Mendelssohn and Rachmaninoff: Musical Depth
In the newspaper today, a columnist named "Richard" (or Li-Cha, in Chinese) have quoted Einstein in saying that the music of Felix Mendelssohn lacks depth; coincidentally, dearest Tiffy told me (after we got off the morning bus at UBC) she found Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto absolutely beautiful. Now, generally, critics and musicologists have argue that Mendelssohn is the better of the two. So, here is the question: does Mendelssohn's music have depth? Does Rachmaninoff's music have depth?
I think one would have to define "depth" with care to really know the answer (especially if we want to see if the claim that Mendelssohn is the better composer). If "depth" means "emotional depth", then of course Mendelssohn would have no depth: Mendelssohn born, lived and died a rich man. His life was almost perfect: he was brought up to do what he wanted to do. He had his own orchestra! Imagine poor Schubert (with his amateur "orchestra" with one cello and like three violin) with his own orchestra! On the other hand, Rachmaninoff had a mental breakdown before he wrote the Second Piano Concerto (it was because of the failure of his First Symphony). So, of course the emotional depth would be different. Also, we have to note the fact that Mendelssohn did not have Rachmaninoff's musical vocabulary: Mendelssohn died before the birth of Wagner, Mahler and Tchaikovsky. Mendelssohn had to invent his own Romantic language (he was an early Romantic composer, arguably after Weber and Schubert); Rachmaninoff, when he wrote the Concerto back in 1920's (I think), much of the musical vocabulary is already there; in fact, Rachmaninoff would be considered as a great conservative.
This leads to the next point of discussion: what kind of "depth" does Mendelssohn have that ultimately allows him to become the better of Rachmaninoff? I think we really need to understand what it means by "depth" in another, perhaps more important sense. We can call it "musical depth", and this has to do with how a composer treats music as music itself. What is music? I would feverishly disagree that music is an expression of the soul using sound. Music, I would argue, is listening to sound as sound. For when we listen to people speak, we do not call that "music" because we listen to the content of the given speech. When we listen to "city noise", we draw various interpretations and the corresponding connotations from it. But with music, we listen to the violin as a sound of the violin. When we listen to a vocal work, we are more concerned with the sounds the voice makes, not the content of the words. (This is why Wagner is so famous; he is no poet, but he is definitely a composer.) If we use music to express emotions, then we take away the real music element: we are now focused on the content of the music, and we neglect music itself. To be able to write music as music is how we can determine which composer has greater depth. Of course, I do not mean you should go into super technical analysis of all the chords and polyphony, etc. "Musical depth" (as I would call it now) is quite easy to determine, once a listener is willing to listen carefully. There are many indications to "musical depth". One important one is see if you are able to tell, in a given piece, who wrote the piece. I mean, for example, there is something about the mature Mozart that one can just listen and be able to tell that the piece is a Mozart piece. I have in fact had this experience: my friend gave me some music, and while I could not tell the first piece, the next piece I knew it was Mozart. Now, it was not because I have heard of the piece before, but because the last piece was "Mozartian". (It turned out the first piece was his early quintet, and the last is his late quintet.) There was something about that gives the feeling of musical maturity, sophistication, yet unmistakably Mozart. The piece had no program; it was pure music, and it was tremendously pleasurable.
To say that Mendelssohn lack musical depth is certainly a mistake. In fact, along with Schubert and Korngold, Mendelssohn is the fastest composer to reach the kind of musical depth that would be considered as great or incredible. His Octet in E flat is a fantastic work of art, written at the age of 18: it was musical, carefully constructed, and it has an 8-part fugue finale. His Overture to Midsummer Night's Dream, written when he was 17, is another such masterpiece. Mendelssohn is careful to form (it is in sonata-allegro form with four themes); his instrumentation is colourful and brilliant; his sense of rhythm is attractive, with an element of surprise. There will be those who argue that Mendelssohn's music does not develop after its early maturity; and that is a reasonable objection. But look at music by Debussy - as soon as Debussy achieved his impressionistic style, he does not develop further. Both composers have reached their ideal way of writing music as music, so why develop? It can only be perfected, and it is perfected for both composers. The late Violin Concerto in E minor is simply brilliant writing; it is Mendelssohn in absolute perfection; it is a violin soloists' Divine Comedy. Is it expressive? Of course; it is an agenda for the Romantics to write music with feeling, but it is a concerto, with abstract musical form, and every element of music is always places before personal expression. We listen to the concerto not because it is a great biography of Mendelssohn or an expression of that great German spirit, but because it is good music.
