Sergej Rachmaninov citáty

„Hudba musí vycházet ze srdce a k srdcím přicházet. Skládání hudby je pro mě právě tak základní složkou mého bytí, jako dýchání a přijímání potravy. Je to pro mě funkce nezbytná k životu. Když skládám hudbu, pokouším se vyjádřit to, co právě naplňuje mé srdce. Může to být láska, zahořknutí, smutek nebo náboženské vytržení – to vše se zrcadlí v mé hudbě.“

V dopise Nikitu Morozovovi roku 1909
Zdroj: Wehrmeyer 2000, s. 65.

„Kdo pochopí Chopinův způsob hraní, umí prakticky všechny klavírní efekty nejvyšší umělecké kvality.“

Rachmaninov v interview v roce 1941
Zdroj: Wehrmeyer, Andreas, Sergej Rachmaninow, Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2000, str. 40, ISBN 978-3-499-50416-7 (dále jen Wehrmeyer 2000).

„Technicky byl velmi nadaný, ale také značně omezený. Jeho hudba je dobře vystavěná a účinná, ale monotónní ve struktuře, která se v podstatě skládá především z umělých a tryskajících melodií doprovázených nejrůznějšími figurami odvozenými z arpeggií. Obrovský populární úspěch, který mělo několik málo Rachmaninovových děl za jeho života, pravděpodobně nevydrží dlouho a hudebníci ho nikdy nepovažovali za příliš oblíbeného.“

Rachmaninov v interview v roce 1923
Zdroj: Wehrmeyer 2000, s. 111.

“Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music.”

Sergej Rachmaninov: Citáty anglicky

“The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt - they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt.”

“I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien. I cannot cast out the old way of writing and I cannot acquire the new. I have made an intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me.”

“My dear hands. Farewell, my poor hands.”

Interviewed by Leonard Liebling in The Musical Courier, 1939; cited from Sergei Bertensson and Jay Leyda Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002) p. 351.

“Especially dangerous on the musical front in the present class war.”

Quoted in Sergei Bertensson and Jay Leyda Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002) p. 381.
Said on February 27, 1943, during his last illness, after having said that he would never be able to play again.

“The virtuosos look to the students of the world to do their share in the education of the great musical public. Do not waste your time with music that is trite or ignoble. Life is too short to spend it wandering in the barren Saharas of musical trash.”

An official Soviet verdict on Rachmaninoff's music, delivered in 1931; cited from Percy A. Scholes The Oxford Companion to Music, 5th edn. (London: Oxford University Press, 1944) p. 775.
Criticism

“I can respect the artistic aim of a composer if he arrives at the so-called modern idiom after an intense period of preparation…Such composers know what they are doing when they break a law; they know what to react against, because they have had experience in the classical forms and style. Having mastered the rules, they know which can be violated and which should be obeyed. But, I am sorry to say, I have found too often that young composers plunge into the writing of experimental music with their school lessons only half learned. Too much radical music is sheer sham, for this very reason: its composer sets about revolutionizing the laws of music before he learned them himself.”

Extract from an interview by James Francis Cooke, as given in the 1999 edition of Great Pianists on Piano Playing (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1999) p. 217.

“Technically he was highly gifted, but also severely limited. His music is well constructed and effective, but monotonous in texture, which consists in essence mainly of artificial and gushing tunes accompanied by a variety of figures derived from arpeggios. The enormous popular success some few of Rakhmaninoff's works had in his lifetime is not likely to last, and musicians never regarded it with much favour.”

Interviewed by David Ewen in The Etude, 1941; cited from Josiah Fisk and Jeff Nichols (eds.) Composers on Music (Boston, MA: Northeastern Universities Press, 1997) pp. 235-6

“Although it may seem incredible, this cure helped me. At the beginning of the summer I began to compose… New musical ideas began to stir with me-far more than I needed for my concerto. By the autumn I had finished the Adagio and Finale… The Two movements I played… at a charity concert… They had a gratifying success… By the Spring I had finished the first movement of the concerto… Out of gratitude, I dedicated it to Nikolay Dahl.”

Eric Blom (ed.) Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th edn. (London: Macmillan, 1954) vol. 7, p. 27.
Criticism

“It is as a composer that his name will live longest. He was the last of the colourful Russian masters of the late 19th cent[ury], with their characteristic gift for long and broad melodies imbued with a resigned melancholy which is never long absent.”

About his second piano concerto. Masterworks of the Orchestral Repertoire: A Guide for Listeners by Donald N. Ferguson.