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Rachmaninoff in music lexicons, 1900–2013: toward a history of the composer's reception

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Content The University of Southern California

Department of Musicology

Rachmaninoff in Music Lexicons, 1900–2013:

Toward a History of the Composer’s Reception

A Dissertation Presented to

the Faculty of the Graduate School

in Candidacy for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy (Historical Musicology)

by

Keenan A. Reesor

Los Angeles

August 2016

Copyright © 2016 by Keenan A. Reesor
All rights reserved

Contents

Acknowledgements iv

A Note on Russian Transliteration vii

A Note on the Citation of Music Lexicons viii

Introduction. Rachmaninoff, Canonicity, and Music Lexicography 1

Chapter 1. 1900–1937: International Recognition 37

Chapter 2. 1938–1979: Regional Variation 49

Chapter 3. 1980–2013: A New Consensus 99

Conclusion. Rachmaninoff’s Legacy Affirmed 124

Bibliography 129
iv
Acknowledgements

I am indebted first and foremost to Bryan R. Simms, who guided my research even before
agreeing to serve as my dissertation advisor and committee chair in 2013 and who continued to
serve as my primary reader since retiring from the University of Southern California in 2014. In
these capacities, Dr. Simms patiently edited countless drafts of various sorts, applying such
excellent editorial and scholarly expertise as inform his own publications. He also verified my
German translations, offering guidance where necessary. I am grateful also to the other
distinguished members of my dissertation committee, USC faculty Joanna Demers, John E.
Bowlt, and Tim Page, and William Weber of California State University, Long Beach, all of
whom offered me their time, expertise, and encouragement. Dr. Demers selflessly assumed the
chairmanship of my committee following Dr. Simms’s retirement and has been my tireless
advocate in that capacity. Dr. Weber significantly contributed to my understanding and
application of canon theory, not only in his writings but also in correspondence and in
conversation, in addition to offering detailed feedback on dissertation drafts. Dr. Bowlt offered
me guidance on Russian transliteration, restored my faith in my own Russian literacy by
verifying my initial messages to Russian institutions, and played a crucial role in helping me
obtain financial support to conduct archival research in Russia.
I am grateful also to the following individuals for lingual assistance of various kinds: to
USC faculty Bruce Alan Brown, Adam Knight Gilbert, and Marek Zebrowski, and to my wife,
Nonie Reesor, for verifying my translations of excerpts in Dutch, French, Italian, and Polish; to
Bruce V. Chiarelli for his indispensable help in translating Hungarian; and to Alessandra Volpi
Jenson for her generous service in facilitating my communication with Italian individuals and
institutions.
v
I am indebted to many individuals and institutions who facilitated my research or
provided me with data. Although much of this data has been reserved for the fuller study of
which the present one is an introduction, I wish nevertheless to thank them here for their
invaluable assistance. These include the staff of USC Interlibrary Loan and Document Delivery,
whose generous service rendered a reception study of the scope that I have undertaken possible;
Kevin LaVine, recently retired senior music specialist of the Music Division of the Library of
Congress, who in addition to organizing the Rachmaninoff Archive and writing its excellent
finding aid—a monumental labor of inestimable worth completed just last year—generously
shared his experience and guidance with me, including placing me in touch with Rachmaninoff’s
posterity in order to obtain permissions relating to the archive; Susan S. Wanamaker,
Rachmaninoff’s great-great-granddaughter, for granting those permissions; Maiia Avelicheva,
president of the AVC Charity Foundation, for her generous support of my research trip to Russia;
Ludmila Dediukina, director of the bibliographic division of the Taneev Library of the Moscow
Conservatory, whose accommodations and bibliographic expertise greatly enhanced the success
of my archival research there; Elena Fetisova, director of the reading room of the archival
division of the Central Museum of Musical Culture in Moscow, for her expeditious
accommodation of my research at the museum; the staff of the Golovanov Memorial Apartment
in Moscow, for furnishing me with access to concert programs offering a unique perspective into
performances of Rachmaninoff’s music during a crucial period in its Soviet reception; Pavel
Dmitriev, director of the music library of the Shostakovich St. Petersburg Academic
Philharmonia, and his assistant, Evgenii Rasshivalov, for granting me liberal access to that
institution’s vast collection of historical concert programs and concert data, among others; to
Irina Medvedeva and Tamara Parshina, for introducing me to articles, by themselves and others,
vi
relating to Rachmaninoff's Soviet reception; and to Vera Val'kova of the Gnessin Academy, for
furnishing me with reviews from Rachmaninoff's London debut in 1899 and for the pleasure of
her collaboration on the continuing collection of Rachmaninoff's performance reviews. Here I
am pleased to thank also those archivists who furnished me remotely with performance data
relating to Rachmaninoff’s music, Michael Hurwitz of the Philharmonia Orchestra, Rob Hudson
of Carnegie Hall, Maximilien Marçais-Husson of the Orchestre de Paris, Silvia Kargl of the
Vienna Philharmonic, Steven LaCoste of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Libby Rice of the
London Symphony Orchestra, Kath Trout of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and Katja
Vobiller of the Berlin Philharmonic.
I wish to thank Svetlana Sigida of the Moscow Conservatory, who, out of the goodness of
her heart, opened many doors for me in Moscow in addition to showing me a great many
personal kindnesses and offering me her treasured friendship. I cannot adequately express in
words the significance of her assistance to me.
I am grateful also to my family, who helped in that uniquely supportive way that only
they can. I thank my father, Craig, whose unflagging support of my musical pursuits extended to
assisting me with travel expenses when institutional funds fell short. Most of all, I thank my
wife, Nonie, and our three little boys, Samuel, Daniel, and James, who have cheerfully and
patiently born the heavy burden of “the dissertation” along with me, in innumerable ways and
instances, and to whom I promise an immediate settling of accounts in the arena of carefree time
spent together.
vii
A Note on Russian Transliteration

