Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Twentieth-Century Composer

Extract

The music of Sergei Rachmaninoff has remained up to the present day a controversial matter over which there has been little actual controversy. I do not mean to suggest that his music is, or ever has been, subject-matter for the battle cry of advance-guard partisanship, but I do submit that the music has achieved an authentic, international popularity that has nothing to do with mere vogue; and that, from the critic's point-of-view, a consistently popular composer, good or bad, is automatically an important one. Actually, Rachmaninoff spent a good part of his life by-passing the pressing issues of this century's “modern” musical thought—not in terms of belligerent reaction but, as the music to 1917 suggests, simply by ignoring it. In a similar way the twentieth-century critical mind has ignored him. The works on which his popularity rests, although typical enough, are far from his most progressive; they tell, really, only a part of the story.