Sergei Rachmaninoff

Born: April 1, 1873, Oneg (near Novgorod), Russia
Died: March 28, 1943, Beverly Hills, California

The Bells, Op. 35

• Composed: 1913
  
• Premiere: November 13, 1913, in St. Petersburg, conducted by the composer
  
• CSO Notable Performances:
  • First: February 1974, Erich Kunzel conducting; soloists Patricia Wise, Seth McCoy and John Reardon; Miami University Choraliers, Miami University Men’s Glee Club, Northern Kentucky State College Concert Choir, Northern Kentucky Chamber Singers, Highlands High School Senior Chorus Ensemble.
  • Most Recent: February 2016, Giancarlo Guerrero conducting; soloists Angela Meade, Garrett Sorenson and Hugh Russell; May Festival Chorus.
• Instrumentation: SATB chorus and STB soloists, 3 flutes, piccolo, 3 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 6 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, chimes, crash cymbals, glockenspiel, snare drum, suspended cymbals, tam-tam, tambour de Basque, triangle, harp, celeste, pianino, strings
• Duration: approx. 35 minutes

Within five years of the spectacular premiere of his Second Piano Concerto in 1901, Sergei Rachmaninoff had become the most popular musician in Russia and probably the busiest — invitations for him to share his prodigious talents as pianist, composer and conductor poured in from across the country and around the world. His many performances severely restricted his time for creative work, however, as he later explained in an interview with Frederick H. Martens: 

When I am concertizing, I cannot compose. When I feel like writing music, I have to concentrate on that — I cannot touch the piano. When I am conducting, I can neither compose nor play concerts. Other musicians may be more fortunate in this respect; but I have to concentrate on the one thing I am doing to such a degree that it does not seem to allow me to take up anything else. 

Early in 1906, frustrated with his lack of time to compose, he quit his post as opera conductor at the Moscow Imperial Grand Theater and tried (unsuccessfully) to live incognito in Dresden while writing his Second Symphony. It was for a similar reason six years later that he packed up his family and his manuscript paper, left Moscow on December 5, 1912 (just in time to escape the harshest rigors of another Russian winter), and headed for an extended working holiday in Switzerland and Italy.

By early 1913, Rachmaninoff had been piecing together ideas for a new symphony since the previous summer, and he planned to realize the work during his stay in Italy. He continued the story in his memoirs: 

In Rome, I was able to take the same flat on the Piazza di Spagna [site of the famed Spanish Steps] that Modest Tchaikovsky had used for a long time and which had served his brother [i.e., the composer Piotr] as a temporary retreat from his numerous friends. It consisted of a few quiet, shady rooms belonging to an honest tailor.... Conditions were ideal in the flat on the Piazza di Spagna. All day long I spent at the piano or the writing desk, and not until the pines on the Monte Pincio were gilded by the setting sun did I put away my pen. Here I worked on my Second Piano Sonata and the Choral Symphony, The Bells…. The work had an unusual source. During the previous summer I had sketched a plan for a symphony, and then one day I received an anonymous letter begging me to read Balmont’s wonderful translation of Poe’s poem, saying that the verses were ideal for music and that they should particularly appeal to me. I read the enclosed poem and decided at once to use it for a Choral Symphony in four movements. 

The unsigned letter, Rachmaninoff learned only after he had introduced The Bells to Moscow in February 1914, was from one Maria Danilova, a cello student of his friend Mikhail Bukinik at the Moscow Conservatory. When Miss Danilova appeared for her lesson after hearing the performance, she could no longer contain the secret that it was she who had been the catalyst for Rachmaninoff’s new work, and she revealed everything to Bukinik, even that she had nearly fainted from excitement during the concert. The poem that Miss Danilova included with her letter was a reworking into Russian of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous lines by the symbolist writer Konstantin Balmont, whose lyric The Migrant Wind Rachmaninoff had included in his set of Fourteen Songs composed in 1912 (Op. 34, which also contains the well-known wordless Vocalise). The Bells was largely completed in Rome between January and April 1913, when Rachmaninoff’s visit was suddenly cut short because his two young daughters contracted typhoid fever. He insisted that they not be treated by Italian doctors and took them instead to a specialist in Berlin. After six anxious weeks in Germany, the family returned to its country retreat at Ivanovka, where the score was finished on July 27.

Rachmaninoff declared The Bells to be his favorite among his compositions, probably as much for the emotional resonances of its subject as for the quality of its musical setting. He recalled:

The sound of church bells dominated all the cities of the Russia I used to know — Novgorod, Kiev, Moscow. They accompanied every Russian from childhood to the grave, and no composer could escape their influence…. All my life, I have taken pleasure in the differing moods and music of gladly chiming and mournfully tolling bells. This love for bells is inherent in every Russian. 

He went on to explain precisely how he had used the four notes of the great bells of Novgorod’s St. Sophia Cathedral, which he had known as a child, to underline the most tragic moment in his opera The Miserly Knight of 1904. It is little wonder that a work so evocative for Russian audiences as The Bells enjoyed excellent success at its November 1913 premiere; the listeners at the first Moscow performance the following February decorated the rafters and balconies with paper bells in anticipation of the event, and they showered the composer with flowers and laurel wreaths when it was over.

Poe’s verses about the bells that punctuate the inexorable progress of life from the cradle to the grave were altered in small but significant ways by Balmont, mainly by replacing some of the reiterated litanies of the original text (“To the rolling of the bells ... /To the tolling of the bells .../Of the bells, bells, bells, bells...) with new lines that served to heighten the poem’s drama by making it more ornate and overtly emotional. The power and emotional range of the original poem remained, however, and were superbly enfolded by Rachmaninoff in some of his most deeply expressive music. Rachmaninoff laid out his setting of The Bells in the broad structural plan of a large four-movement symphony with voices — a brilliant opening movement in quick tempo; a thoughtful Lento; a raging Scherzo; and a brooding finale that was inspired, according to the composer, by the closing movement of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony. 

The first movement (for chorus and tenor soloist), with its sparkling orchestration and its harmonic evocation of bell sounds, depicts the settled wholeness of childhood through the radiant tintinnabulations of the Silver Sleigh Bells. Confident optimism and joy in the promised fullness of life are the poetic and musical subjects of the following movement (for soprano and chorus) — The Golden Wedding Bells. The third movement — The Loud Alarum Bells — with its violent rhythms, blazing orchestral sonorities and choral proclamations, stands in terrifying contrast to the halcyon music of the wedding. The solemn chiming of great bells continues almost unabated throughout the finale, The Mournful Iron Bells (baritone and chorus), but the symphony ends not with Poe’s bleak pessimism but rather with a halo of gentle peace. 

John Culshaw, in his 1945 Gramophone article about the composer, wrote:

In Rachmaninoff’s version, it is the human spirit that finally triumphs; the bells do not cease their tolling, but their cry is in vain. This is indeed a strange work, unique in musical history, and although other settings [of the text] have been made and will be made, it is unlikely that they will challenge the depth, penetration and imagination evident wherever one looks in this score.

—©Dr. Richard E. Rodda