Today, April 1, marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of the outstanding Russian composer, pianist and conductor Sergei Rachmaninoff. After the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia, he left his homeland. Living and performing mainly in the United States, Rachmaninoff spent much of his time in Switzerland, where he built the Senar villa overlooking Lake Vierwaldstet and Mount Pilatus.
We decided to talk about the significance of Sergei Rachmaninoff for Russian culture with the writer Mikhail Shishkin, a laureate of the Russian Booker, Russian literary awards Big Book and National Bestseller, who lives in Switzerland, also writes in German and, importantly, sincerely loves Rachmaninov’s music, is well versed in the composer’s work and writes about him.
DW: What is the peculiarity of Sergei Vasilyevich’s figure for you personally? Or, perhaps, the peculiarity of this figure for Russian and Russian, including modern, culture?
Mikhail Shishkin: Rachmaninoff for me personifies Russian culture. If I had to name only one name, I would name Rachmaninoff! What is central for me: he realized his Russianness only through belonging to the world culture. Like every real artist (and it doesn’t matter whether he is a composer, musician or writer), he had an “absolute pitch” – to history and to life. Recently, I really understood what Kazimir Malevich had in mind with his Black Square. Malevich also had “perfect pitch”. The artist feels the future. In the future of Malevich was the First World War, a monstrous civil war, the Gulag. The same applies to Rachmaninov: he felt all this when he wrote his symphonic poem “The Bells”. For whom does his bell toll? This bell rings for all those who later died in the war, and during the revolution, and in the civil war, and in the Gulag. For each of those who feel like a Russian person – after all, in every family someone died in our family.
All his life, Rachmaninoff wanted to build a house for himself – for himself and his family. Large, bright, beautiful – so that everyone is spacious and comfortable. When he built his Swiss villa “Senar”, he personally entered into all construction details, drawings. On the shores of Lake Firwaldstet in Switzerland, he blew up rocks so that the place would remind him of his Ivanovka, which was taken away from him, destroyed.
Revolutions and wars took everything from him that he built. And therefore, all his life he built himself a house in music – spacious, bright, in which he will live after the death of the body. A house that no one can take away from him. And it turned out that it was the sounds that turned out to be the most durable building material.
Rachmaninoff’s earthly life came at a terrible time. Human darkness flooded the earth, but life needs light. Something needs to be countered to this cruelty, bestiality, disgust. Music is the only thing he could oppose to the guns with which they shot hostages, the armies of all countries, the Gulag and Auschwitz. His music was luminous. It was his fight – and he won. To those forces that bring death, he opposed his music, which carries life, delight in the beauty of the world, joy, sorrow, faith, love. For me, the secret of his music is that it is the victory over death. And, joining it, we ourselves become a little immortal.
– The celebration of the anniversary of Rachmaninoff this year surpasses all the musical anniversaries of the last decades in pathos and scope. Why do you think?
– Today’s Russian state is the main enemy of art and culture. But while there is still the West, for the West they need to pretend that they love culture. We remember this from Stalin and Shostakovich: Stalin would gladly destroy Shostakovich, rot in the Gulag. But while the West was there, it needed Shostakovich, Shostakovich was used as the human face of the regime. They wanted to do exactly the same with Rachmaninov: as you know, at the end of his life, Rachmaninoff was going to return to his homeland. Fortunately, fate decided differently (Rakhmaninov died in 1943, having taken American citizenship shortly before his death). – Approx. ed.). It is impossible to imagine him sitting on the podium of the congress, from which speeches of doxology go to the address of “the main lover of music in the country.” Death protected him from this, freed him. But even now, after death, they want to use it. They arrange worship of Rachmaninov, and it seems to them that in this case his reflection falls on them, on the Putin regime, on their “SVO”. And he can no longer defend himself.
– For more than 10 years, there have been plans to transfer the ashes of Rachmaninoff from a cemetery near New York to Russia. The composer’s descendants do not agree with these plans; Rachmaninoff himself is known to have said that every person should be buried where he died. What do you think?
– It has long been noted that the modern Russian government is like King Midas: just as the ancient king turned everything he touched into gold, so everything she touches turns into shit, blood and horror. They don’t need to stick their fingers in there.