yet nearly all of what music he did write after 1917, however scornfully journalists received it when it appeared, is as glorious as anything he had written earlier. The old melodic power and orchestral craftsmanship flourish still; also detectable is a textural astringency new to him.

Whereas Stravinsky’s muse never fully recovered from enforced uprooting, the transplanted Rachmaninoff coped much better, if only because he felt so little sentimentality about the old régime. By the 1930s he no longer faced penury - he kept his recording contract during the Great Depression, when RCA shunted off most other U.S.-based virtuosi to its British affiliate - but his workaholism had grown incurable. Despising the arrogance which confines so many performers to America’s biggest cities, he routinely gave recitals in almost every state which had a tolerable concert hall. He always offered ticket-buyers full musical value, even after cancer had begun ravaging him. His final concert (Knoxville, February 1943) included Chopin’s Funeral March Sonata, a circumstance which no Hollywood scriptwriter would dare to invent. Six weeks later he breathed his last.

In early manhood, his churchgoing had been so sporadic that he had undergone considerable problems finding Orthodox clergy who would officiate at his marriage. But on the penultimate day of his life he received the last sacraments from a priest, while the splendor of his best a cappella religious music - conspicuously the 1915 All-Night Vigil - makes for shattering avowals of faith, a faith informed by obsession with the contours of Orthodox chant, but ultimately rising above aesthetics.

These aesthetics are delineated with rare aplomb (and carefully chosen examples of musical notation) by Harrison, who conveys very effectively his bafflement concerning why Rachmaninoff masterpieces such as the piano sonatas, and the best songs, remain so stubbornly forgotten. Within such sheet music, there are clearly whole new worlds for the rest of us to discover. Leopold Stokowski, who on the podium had championed Rachmaninoff with commendable indifference to vogue, reflected: “To think my good friend Rachmaninoff is dead and put into the earth - and yet there is the music he created and we can still hear his spirit. Somehow it doesn’t make sense, but then people think too often that two and two make four.” Among 20th-century composers’ epitaphs, this surely stands not far below John O’Hara’s laconic response to Gershwin’s demise: “I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.”

R. J. Stove lives in Melbourne, Australia.

© The American Conservative, 2006