Russian names and words have been transliterated in this dissertation using a simple modified
version of the ALA-LC scheme that does not employ any diacritical marks. Unidirectional
apostrophes and double quotation marks represent the Russian soft sign and hard sign
respectively and should be interpreted neither as stray punctuation marks nor, as they are in some
other schemes, as diacritical marks. Exceptions to this scheme include the names of Russian
persons for whom certain romanized spellings have long been established in Anglo-American
literature. The spelling Rachmaninoff, which the composer himself used, has been adopted by the
Library of Congress Authorities and has been employed here everywhere in the body text to
avoid visual confusion, even in quotations of English-language sources and of translated excerpts
from foreign-language sources that employ other spellings. The various spellings used in
foreign-language sources have been retained, however, in the original texts provided in the
footnotes and also in the bibliography, including the direct Russian transliteration Rakhmaninov.
Russian characters rendered obsolete by the post-Revolutionary orthographic reforms have been
transliterated using their homophonous counterparts.
viii
A Note on the Citation of Music Lexicons

In order to avoid unnecessary clutter, publication information and locators for the numerous
music-lexicon entries on Rachmaninoff cited in this study have not been provided in footnotes.
Rather, information sufficient for locating lexicons in the bibliography has been provided in the
body text, and the entries themselves can be found under the composer’s name, which in Cyrillic
is spelled Рахманинов and is always transliterated with the stems Rac-, Rak-, or, rarely, Rah-.
The normal citation practice for lexicons has been employed, however, for entries not on
Rachmaninoff, unless otherwise noted, and the small number of encyclopedic works that are not
arranged alphabetically have been cited appropriately.
For the sake of textual clarity, abbreviated words, which so abound in music lexicons, are
restored here to their full forms without the use of brackets, both in quoted material and in the
original texts of translated quotations.
Finally, in order to achieve a more precise chronology, assessments are cited in the text
by the year in which they appeared, which in the case of multivolume works often does not
correspond to the publication years of the whole work as they appear in the bibliography.
1
Introduction

Rachmaninoff, Canonicity, and Music Lexicography

I came to know Rachmaninoff’s music the same way that many have in the past. Among the
yellowed, tattered piano scores passed down in my family was the Prelude in C-sharp Minor,
which in our lore stood on the threshold of accomplished pianism. The piece loomed over the
early years of my study, much as Rachmaninoff himself loomed on its cover, his dour yet
mysterious expression seeming to confirm his rumored struggle with depression. The movies
played their part, too. Having learned the prelude, I took no particular interest in Rachmaninoff’s
music until a few years later, when his Third Piano Concerto played a starring role in the 1996
hit Australian drama Shine. Like other films that have featured his music, Shine tells a story in
which love conquers all: the young pianist David Helfgott experiences a nervous breakdown
after performing the “Rach 3,” which he had learned in a futile attempt to win the approval of his
oppressive father, but his self-confidence is ultimately restored by his marriage to a woman who
both loves him and believes in his talent. Helfgott’s personal triumph seemed to find the perfect
analog in a concerto that suggests overcoming not only in the progression of its themes and
harmonies but also in its transcendent technical virtuosity. This all proved a winning
combination for the movie-going public—it certainly did for me—and Rachmaninoff’s Third
became, for a time, a popular phenomenon.
Gaining exposure to the concerto through the film not only inspired me to practice longer
and harder; it led me for the first time into the domain of musical commentary. Young,
inexperienced, and inspired, I was wholly unprepared for what I encountered in the criticism that
swelled around Shine but what members of my parents’ generation might have remembered from
reviews of the 1980 American romance Somewhere in Time and what members of my
2
grandparents’ generation might have remembered from reviews of the 1945 British romance
Brief Encounter: namely that critics have had reservations about Rachmaninoff’s music for a
long time, and that cinematic appropriations of it have tended to aggravate and elicit those
reservations.
I have searched in vain for the article that introduced me to this state of affairs twenty
years ago, but I have never forgotten it. The author explained that he was once one of those for
whom Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto could evoke “a salty Russian tear,” one who had been so
openly obsessed with the work that his classmates had inserted its title into their inscriptions in
his junior-high yearbook but who had, alas, ultimately grown up and defected to “the side of the
critics.” Imagine my naïve confusion upon reading this: I was, at that very time, one of those
obsessed teenagers! A conversation with my piano teacher, a professor at the local university, did
not help my confusion: when I told her that my favorite composer was Rachmaninoff, her only
remark was that his works were “showpieces.”
All this was nothing, however, by comparison with Bernard Holland’s derisive New York
Times editorial on the music featured in Shine, which I discovered only later. “I haven’t gone to
see the movie Shine, and I probably won’t,” wrote Holland. “The idea of losing one’s mind over
the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto is simply too offensive.” The story might be true and
even uplifting, he remarked, “but music lovers: how can you get excited about a cozy piece of
schlock like this? . . . Treating ‘Rach 3’ with awe, Shine lowers musical values to fast-food
levels.”
1
He was echoed by Mark Swed in the Los Angeles Times, who, commenting on the film,
described the concerto as “a popular showpiece that has some fiendishly difficult piano writing

