Rachmaninoff

I found out Rachmaninoff is buried not 60 miles away from where I live! In the same cemetery as Lou Gehrig, Danny Kay, Ayn Rand (gulp!), Tommy Dorsey, Anne Bancroft, and Glinda, the Good Witch of the North (a/k/a Billie Burke.)

I am thinking a road trip is in my future.

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This same documentary said that by 1950, Rachmaninoff had fallen out of favor with the musical elite and that it was only very, very recently that people had begun listening to him again.

Buh?

I grew up listening to Rachmaninoff. And Prokoviev. And Tchaikovsky.

I mean, my mother was a madwoman, but she had impeccable taste in classical music and foreign movies.

I have a thing for musical romanticism. Liszt. Chopin. Paganini. Berlioz.

Though I guess, strictly speaking, Rachmaninoff wasn’t a romanticist. More of a bridge composer between romanticism and the more anarchic atonalism of Stravinsky.

Seems to me, though, that anyone with even a smidgeon of music theory must shiver with delight at that moment in the Paganini Rhapsody when the D flat major riff inverts the A minor melody. It’s so fucking perfect! Like a musical ying/yang symbol. Transcendent yet geometrical. Utterly, utterly sublime.

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Thinking about Liszt reminds me of a time when RTT was maybe two years old. I was listening to the second Hungarian Rhapsody in the living room of the Franklin Street house, talking to Ben. The frisky second movement came on. And out of nowhere, RTT began to dance. We’re talking pirouettes and coupé jetés so perfect, they could have been choreographed!

Ben and I just sat there watching him with our mouths hanging open.

“Wow!” I said. “He must have been Liszt in a previous life.”

“Or Nijinski,” Ben said.

Robin’s never done anything remotely like that ever again.