Rachmaninoff's musical depth is often overlooked because of his capacity (and also the musical vocabulary available to him) to write big expressive stuff. All popular Rachmaninoff works tend to be huge works: his Second and Third Piano Concerto; his Paganini Rhapsody; his Second Symphony; his piano preludes and the Second Piano Sonata (huge as pianistic works). He has that great Romantic Russian soul in him, there is no doubt about that; his flashy virtuosity is simply far too attractive for our now visual-orientated audience. But we must give Rachmaninoff credit for his "musical depth": the opening of the Second Concerto is absolutely sublime - eight simple chords, followed by a deep, sorrowful tenor melody; or the opening of the Third Concerto - one single melody dominates the first few minutes. In either case, Rachmaninoff's orchestration is beautiful. His harmonies, melodies and instrumentation matches perfectly (for an imperfect example, listen to Brahms' opening of his First Piano Concerto: the strings and bare brass definitely are not enough to sustain his melody; in fact, I don't believe any instrumentation can suit the melody). Rachmaninoff's sensitivity to form is also admirable. A re-listening to the Second and the Third Piano Concerto made me appreciate Rachmaninoff's skills in seeing how the sonata-allegro form should be expanded or tricated depending on his musical material. The first movement of the Second Piano Concerto is a full sonata-allegro form, with the recapitulation greatly disguised; the movement sounds like a huge rhapsody, substantial and formless, when in fact, Rachmaninoff very carefully blended in all the elements of the sonata-allegro form into the movement. The Third Piano Concerto is even more impressive; the recapitulation of the first movement is cut short after the cadenza. Initially I thought this was a point of criticism on Rachmaninoff; but now I have realized that he needed to cut the first movement in order to give the entire concerto a sense of unity: a fully recapped first movement would take away the musical flow of the entire piece; the first movement would have been a piece on its own, leaving behind two dangling movements on their own. Rachmaninoff, however, did not seem to master the idea of form in purely symphonic pieces, such as his Second Symphony. To me, it is a beautiful symphony; the musical ideas, however, seemed to be very artificially put together. It lacked the grace, rhapsodic flow of the Piano Concertos. But this is scarcely noticable, because much of the time the listener would be captured by the beautiful melodies Rachmaninoff orchestrated. (The third movement is especially exquisite. It is quite a treat to listen to the clarinet singing its beautiful melody.) The Paganini Rhapsody, a set of twenty four variations on Paganini's Caprice in A minor, shows similar artificiality. For me it lacks the spontaneity of Elgar's Enigma Variations, or the harmonic tightness of Brahms' Haydn Variations. Rachmaninoff's variations stand between the two extremes, creating an uncomforting balance which is nevertheless interesting and captivating. Rachmaninoff's sense of musical depth may be depreciated by his lack of polyphonic writing; on the other hand, it would be just as bad comment as to say James Joyce is not as great a writer as Shakespeare because he does not write sonnets or in verses. Rachmaninoff's musical depth is different from that of Mendelssohn: Mendelssohn's musicality is pure music; for Rachmaninoff, his music and the context of his music is never separated.
"Depth" can also be taken in another sense: it has to do with how a composer handles a musical tradition. And in this sense, Mendelssohn is definitely better than Rachmaninoff. (But I must, however, point out that this is unfair to Rachmaninoff because he was born later and in another place. But facts are facts...) Mendelssohn, at his time, can be considered as the beginning, development and the ending of a German tradition of music. He is the beginning the Romantic style; Schumann and Brahms are tremendously influenced by him; he is the development of an early Romantic style as given by the middle Beethoven, Schubert and Weber. He is also ending the classical tradition of Haydn and Mozart: Mendelssohn's String Symphonies and his First Symphony are beautifully Haydian and Mozartian, with a blend of Beethoven and Schubert. Haydn's effortless Allegros are reproduced in his early works; Mendelssohn's late works are just as effortless. Mendelssohn's influence spreads as not just a composer, but as a complete musical artist. His music is example of music, not emotional sounds (Schumann and Liszt) or a landscape of the ear (Wagner, to a concern extend, Debussy).