1
Bernard Holland, “Basking in the Glow of the Golden Arches,” New York Times, December 22,
1996. See also Holland, “The Limits of Bait and Switch,” New York Times, February 23, 1997.
3
in it, some clever use of instrumental sonorities, and some sure-to-please gushy melodies. It
certainly can be an effective piece,” he wrote, “. . . but great art it isn’t.”
2

I also didn’t know then that harsh criticism of Rachmaninoff’s music such as this was
nothing new. The idea that his music is beneath serious consideration received its iconic
expression in his entry in the 1954 edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, a
statement, in fact, to which Swed’s commentary bears a striking resemblance. There, the British
critic and lexicographer Eric Blom, also the edition’s general editor, asserted that, as a composer,
Rachmaninoff was old-fashioned, lacked distinctive national and individual features, and was
technically “highly gifted, but also severely limited.” Blom further described the composer’s
music as “well constructed and effective, but monotonous in texture, which consists in essence
mainly of artificial and gushing tunes accompanied by a variety of figures derived from
arpeggios.” To these pronouncements he added a negative prognosis: “The enormous popular
success some few of Rachmaninoff’s works had in his lifetime is not likely to last, and musicians
never regarded it with much favor.”
3

The experience of falling in love with Rachmaninoff’s music only to learn that to do so
was considered by some to be immature, uncritical, or both planted a question in my mind, the
one that lies at the foundation of this dissertation: How could Rachmaninoff’s music enjoy the
obvious veneration represented by enshrinement in the time-tested concert repertoire, in addition
to widespread popularity, and at the same time be the subject of critical scorn? In reality, this
question entails several others: Why didn’t these critics like the music, and who were they? Was
distaste for Rachmaninoff’s music a hallmark of critical or scholarly professionalism, or was it

2
Mark Swed, “The Reality of ‘Shine’: An Image Distorted,” Los Angeles Times, March 22,
1997.
3
This entry is reproduced in full and discussed at length on pp. 73–88 below.
4
the product of some independent ideology? Was it as widespread as it seemed, and if so, how did
the music survive? Finally, how do the answers to these questions bear on Rachmaninoff’s
general standing in musical life?
As these questions suggest, the objective of this study is not to take sides in a debate
about the quality of Rachmaninoff’s music, my continuing interest in it notwithstanding. Quality
in music cannot be proved but only postulated in reference to accepted values, the adoption of
which is inherently subjective. Rather, this study approaches Rachmaninoff’s critical reception
as a composer from a historical viewpoint, embracing a paradigm that accommodates positive
and negative opinions alike in an effort to understand both, and it will yield objective
conclusions grounded in documentation. Whether or not one agrees with Blom, for example, one
can make an honest effort to understand his views and assign them a place within a historical
pattern.
Firm answers to the preceding questions will not be found in existing writings about
Rachmaninoff, because there has never been a general study of his international critical
reception. This is genuinely ironic, because that subject is easily the most ubiquitous issue in the
literature about him published in the West. Introducing an article or book with a smattering of
past critical zingers is virtually an article of faith in Rachmaninoff studies; doing so is not only
easy and effective but also supplies a ready context for new research—any new study can be
framed as a reappraisal in the broader context of the composer’s critical reception. As a result,
commentary on the reception has been closely bound up with critical evaluation itself. Whether
this tendency has succeeded in improving the composer’s standing is open to question,
4
but it has

4
According to Glen Carruthers, reappraisals of Rachmaninoff’s music have paradoxically
perpetuated the need for further reappraisal, “since [they] have, more often than not, become
mired in the same paradoxes, contradictions, and fallacies—plus some new ones—that gave rise
5
certainly generated a good deal of confusion. Habitually relegated to the ancillary parts of
articles and books, commentary on Rachmaninoff’s critical reception has been passing and
cursory, languishing in a state of vagueness concerning basic documentary facts.
We might ask, for example, who has typically disliked Rachmaninoff’s music and why.
One gathers from existing commentaries that it was any participant in musical life with an
intellectual or progressive outlook, but these notions are couched in extremely general terms.
Commenting briefly on Rachmaninoff’s reception in his foreword to Victor Seroff’s 1950
biography of the composer, Virgil Thomson observed that “the only kind of success
[Rachmaninoff] never knew was that of intellectual distinction,” and that his music was “often
distasteful to musicians, [who] tend[ed] to find it a retreat from battle, an avoidance of the
contemporary problem.”
5
Seroff suggests a similar state of affairs in the book itself.
6
In a 1951
article advocating a more progressive view of the composer, Joseph Yasser attributed
“misconceptions” concerning Rachmaninoff’s music to “composers of the extreme musical
‘left’” and “a fair number of professional musical observers” who fell under their influence.
7
In
their 1956 biography of the composer, Sergei Bertensson and Jan Leyda quoted dismissive
statements about Rachmaninoff by Paul Rosenfeld and Edward Sackville-West, suggesting that

