Six Song Op.38 (1916)

In my Garden at Night

To her

Daisies

The Pied Piper

A Dream

A-oo

If Rachmaninov had not had to leave Russia in the middle of his career - a couple of months after the October Revolution in 1917 - he might well have become one of the great song composers of the twentieth century, alongside the likes of Debussy and Richard Strauss. Certainly, he wrote well over eighty songs at fairly regular intervals during the twenty-five years before his departure and none at all in the twenty-six years left to him after that. It was as though, having cut himself off from his native country and its language, he had cut himself from its poetry too. Or perhaps he felt that no American or West-European publisher would be interested in songs in Russian. But, whatever the reasons for his abandonment of the medium, it was uncompromising and absolute.

The Six Songs Op.38, completed just over a year before his departure from Russia and the last of their kind, are a tantalising indication of what Rachmaninov might have achieved had he retained his interest in song. The quality of the piano writing one can take for granted. What is more surprising is the progressive technique of these songs - their impressionistic harmonies, their extraordinary metrical flexibility - and their highly resourceful treatment of the soprano voice. They were actually written for a singer the composer knew very well, the then twenty-two-year-old Nina Pavlovna Koshetz, whom he admired perhaps for more than just her musical gifts. If he had not been reported as telling her that she was the seductive Pied Piper of the fourth song in the set, one might have guessed as much from the peculiarly intimate union between the piano and the voice in some of these settings.

The first and far from only example of that close textural relationship occurs at the climax of In my Garden at Night, where the voice rises to a high B flat and the delicate piano figuration (concealing Rachmaninov’s Dies Irae motto theme) seems to caress the vocal line. “If they all wrote about nature as he did,” Rachmaninov said of Alexander Blok, “we musicians would only have to reach out for the text and a song would be ready.” His setting of Biely’s To her is no less atmospheric, however, and no less passionate in expression either, although the sensual textural inspiration in this case is not so much the climactic ending as the exotic colouring of the last line but one. And there is no more sensitive evocation of nature in any of Rachmaninov’s songs than his setting of Severyanin’s Daisies which develops, by way of the piano postlude, into a miniature tone poem. So much of the melodic material is in the piano part, incidentally, that Rachmaninov had little trouble in arranging the song as a piano piece six years later.

A less imaginative composer might have set Briussov’s The Pied Piper to a predictable dance rhythm. Rachmaninov, on the contrary, heightens his capricious characterisation of the piper by varying the metre constantly between quadruple, triple and duple time with a freedom he never risked in his piano or orchestral music. A timely intervention of mischief in a generally contemplative context, The Pied Piper is followed by a hypnotic setting of Sologub’s Dreams which revolves round a basically two-note ostinato in the piano part. The amorous dialogue between voice and piano initiated by a romantic left hand in the middle of the song continues to reverberate, though ever more distantly, in the poetically harmonised piano postlude. The Balmont setting A-oo (also known as The Quest) is similarly constructed, a dreamy beginning leading to a passionate climax - in this case the singer’s despairing cries of “A-oo” projected over dramatically articulated fistfuls of dissonances - and a fond ending motivated by lyrical memories in the left hand of the piano part.

As well as dedicating the Six Songs to Nina Koshetz, incidentally, Rachmaninov presented her with a notebook which, it was discovered after her death in 1965, included sketches for two more songs written at the same time. Excluded from the Op.38 set presumably because their religious inspiration set them apart from the others, A Prayer and All glory to God were eventually published on the centenary of the composer’s birth in 1973.