Rachmaninoff, on the other hand, is the end of a tradition. In fact, I would argue that he was the very end of classical music. Rachmaninoff follows the brief Russian Tradition of Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky. Historically more important is the fact that Rachmaninoff is really the last great composer who writes entirely in tonality. Of course, he mastered much of tonal music. But he is not much of an innovator: he is not a Stravinsky, a Bartok, a Schoenberg or a Hindemith; he mastered the art of a previous century, and made it popular to a modern audience, who is mostly sick of modern music. Rachmaninoff, the great Russian Soul, he is someone everybody can understand; nobody understands Alban Berg (who's that?). This is his lack of musical depth: he is not able to continue the tradition of classical, artistic music. He perfected the art, and did not allow any other tonal composers to come after him. After all, how many post-war composers are popular? You may have Barber, Copland; maybe Lutoslawski, KabalevskyMessaien or Hovanness; but how well known are they compare to Rachmaninoff? With the exception of Barber's Piano Concerto, one is safe to say that there are no Piano Concertos that are popular after the Second World War. Music as music is gone; the Paganini Rhapsody, certainly Rachmaninoff's most popular work and his last work for piano and orchestra, is almost a betrayal to the musical world: it ended with a whimper, not a bang. Mendelssohn has great musical depth; Rachmaninoff, seeing him in this light, is really the surface of it all.
This is perhaps not at all a fair criticism on Rachmaninoff: after all, he is not the one who controls the destiny of Classical Music; he did what he liked to do, which is to composer. He would still be the same even if there is somebody after him. The fact that almost all great composers leave a legacy behind for others after them to pick up, Rachmaninoff certainly fails in this sense. Many innovators (including Mendelssohn) inspired others to do something else; Rachmaninoff only invited others to copy. This is not to say Rachmaninoff is a bad composer: there is no doubt that he is among the greatest there ever will be. But as listeners, we should compliment as well as criticize: there are plenty of compliments made for Rachmaninoff, so why not entertain a few criticisms?
I think one would have to define "depth" with care to really know the answer (especially if we want to see if the claim that Mendelssohn is the better composer). If "depth" means "emotional depth", then of course Mendelssohn would have no depth: Mendelssohn born, lived and died a rich man. His life was almost perfect: he was brought up to do what he wanted to do. He had his own orchestra! Imagine poor Schubert (with his amateur "orchestra" with one cello and like three violin) with his own orchestra! On the other hand, Rachmaninoff had a mental breakdown before he wrote the Second Piano Concerto (it was because of the failure of his First Symphony). So, of course the emotional depth would be different. Also, we have to note the fact that Mendelssohn did not have Rachmaninoff's musical vocabulary: Mendelssohn died before the birth of Wagner, Mahler and Tchaikovsky. Mendelssohn had to invent his own Romantic language (he was an early Romantic composer, arguably after Weber and Schubert); Rachmaninoff, when he wrote the Concerto back in 1920's (I think), much of the musical vocabulary is already there; in fact, Rachmaninoff would be considered as a great conservative.