to the need for reappraisal in the first place.” Carruthers, “The (Re)Appraisal of Rachmaninov’s
Music: Contradictions and Fallacies,” Musical Times 147 (Autumn 2006): 50.
5
Virgil Thomson, foreword to Rachmaninoff, by Victor I. Seroff (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1950), xii. Thomson’s other writings make it clear that he held this view himself.
6
Seroff, Rachmaninoff, 219–20.
7
Joseph Yasser, “Progressive Tendencies in Rachmaninoff’s Music,” Tempo, n.s., no. 22
(Winter 1951–52): 24–25.
6
these typified the composer’s treatment in “intellectual American [and English] criticism.”
8
In a
1968 New York Times editorial observing the twenty-fifth anniversary of the composer’s death,
Harold Schonberg wrote that Rachmaninoff “was a composer who unabashedly used 19th-
century models for his music, and as a result has been all but dismissed by scholars, historians,
tastemakers, and professionals.”
9
In 1973, John Culshaw, recounting the writing of his 1949
book on the composer, wrote that “it proved highly undesirable even to mention the name of
Rachmaninoff in London musical circles in 1946,” that “in academic circles his music was
regarded with contempt.”
10
In 1987, Stephen Wigler cited “musical progressive[s],” adding that
these “were the people who taught at the conservatories and who wrote reviews for the most
influential newspapers.”
11
Terry Teachout reiterated many of these same ideas in 2002, but
suggested that it was the emotionalism of Rachmaninoff’s music, rather than its conservatism per
se, that elicited a negative response. “For those listeners who are made uncomfortable by the
straightforward expression of emotion in classical music,” Teachout wrote, “his name will
always be a synonym for vulgarity.” Then, having quoted the Sackville-West criticism from the
Bertensson and Leyda biography, he adds, “But less priggish critics (one is tempted to say, less
English critics) no longer find it necessary to make excuses for Rachmaninoff.”
12

8
Sergei Bertensson and Jan Leyda, Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music (New York: New
York University, 1956; repr., with a new introduction by David Butler Cannata, Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2001), 218.
9
Harold Schonberg, “‘Rachmaninoff? Well, I mean . . .’” New York Times, April 14, 1968.
10
John Culshaw, “Rachmaninov Revisited,” Soundings 3 (January 1, 1973): 2.
11
Stephen Wigler, “Let’s Stop Bashing Rachmaninoff,” Baltimore Sun, January 11, 1987.
12
Terry Teachout, “What Was the Matter with Rachmaninoff?” Commentary, June 2002, 50–51.
7
As these statements show, generalities concerning one aspect of Rachmaninoff’s critical
reception often intermingle with others. For example, the question of where the reception was
unfavorable has elicited even less comment than its who and why. With very few exceptions,
commentators simply assume that Rachmaninoff’s standing was the same everywhere and that
any change in it in one place registered universally. The statements in the previous two
paragraphs illustrate this well enough. The fact that Teachout ventured only in parentheses to
locate Rachmaninoff’s critical opposition in England is indicative of the ambiguity that prevails
over the geographic aspect of the reception. Similarly rare and unremarkable is Thomson’s
further statement in his foreword to the Seroff biography that “Rachmaninoff . . . has been
adopted since his death as a Russian classic master in Russia.”
13
Some commentators limit the
scope of their comments to their own region or time—Culshaw, for example—but such are the
exception rather than the rule. There are also two focused discussions that present some useful
findings for certain periods in certain regions—Geoffrey Norris’s brief 1995 article
“Rachmaninoff’s Reception in England, 1899–1938” and Pauline Fairclough’s recent discussion
of Rachmaninoff’s reception in Soviet Russia between 1931 and 1945—but neither these nor any
other commentaries venture substantive comparison of Rachmaninoff’s critical reception in more
than one region.
14
Russian commentators, for their part, have been preoccupied for so long with
specialized studies of Rachmaninoff’s music that it seems not to have occurred to them that his
international critical reputation was ever in question.

