The verdict is in! Following the victory of Ravel’s La Valse in 2022, the honour of most performed concert work in 2023, according to our statistics, has passed to Sergei Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances. On the surface, there’s no shortage of possible explanations. For a start, 2023 was the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, resulting in an unusually large number of his works being performed in concert. Next, the Symphonic Dances are a masterpiece of orchestration, with spectacular effects that give as many goosebumps to the performers as to listeners. Finally, and not to be sniffed at by artistic directors always in search of an appealing programme, there’s the name: far more lively and replete with imagery to the average prospective concertgoer than the umpteenth Symphony no. X, Op. Y. As ever, music publishers use titles in order to generate more sales and performances!
But are these three points enough to explain the international popularity of the Symphonic Dances? That would be a step too far. If Rachmaninov’s work is so celebrated worldwide, it is probably because, whether we realise it or not, it is the most faithful self-portrait of the composer, holding up a mirror to his personality. Let’s dive into a score that tells us so much more than the notes on the page suggest.
The Dances are in three movements. The first takes us into the hectic rhythms of Russian ballet; the second is in waltz tempo; the finale is in the form of a chase. However, beneath this appearance of a simple suite of dances, Rachmaninov had in mind a far more personal programme. We know that he initially intended to give this triptych the titles “Noon”, “Twilight” and “Midnight”. Admittedly, we’ve heard more exciting titles in our lifetimes – and perhaps that’s why the composer abandoned the idea. But what they express is not so much the unfolding of a day as the unfolding of a life: that of the composer who, while writing this work in 1940, was looking back over his career and even seeming to retrace it in music.
The work is thus peppered with autobiographical elements that help give it its strong personality. You may already have felt transported by the end of the first movement, when the violins launch into an ascent to a high register that ends in a suspended, lilting melody. But you might not be aware that this is a self-citation by Rachmaninov, a reminder of his First Symphony. That imparts real significance to the bright colours of the first movement: the composer recalls his carefree youth, accentuated by the interjections of the piano – Rachmaninov’s own instrument – and the glockenspiel, an object similar to a child’s toy.
With its tempo di valse, the second movement could extend this light, harmless character, but it does not. The spirit of the waltz is there, but it is regularly interrupted by grating trumpet calls. There is a tempting parallel: Rachmaninov, a scion of the minor Russian nobility accustomed to elegant salons, had to flee Russia following the 1917 Revolution that sounded the death knell of the Empire. Isn’t this the scenario we are presented with in the second movement of the Symphonic Dances, with this noble dance threatened by martial trumpets?
The solo violin which takes the floor bears a striking resemblance to the figures of the Devil or Death that we encounter in many Russian fairy tales – and in many other symphonic works, such as Saint-Saëns’ Danse macabre. From the very first seconds of its intervention, the violin lets us hear the tritone, that singular interval nicknamed the diabolus in musica. This tempo di valse is indeed “crepuscular”, to use the title the composer had in mind: it is the dance of a nobility that is sinking, of a world that is tipping over into darkness, of a youth that Rachmaninov believes is definitively over.
That impression is reinforced by the third and final movement, with its clear intentions: in addition to the anecdotal twelve strokes of midnight distinctly played by the bells – here again, one is reminded of Saint-Saëns – it is above all the lugubrious quotation from the Dies irae that strikes home. Associated with divine wrath and the Last Judgement, this macabre liturgical sequence of a few notes appears many times in Rachmaninov’s works, but its regular use here is particularly significant. Far less prolific than in the past, the composer knew he was at the end of his life – he was to die of cancer two years later. Is this enough to identify an autobiographical dimension in this finale? One might object that writing a form of macabre supernatural dance is not necessarily a highly personal gesture for closing a symphonic work: Berlioz had already done so at the end of his Symphonie fantastique, also using the Dies irae.
But here, Rachmaninov adds a very specific element: a quotation from his own Vespers, which intervenes like a prayer to ward off the procession of the dead. And five pages before the conclusion, at the moment when the xylophone returns to the dance for the last time, he spells out the letters of “Hallelujah” on the score. This astonishing inscription acts like an apparition that dispels the dark spirits of the macabre dance and brings a luminous end to the work, as well as to the composer’s career as a whole.
Listening to the Symphonic Dances, therefore, is like looking at a self-portrait of its composer and this is probably what has led programmers, whether consciously or not, to honour this score in Rachmaninov’s anniversary year of 2023. But we can go beyond that. If this work has met and continues to meet with immense success throughout the world, it is perhaps because of a less personal, more universal message.
In this work, Rachmaninov brings together a host of sources of inspiration that illustrate his cosmopolitan career. While the straightforward rhythms and vivid colours at the start of the work bear the mark of the Ballets Russes, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Igor Stravinsky, another passage in the first movement deserves our attention: what is the purpose of this strange saxophone solo, an instrument rarely invited into the symphony orchestra? The saxophone was born in Europe in the workshops of Adolphe Sax, but its success only came when it was exported across the Atlantic and used in jazz orchestras. It was this same journey that Rachmaninov had just experienced when he composed his dances, having recently gone into exile in the United States while war was raging in the Old World.
In this first movement, the saxophone gives voice to the migrant and thus, in a way, embodies Rachmaninov. But more broadly, it is this voice that makes the Symphonic Dances speak to listeners the world over: by multiplying references and crossing heritages, Rachmaninov builds a vast arch in his work between the great Russia from which he came and the United States that welcomed him (the Symphonic Dances was premiered there by the Philadelphia Orchestra). If this arch seems like a utopia in today’s world, consider that its luminous concluding message was delivered in 1940 in a very sombre context, at the end of a musical journey that plunged the listener into some very tormented pages. Will the success of the Symphonic Dances in 2023 herald happier days to come in 2024? Now there’s something we can all hope for.
Translated from French by David Karlin.