This leads to the next point of discussion: what kind of "depth" does Mendelssohn have that ultimately allows him to become the better of Rachmaninoff? I think we really need to understand what it means by "depth" in another, perhaps more important sense. We can call it "musical depth", and this has to do with how a composer treats music as music itself. What is music? I would feverishly disagree that music is an expression of the soul using sound. Music, I would argue, is listening to sound as sound. For when we listen to people speak, we do not call that "music" because we listen to the content of the given speech. When we listen to "city noise", we draw various interpretations and the corresponding connotations from it. But with music, we listen to the violin as a sound of the violin. When we listen to a vocal work, we are more concerned with the sounds the voice makes, not the content of the words. (This is why Wagner is so famous; he is no poet, but he is definitely a composer.) If we use music to express emotions, then we take away the real music element: we are now focused on the content of the music, and we neglect music itself. To be able to write music as music is how we can determine which composer has greater depth. Of course, I do not mean you should go into super technical analysis of all the chords and polyphony, etc. "Musical depth" (as I would call it now) is quite easy to determine, once a listener is willing to listen carefully. There are many indications to "musical depth". One important one is see if you are able to tell, in a given piece, who wrote the piece. I mean, for example, there is something about the mature Mozart that one can just listen and be able to tell that the piece is a Mozart piece. I have in fact had this experience: my friend gave me some music, and while I could not tell the first piece, the next piece I knew it was Mozart. Now, it was not because I have heard of the piece before, but because the last piece was "Mozartian". (It turned out the first piece was his early quintet, and the last is his late quintet.) There was something about that gives the feeling of musical maturity, sophistication, yet unmistakably Mozart. The piece had no program; it was pure music, and it was tremendously pleasurable.
To say that Mendelssohn lack musical depth is certainly a mistake. In fact, along with Schubert and Korngold, Mendelssohn is the fastest composer to reach the kind of musical depth that would be considered as great or incredible. His Octet in E flat is a fantastic work of art, written at the age of 18: it was musical, carefully constructed, and it has an 8-part fugue finale. His Overture to Midsummer Night's Dream, written when he was 17, is another such masterpiece. Mendelssohn is careful to form (it is in sonata-allegro form with four themes); his instrumentation is colourful and brilliant; his sense of rhythm is attractive, with an element of surprise. There will be those who argue that Mendelssohn's music does not develop after its early maturity; and that is a reasonable objection. But look at music by Debussy - as soon as Debussy achieved his impressionistic style, he does not develop further. Both composers have reached their ideal way of writing music as music, so why develop? It can only be perfected, and it is perfected for both composers. The late Violin Concerto in E minor is simply brilliant writing; it is Mendelssohn in absolute perfection; it is a violin soloists' Divine Comedy. Is it expressive? Of course; it is an agenda for the Romantics to write music with feeling, but it is a concerto, with abstract musical form, and every element of music is always places before personal expression. We listen to the concerto not because it is a great biography of Mendelssohn or an expression of that great German spirit, but because it is good music.
Rachmaninoff's musical depth is often overlooked because of his capacity (and also the musical vocabulary available to him) to write big expressive stuff. All popular Rachmaninoff works tend to be huge works: his Second and Third Piano Concerto; his Paganini Rhapsody; his Second Symphony; his piano preludes and the Second Piano Sonata (huge as pianistic works). He has that great Romantic Russian soul in him, there is no doubt about that; his flashy virtuosity is simply far too attractive for our now visual-orientated audience. But we must give Rachmaninoff credit for his "musical depth": the opening of the Second Concerto is absolutely sublime - eight simple chords, followed by a deep, sorrowful tenor melody; or the opening of the Third Concerto - one single melody dominates the first few minutes. In either case, Rachmaninoff's orchestration is beautiful. His harmonies, melodies and instrumentation matches perfectly (for an imperfect example, listen to Brahms' opening of his First Piano Concerto: the strings and bare brass definitely are not enough to sustain his melody; in fact, I don't believe any instrumentation can suit the melody). Rachmaninoff's sensitivity to form is also admirable. A re-listening to the Second and the Third Piano Concerto made me appreciate Rachmaninoff's skills in seeing how the sonata-allegro form should be expanded or tricated depending on his musical material. The first movement of the Second Piano Concerto is a full sonata-allegro form, with the recapitulation greatly disguised; the movement sounds like a huge rhapsody, substantial and formless, when in fact, Rachmaninoff very carefully blended in all the elements of the sonata-allegro form into the movement. The Third Piano Concerto is even more impressive; the recapitulation of the first movement is cut short after the cadenza. Initially I thought this was a point of criticism on Rachmaninoff; but now I have realized that he needed to cut the first movement in order to give the entire concerto a sense of unity: a fully recapped first movement would take away the musical flow of the entire piece; the first movement would have been a piece on its own, leaving behind two dangling movements on their own. Rachmaninoff, however, did not seem to master the idea of form in purely symphonic pieces, such as his Second Symphony. To me, it is a beautiful symphony; the musical ideas, however, seemed to be very artificially put together. It lacked the grace, rhapsodic flow of the Piano Concertos. But this is scarcely noticable, because much of the time the listener would be captured by the beautiful melodies Rachmaninoff orchestrated. (The third movement is especially exquisite. It is quite a treat to listen to the clarinet singing its beautiful melody.) The Paganini Rhapsody, a set of twenty four variations on Paganini's Caprice in A minor, shows similar artificiality. For me it lacks the spontaneity of Elgar's Enigma Variations, or the harmonic tightness of Brahms' Haydn Variations. Rachmaninoff's variations stand between the two extremes, creating an uncomforting balance which is nevertheless interesting and captivating. Rachmaninoff's sense of musical depth may be depreciated by his lack of polyphonic writing; on the other hand, it would be just as bad comment as to say James Joyce is not as great a writer as Shakespeare because he does not write sonnets or in verses. Rachmaninoff's musical depth is different from that of Mendelssohn: Mendelssohn's musicality is pure music; for Rachmaninoff, his music and the context of his music is never separated.