13
Thomson, foreword to Rachmaninoff, xi.
14
See Geoffrey Norris, “Rachmaninoff’s Reception in England, 1899–1938,” Studies in Music
from the University of Western Ontario 15 (1995): 49–58; and Pauline Fairclough, Classics for
the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity under Lenin and Stalin (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2016), 89–90, 185–91.
8
Most confusingly of all, while most commentators agree that Rachmaninoff has suffered
critical neglect, they are at complete odds with each other concerning when, or even if, it came to
an end. His “rehabilitation,” as Teachout termed it, seems always to have been just on the
horizon. Yasser, for example, to return to his article of 1951, believed that a period when the
composer’s “basic creative course was not fully understood” was coming to and end, that he was
then “gradually taking his place in music history.”
15
This belief was shattered by the appearance,
in 1954, of Blom’s dismissive assessment in Grove’s. Culshaw dated the favorable reversal of
Rachmaninoff’s critical fortunes to “the middle of the nineteen-sixties,” when his music “had not
only retained its public appeal, but had become accepted by a different generation of scholars
and artists, who found no embarrassment in embracing the work of a composer whose style was
out of step with his period.”
16
Yet Stephen Walsh still found it necessary in 1973 to rebut the
Grove’s entry and “attempt a more balanced judgment of Rachmaninoff’s place in twentieth-
century music,” concluding that the composer had at last passed “the test of time.”
17
Still,
nothing seemed to change: Richard Coolidge opened his 1979 article on Rachmaninoff’s
concertos with the observation that “today . . . the most ‘out’ of the ‘out’ composers and the
primary target of all the ‘fashionable’ scoffers is undeniably Sergei Rachmaninoff”—an
assertion that he substantiated with several quotations.
18
In his 1990 biography of the composer,
Barrie Martyn suggested that negative critical attitudes toward Rachmaninoff’s music persisted

15
Yasser, “Progressive Tendencies,” 24.
16
John Culshaw, Putting the Record Straight: The Autobiography of John Culshaw (New York:
Viking, 1982), 77.
17
Stephen Walsh, “Sergei Rachmaninoff, 1873–1943,” Tempo, n.s., no. 105 (June 1973): 12–14,
21.
18
Richard Coolidge, “Architectonic Technique and Innovation in the Rakhmaninov Piano
Concertos,” Music Review 40 (August 1979): 178–81.
9
until the mid-1970s, and in 1993 he declared confidently that “the half-century since his death
ha[d] restored him to critical respectability.”
19
The vitriolic response to Shine, which appeared
just three years later, casts doubt on this claim, as does David Cannata’s statement, made in
1998, that Rachmaninoff was “somewhat of an enigma” who “has only slowly gained a place in
the communion of composers thought worthy of serious attention.”
20
The trend has continued
into the twenty-first century: in 2002, the same year that Teachout declared, like Walsh, that
Rachmaninoff had “stood the test of time,” Alfred Brendel could be found flatly describing the
composer as “a waste of time” whose music bordered on “kitsch.”
21

Recent scholarship has done little to resolve the ambiguity surrounding Rachmaninoff’s
critical reception. As before, elucidation has not been the primary objective, and conclusions on
the subject have been ventured on narrow documentary bases, perpetuating existing
generalizations. Some tirelessly bear the timeworn standard of Rachmaninoff apologetics
forward, employing various scholarly means in an effort to effect a broader reassessment of his
legacy. The implication of such a study is that the composer remains misunderstood, that his
critical standing is still ambiguous.
22
In his 2008 article advocating a twentieth-century view of
the composer, Charles Fisk concludes from a trio of statements by Orlando Figes, Francis Maes,
and Richard Taruskin that, “in America and Western Europe, a commonly held critical view of

19
Barrie Martyn, Rachmaninoff: Composer, Pianist, Conductor (Aldershot: Scolar, 1990), 16–
17, 18n21; Martyn, “The Legacy of Rachmaninoff,” Clavier 32 (March 1993): 17.
20
David Butler Cannata, Rachmaninoff and the Symphony (Innsbruck: Studien, 1999), 13–16.
21
Teachout, “What Was the Matter with Rachmaninoff?” 51; Alfred Brendel and Martin Meyer,
Me of All People: Alfred Brendel in Conversation with Martin Meyer, trans. Richard Stokes
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 42, 161–62, 251–52.
22
The notion that Rachmaninoff remains misunderstood has been argued explicitly as well. See
Carruthers, “The (Re)Appraisal of Rachmaninov’s Music,” 44–50.
10
Rachmaninoff still persists today: that he was fundamentally a blinkered nineteenth-century
composer, a holdover from the past who was able to achieve spectacular success far and wide
with audiences who shared his reluctance to advance musically into the twentieth century.”
23

Such an approach is evident also in Robin Gehl’s 2008 dissertation, “Reassessing a
Legacy: Rachmaninoff in America, 1918–43,” which argues that Rachmaninoff’s lively
participation in American musical life following his emigration from Russia constitutes a
sufficient basis for according him greater historical significance. Whereas most of the
commentators cited above have tended to attribute Rachmaninoff’s alleged neglect to critics,
Gehl focuses throughout her commentary on “musicologists,” who, she writes, “have largely
dismissed him as a touring virtuoso and conservative, part-time composer,” and she makes
repeated reference to his omission from the “academic canon.”
24
She bases these assertions on a
survey of a few English-language music histories and various editions of Grove’s.
25
Surveying
the latter, Gehl implies that Blom’s dismissive assessment in the 1954 edition reflects the
modernistic disposition of the age in which it was published, a period she describes in passing as
“the height of modernism.”
26

