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BBC Proms - 17 July - 12 September 2009 - The World's Greatest Classical Music Festival

What's On / Programme Notes

Sergey Rachmaninov (1873–1943)
The Isle of the Dead, Op. 29 (1909)
Rachmaninov admitted that he was often prompted to compose by some literary or visual stimulus, but he was usually reluctant to talk about these, rightly believing that his music was eloquent enough to stand on its own without titles or explanations. The Isle of the Dead is a rare exception. The title is that of the painting by the Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901). It is a deliberately mysterious picture: a rocky island, cypress trees, a tomb-like building. Approaching the island over still, dark water is a boat with a coffin, a solitary white-robed figure standing over it. This scene must have made a great impression on the composer, who once confessed that ‘light, gay colours do not come easily to me’.
In May 1907, shortly after completing his Second Symphony, Rachmaninov, together with Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, Scriabin and Chaliapin, was in Paris for Diaghilev’s season of Russian music, where he played his Second Piano Concerto and conducted the cantata Spring. It was here that he saw a black-and-white reproduction of the Böcklin painting (of which there are in fact five slightly different versions; Rachmaninov may later have seen one of the originals in Leipzig or Berlin). After composing his next major work, the First Piano Sonata, he wrote The Isle of the Dead between January and March 1909 and conducted the first performance in Moscow on 1 May. Twenty years later he made a very fine recording of it with the Philadelphia Orchestra.

The Isle of the Dead unfolds within the same basic tempo over a 20-minute span, a concentrated impression both of the painting’s subject and its symbolism. There is a fluid 5/8 metre (2 + 3 quavers, sometimes changing to 3 + 2) to convey the movement of the boat over the dark water, increasing in volume and intensity as it approaches the island. Almost the whole thematic material comes from the four-note figure that stalks through so much of Rachmaninov’s music, from his First Symphony in 1895 to his last work, the Symphonic Dances, composed 45 years later: these are the first notes of the plainchant setting of the Dies irae, the 13th-century Latin poem describing the terrors of the Last Judgement. Berlioz was the first to quote it in his Symphonie fantastique (1830), followed by Liszt in his Totentanz for piano and orchestra, which Rachmaninov both played and conducted. The phrase was Rachmaninov’s musical symbol for death – an ever-present spectre, sometimes feared, sometimes welcomed – and it impregnates the whole fabric of The Isle of the Dead.
About halfway through the score, after a change of metre to 3/4, a new theme appears in the higher register of divided violins and woodwind. It unfolds within a narrow compass, becoming more and more impassioned: Rachmaninov called it the theme of life. At its climax, the Dies irae returns to crush it. There is a last, lingering backward look before the return to the dark, swaying movement of the opening.

Programme note by Andrew Huth © BBC
Andrew Huth is a writer and translator working extensively in Russian, Eastern European and French music.

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