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Sergei Rachmaninoff-the last great Russian romantic and arguably the finest pianist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries-wrote 83 songs, which are performed and beloved throughout the world. Like German Lieder and French mélodies, the songs were composed for one singer, accompanied by a piano. In this complete collection, Richard D. Sylvester provides English translations of the songs, along with accurate transliterations of the original texts and detailed commentary. Since Rachmaninoff viewed these \"romances\" primarily as performances and painstakingly annotated the scores, this volume will be especially valuable for students, scholars, and practitioners of voice and piano.

Drawing extensively on Russian-language sources, a concise yet comprehensive survey of the life and work of one of classical music's great composers. Unquestionably one of the most popular composers of classical music, Sergei Rachmaninoff has not always been so admired by critics. Detractors have long perceived Rachmaninoff as part of an outdated Romantic tradition from a bygone Russian world, aloof from the modernist experimentation of more innovative contemporaries such as Igor Stravinsky. In this new assessment, Rebecca Mitchell resituates Rachmaninoff in the context of his time, bringing together the composer and his music within the remarkably dynamic era in which he lived and worked. Both in Russia and later in America, Rachmaninoff and his music were profoundly modern expressions of life in tune with an uncertain world. This concise yet comprehensive biography will interest general readers as well as those more familiar with this giant of Russian classical music.

In two of Rachmaninov's last works, theRhapsody on a Theme of Paganiniof 1934 and the first of theSymphonic Dancesof 1940, a stylistic contrast between an opulently scored lyrical theme and the more angular, dissonant music that surrounds that theme throws into relief the extent that Rachmaninov's musical language had changed and developed since his first great successes thirty years earlier with the Second Piano Concerto and the Second Symphony. The words that motivate a similar stylistic contrast in the songSon(Sleep), composed in 1917, near the end of his most compositionally productive years, suggest an interpretive reading of such a stylistic contrast: the earlier, lusher style is associated here with dreams, and hence with memories; while the later, sparer, more tonally ambiguous style accompanies an evocation of something more impersonal, in the case of the song the stillness of a dreamless sleep. Some of the developing aspects of Rachmaninov's style revealed in these later examples are already evident even in the more traditional-sounding pieces of the last decade (1907–17) of his Russian period, which is shown in an analysis of the piano Prelude in G# Minor of 1910. Even this seemingly traditional Prelude, but more and more in his later music, Rachmaninov emerges as an indisputably twentieth-century composer.

Rachmaninoff's complete songs: a companion with texts and translations, by Richard D. Sylvester, Russian Music Studies, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2014, xxii + 302 pp., US$55.00 (hbk), ISBN 978-0-253-35339-9 Sergei Rachmaninoff is known first and foremost as a legendary pianist, the author and performer of spectacular preludes, etudes-tableaux, and concertos. Sylvester weaves each of Rachmaninoff's songs into the composer's pre-1918 biography at large - a narrative move that distinguishes this Companion from its predecessor, Tchaikovsky's Complete Songs: A Companion with Texts and Translations (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2003) by the same author, which focused on the moments of Tchaikovsky's biography that spoke directly to his songs.

English musicologist [Max Harrison] has met this obvious need. His earlier titles treated artists as different from one another, and from [Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff], as Brahms and Charlie Parker; his new publication, which [Vladimir 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 Jan. 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.) 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 that 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 [Alexander Glazunov] stayed put throughout Lenin's rule, happy that revolution had left his vodka supplies unimpeded.) 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.\"