Others, by contrast, suggest that the composer is no longer in need of defending and that
it is time to move on. Thus reasons Blair Johnston in the opening sentences of his 2009

23
Charles Fisk, “Nineteenth-century Music? The Case of Rachmaninov,” 19th-Century Music 31
(April 2008): 248. Efforts to situate Rachmaninoff’s music in the twentieth century began as
long ago as the Winter 1951–52 issue of Tempo, in the article by Yasser already cited (see n. 7
above) and in another one by William Flanagan, “Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Twentieth-century
Composer,” 4–8.
24
Robin S. Gehl, “Reassessing a Legacy: Rachmaninoff in America, 1918–43” (PhD diss.,
University of Cincinnati, 2008), ii, 3, 202–03.
25
Ibid., 3–6.
26
Ibid., 5.
11
dissertation, “Harmony and Climax in the Late Works of Sergei Rachmaninoff.” “Rejecting a
cherished modus operandi of Rachmaninoff scholars,” he writes, “I will not begin this study with
a defense of the composer. If recent trends can be trusted,” he continues, “the scholarly tide has
turned and a fuller reckoning of his achievements may be forthcoming. The brutal dismissal of
the composer in the fifth edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians has been
supplanted by Geoffrey Norris’s far more sympathetic account in recent print and online
editions, and . . . several high-grade dissertations and books have appeared during the last
quarter-century.”
27

Johnston’s call to abstain from further comment on Rachmaninoff’s critical reception is
reasonable, I feel, insofar as such comment is deemed necessary to justify study of his music.
The premise of this dissertation, however, is that Rachmaninoff’s critical reception remains
ambiguous and demands elucidation, even if Johnston proves right, unlike past commentators,
and the composer’s critical fortunes really have at last turned the corner. Unfortunately, whether
or not “recent trends can be trusted” is precisely what has proven so difficult to tell, indeed
whether circumstances such as those that Johnston names can be considered trends at all. The
image one constructs of Rachmaninoff’s critical reception merely reflects one’s data, and the
fewer the data, the less reliable the image. Connecting the dots from Yasser to Martyn to
Teachout, for example, would suggest that Rachmaninoff’s music has traveled a path of critical
self-fulfillment, but connecting the dots from Blom to Swed to Brendel would suggest precisely
the opposite. It is just such an insufficiency of data that explains the conspicuous level of
disagreement among the foregoing accounts of Rachmaninoff’s critical reception. Taken

27
Blair Allen Johnston, “Harmony and Climax in the Late Works of Sergei Rachmaninoff” (PhD
diss., University of Michigan, 2009), 1. Johnston’s dissertation is one of the most enlightening
theoretical studies of Rachmaninoff’s music in the English language.
12
individually, none of them may seem unreasonable, but together they are hardly practicable.
Even if we dismiss the when and where in order to salvage the seemingly more certain who and
why, these accounts yield a dubious image of Rachmaninoff: a composer historically unloved
and unappreciated—“never [emphasis added] regarded . . . with much favor,” if we are to believe
Blom—by any listener, performer, critic, or scholar with progressive or intellectual pretensions,
a composer essentially devoid of critical approval.
We can conclude on the basis of ground already covered that this image is illusory. The
very commentators who have decried Rachmaninoff’s allegedly poor critical treatment have
often been authoritative musical commentators themselves, their appeals on his behalf often
published in prominent periodicals. Schonberg was one of the major American music critics of
the second half of the twentieth century; in addition to publishing some very popular books on
music (some of them translated into other languages), he wrote in some of the country’s most
widely read publications, most notably the New York Times, where he was chief music critic
from 1960 to 1980. It was during that period that he wrote his editorial on Rachmaninoff cited
above, not long after which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Teachout has written
continuously on the arts since the mid-1980s, for such magazines as Harper’s and Commentary,
contributing also to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and he is the author of
several well-received books on prominent figures in the arts. The journals 19th-Century Music
and Tempo (which featured the articles of Fisk, Walsh, and Yasser) are highly distinguished in
their respective areas, as was The Music Review (which featured Coolidge’s) until its
discontinuation in 1994. Walsh himself has emerged as a significant British commentator, having
written music criticism for the Daily Telegraph, the London Times, and the Observer, in addition
to having written the definitive English-language biography of Stravinsky. Norris has likewise
13
distinguished himself with scholarly work on Rachmaninoff and music criticism in the London
Times and the Daily Telegraph. If critics and scholars have frequently been blamed for
undervaluing Rachmaninoff, they must also be numbered among his noteworthy advocates.
The first step in elucidating Rachmaninoff’s international critical reception as a composer
is thus to establish its documentary facts: Who said what about Rachmaninoff, when, where, and
why? This approach, a straightforward mode of reception history, will offer quantifiable data
concerning the extent, both geographically and temporally, to which Rachmaninoff’s music has
been praised or disparaged and the historical bases for doing so.
28
The documentation and
analysis of critical assessments will not, however, reveal how Rachmaninoff’s music
paradoxically withstood critical disapproval, retaining and even increasing its place in the
concert repertoire over time, nor will it offer a means to evaluate his historical standing in
general musical life, since musical commentary is only one constituent of the latter. The second
step in elucidating Rachmaninoff’s critical reception is thus to analyze his reception in musical
commentary in relation to his reception in the repertoire and other aspects of musical life, with
consideration of any relevant musical or extra-musical factors.
Unlike the first step, this one requires some conceptual explanation, since it entails
consideration of how the various groups that make up musical life interrelate in the overall
determination of musical value over time. Just who directs this mysterious process is a matter of
great contention. In asserting that Rachmaninoff had passed the “test of time” (that seemingly
obvious but conceptually elusive term), Walsh and Teachout both implied that continuing

