Musical Moments #43
Musical Moment #43
“Poetry is the true source of my music.”
Hugo Wolf (1860-1903)
The Bells (Movement 1) Sergey Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)
Sergey Rachmaninoff is best known to contemporary audiences for his piano concerti, but he believed his finest work was The Bells. As a touring pianist and conductor, his writing projects were relegated to sabbaticals from performance, and it was the summer of 1913 while living in Rome that he composed this work. Rachmaninoff wrote, “All day long I spent at the piano or writing table, and not until the sinking sun gilded the pines of the Monte Pincio did I put away my pen,” interestingly, in the same apartment Tchaikovsky had composed his Capriccio Italien in 1880.
The idea for using Konstantin Belmont’s Russian translation of Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “The Bells” was suggested to him in a letter from a Moscow Conservatory student. While the translation captured the concepts, it did not retain any of the meter or repetition, and after the text was translated back to English from Russian, very little of the original flavor of the poem exists.
For the sake of comparison, below is Poe’s original first verse of The Bells followed by the English translation used for the score. In contrasting the inequitable poetic treatment, one can see the textual challenges. Nevertheless, the beauty and power of the music is intact as are the four movements to match the four stanzas of Poe’s poem.
Hear the sledges with the bells—
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that over sprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells….
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.
Translation:
Listen!
Listen. Hear the silver bells, hear the sledges with the bells.
How they charm our weary senses with the sweetness that compels.|
Hear the sledges with the bells, the bells, the bells deep oblivion compels.
Hear them calling rippling sounds of laughter, falling on the icy midnight air,
and a promise they declare beyond illusions cumber, births and lives beyond all number, waits universal slumber, deep and sweet past all compare.
Hear the sledges with the bells, the sliver throated bells.
See the stars bow down to harken, what their melody foretells, with a passion that compels, and their dreaming is a gleaming that a perfumed air exhales, and their thoughts are but a shining, and a luminous divining of the singing and the ringing of a promise that a dreamless peace foretells.
This archival recording from 2002 features Central Florida’s own, tenor Curtis Rayam with the Bach Choir and Orchestra. Curtis is now a professor at Bethune-Cookman University and Rollins College after coming home from an international operatic career.
For more insight into the life of Rachmaninoff please reference Musical Moment #23.
—John V. Sinclair
“Let the word be the master of the melody, not the slave.”
Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643)
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