"Depth" can also be taken in another sense: it has to do with how a composer handles a musical tradition. And in this sense, Mendelssohn is definitely better than Rachmaninoff. (But I must, however, point out that this is unfair to Rachmaninoff because he was born later and in another place. But facts are facts...) Mendelssohn, at his time, can be considered as the beginning, development and the ending of a German tradition of music. He is the beginning the Romantic style; Schumann and Brahms are tremendously influenced by him; he is the development of an early Romantic style as given by the middle Beethoven, Schubert and Weber. He is also ending the classical tradition of Haydn and Mozart: Mendelssohn's String Symphonies and his First Symphony are beautifully Haydian and Mozartian, with a blend of Beethoven and Schubert. Haydn's effortless Allegros are reproduced in his early works; Mendelssohn's late works are just as effortless. Mendelssohn's influence spreads as not just a composer, but as a complete musical artist. His music is example of music, not emotional sounds (Schumann and Liszt) or a landscape of the ear (Wagner, to a concern extend, Debussy).
Rachmaninoff, on the other hand, is the end of a tradition. In fact, I would argue that he was the very end of classical music. Rachmaninoff follows the brief Russian Tradition of Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky. Historically more important is the fact that Rachmaninoff is really the last great composer who writes entirely in tonality. Of course, he mastered much of tonal music. But he is not much of an innovator: he is not a Stravinsky, a Bartok, a Schoenberg or a Hindemith; he mastered the art of a previous century, and made it popular to a modern audience, who is mostly sick of modern music. Rachmaninoff, the great Russian Soul, he is someone everybody can understand; nobody understands Alban Berg (who's that?). This is his lack of musical depth: he is not able to continue the tradition of classical, artistic music. He perfected the art, and did not allow any other tonal composers to come after him. After all, how many post-war composers are popular? You may have Barber, Copland; maybe Lutoslawski, KabalevskyMessaien or Hovanness; but how well known are they compare to Rachmaninoff? With the exception of Barber's Piano Concerto, one is safe to say that there are no Piano Concertos that are popular after the Second World War. Music as music is gone; the Paganini Rhapsody, certainly Rachmaninoff's most popular work and his last work for piano and orchestra, is almost a betrayal to the musical world: it ended with a whimper, not a bang. Mendelssohn has great musical depth; Rachmaninoff, seeing him in this light, is really the surface of it all.
This is perhaps not at all a fair criticism on Rachmaninoff: after all, he is not the one who controls the destiny of Classical Music; he did what he liked to do, which is to composer. He would still be the same even if there is somebody after him. The fact that almost all great composers leave a legacy behind for others after them to pick up, Rachmaninoff certainly fails in this sense. Many innovators (including Mendelssohn) inspired others to do something else; Rachmaninoff only invited others to copy. This is not to say Rachmaninoff is a bad composer: there is no doubt that he is among the greatest there ever will be. But as listeners, we should compliment as well as criticize: there are plenty of compliments made for Rachmaninoff, so why not entertain a few criticisms?
posted by Tristan at 3:30 p.m.
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