28
This study does not employ reception history as a means for evaluating or interpreting musical
works. For a discussion of the latter, see Carl Dahlhaus, “Problems in Reception History,” chap.
10 in Foundations of Music History, trans. J. B. Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983), 150–65. Nor does this study employ reception history in order to effect critical
reevaluation, the subject of Leon Botstein’s article “Music in History: The Perils of Method in
Reception History,” Musical Quarterly 89 (Spring 2006): 1–16.
14
performance, whether in concert or on record, is ultimately a more reliable or important indicator
of musical value than critical approbation—that is, that performers, by virtue of the music they
choose to perform, and audiences, who validate that choice in the form of ticket and record sales,
possess the ultimate authority to assign that value. This is a view likely to be shared by
performers and audiences themselves. Works that have passed the test of time in this sense are
considered by some to constitute a “canon” of classical music, as they are, for example, in David
Dubal’s 2001 book The Essential Canon of Classical Music. As Dubal explains, the book grew
out of his years as a classical radio broadcaster for WNCN-FM in New York, when “many
listeners wrote or called to request that [he] write a book that might guide them through the
classical music repertoire,” which he describes as the “best-known works” of the most famous
composers. To Dubal, performing and listening are the activities that define the canon, not
critical study. “This is not,” he writes, “a book of analysis.” Rather, the book “codifies the
essential canon” in order to “suggest a lifetime listening plan.”
29

An opposite view of authority in musical life is implicit in the field of music criticism,
which is founded on the premise that critics possess critical faculties superior to that of lay
concert-goers, their presumed readership, as well as that of performing musicians and even
composers, whose work they take it upon themselves to evaluate. This basic dichotomy between
practitioners and listeners, on the one hand, and connoisseurs, on the other, can be traced to
Greek and Roman antiquity, whatever differences in other aspects of musical culture may
separate these eras from our own. In The Politics, Aristotle described criticism as the pinnacle of
musical experience, a practice ideally preceded by a long period of performing by critics
themselves. Aristotle regarded such a critic as a person of “quality” and a “gentleman,” while

29
David Dubal, The Essential Canon of Classical Music (New York: North Point Press, 2001),
5–6.
15
professional performers were dismissed as “paid employee[s]” who where caught up with
“common” listeners in a mutually detrimental, self-perpetuating cycle of indulgence in “vulgar
pleasure” and “popular music such as appeals to slaves, children, and even some animals.”
30

Writing several hundred years later, Boethius similarly dismissed performing musicians as
manual laborers akin to “slaves.” He, like Aristotle, placed the musical critic at the top of
musical life. To him, performers are, by definition, “separated from the understanding of musical
knowledge, . . . for they use no reason, but are totally lacking in thought.” Similarly, composers
work “not so much by thought and reason as by a certain natural instinct” and are thus “also
separated from music.” One who judges music, by contrast, “is devoted totally to reason and
thought, [and] can rightly be considered musical.”
31

In much the same vein, some critics of recent times have viewed the concert repertoire as
little more than the product of consciously manipulated market forces in a commercialized music
industry, a view expounded acerbically by Virgil Thomson in his 1939 book The State of Music.
There Thomson dismissed the association between repertoire and value as subjective, arguing
that the romantic symphonic works that then formed the core of the repertoire were regarded as
the “best” music merely because of “the popularity of the symphony orchestras (plus their
gramophone recordings and radio transmissions) performing this repertory.”
32
Thomson held an
extremely cynical view of musical life, one in which the concert repertoire, the classical-music

30
Aristotle, The Politics, rev. ed., trans. T. A. Sinclair and Trevor J. Saunders (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Classics, 1981), 307–316, quoted in Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin, eds., Music in
the Western World: A History in Documents, 2nd ed. (Belmont, CA: Thomson Schirmer, 2008),
9–10.
31
Calvin Martin Bower, “Boethius’s The Principles of Music: An Introduction, Translation, and
Commentary” (PhD diss., George F. Peabody College, 1967), 101–04, quoted in Weiss and
Taruskin, Music in the Western World, 31–32.
32
Thomson, The State of Music (New York: William Morrow, 1939), 127.
16
recording industry, and the music-appreciation movement were fellow cohorts in a scheme
whose ultimate objective was not to educate or uplift but to indoctrinate more and more potential
listeners with a subjective vision of musical “taste” in order to ensure the continuing economic
success of the music industry as a whole. According to Thomson, the “standardized” symphonic
repertoire (about “fifty pieces,” in his estimation) went hand in hand with the standardization of
“the conductors, the players, the soloists,” a process that he believed served the social and
financial interests of the symphony orchestra, especially of its conductors and management.
33
He
went so far as to claim that “the standardization of repertory . . . is not a result of mere supply
and demand [but] has been reached by collusion between conductors and managers.”
34
“The
symphony orchestras,” Thomson concluded, “are the king-pin of the international music-
industry. Their limited repertory is a part of their standardization. The Appreciation-racket is a
cog in their publicity machine.”
35
Needless to say, according to this view, participation in the
repertoire is well nigh irrelevant to value, and authority in musical life dwells in the hands of the
critic.
Critics are not, however, the only musical commentators who claim authority in critical
affairs; scholars do, too. In the first place, scholars have often written criticism, including such
eminent musical writers of the last two centuries as François-Joseph Fétis, Hugo Riemann,
Gerald Abraham, and Richard Taruskin. While the aims of musicology have, strictly speaking,
lay apart from critical evaluation, the two have often intermingled, sometimes overtly. Joseph
Kerman, for example, was a devoted advocate of a scholarly mode of criticism and was in turn

33
Ibid., 127–28.
34
Ibid., 128.
35
Ibid.
17
strongly associated with the so-called critical musicology that emerged in the late twentieth-
century.
36
Even in their principal historical or analytical work, scholars exercise and express
critical discrimination in their choice of what music to study. The place of honor accorded the
Viennese classicists and the Three Bs—with Beethoven at the center of both groups—in
scholarly literature of all types clearly illustrates the type of critical judgments that emerge from
scholarly researches. Scholars have also laid claim to critical authority in ideological terms, as
Carl Dahlhaus did when he defined canon formation as “the transition from journalism to
historiography.”
37
According to this view, music historians have, quite literally, the final word in
matters of critical evaluation.
Composers, for their part, tend to express their claim to critical authority in writing,
becoming in that instance musical commentators themselves. It is true that when one composer
emulates another in composition, the former increases the authority of the latter, but surely this
emulation, when conscious at all, is rarely intended as a direct expression of critical approval.
Rather, composers have proven, Boethius to the contrary, to be among the most vigorous literary
contributors to musical life. Thomson serves as a convenient example, as a composer who, like
his colleague Aaron Copland, tended toward an intellectual type of journalistic criticism. But
history shows that composers engage in critical discourse in a number of other guises as well,
from the philosopher to the theorist to the historian, as a survey of the writings of such
composers as Vincenzo Galilei, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Richard Wagner, and Milton Babbitt will
show, to name but a few.

36
Kerman posited this brand of criticism in his classic article “How We Got into Analysis, and
How to Get Out,” Critical Inquiry 7 (Winter 1980): 311–31, and brought this perspective to bear
in various ways on musicology in his similarly classic reflection on the discipline, Contemplating
Music: Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).
37
Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History, 161.
18
Thus, all parties in musical life consider themselves autonomous in critical evaluation;
when opinions differ, anyone may claim superior judgment at will. An article written in 1962 by
the popular mid-century American critic B. H. Haggin, “Music Criticism and Scholarship,”
illustrates the inadequacy of rigid conceptualizations of critical hierarchies in musical life.
Haggin opens by quoting an article by Hungarian-American musicologist Paul Henry Lang in
which the latter accuses American critics of propagating “a thick tangle of prejudices, inherited
formulas and catchwords, a prodigious lack of information, and an unbelievable ignorance of
musical literature.”
38
Haggin devotes the rest of his article to settling the score. With the
assistance of a letter from an unnamed lay correspondent bewailing instances of alleged
inaccuracy and questionable musical judgment in well-known books on music by Lang and
Alfred Einstein, another prominent musicologist of the time, Haggin unleashes a pitiless assault
on the two scholars, the premise of which is that they, like most members of their profession,
mistakenly equate “knowledge about” a work of art with “perception of” it, the former
representing the proper domain of the scholar and the latter of the critic.
39
Adding examples of
his own to those of his correspondent, Haggin turns Lang’s statement back on himself and
Einstein, accusing them, in certain instances, of being not only “poor critics” but also “poor
scholar[s],” and of dispensing “misinformation,” concluding that, “if one judges by Einstein’s
and Lang’s performances, writing about music for the enlightenment of the general public
doesn’t seem the right activity for musical scholars.”
40
What might be the right activity, he asks?

38
Paul Henry Lang, “Ecce Criticus,” American Scholar 7 (Autumn 1938): 480. For Haggin’s
treatment of the quotation, see his “Music Criticism and Scholarship,” American Scholar 31
(Summer 1962): 423.
39
Haggin, “Music Criticism,” 423–24. The italics are Haggin’s.
40
Ibid., 424, 426, 430.
19
Haggin takes his answer from Virgil Thomson: “the thing for the musicologists to do [is] to teach
musicology.”
41
Scholar dismisses critic, critic and non-professional dismiss scholar: in practice,
no critical hierarchy exists.
Owing to this state of critical anarchy, any attempt to situate all but the most central
composers within the canon, prioritizing the interests of any one constituent group in musical life
over the others, would prove meaningless; each group tends to embrace a view of the canon that
reflects its own interests. Asserting that Rachmaninoff has passed the test of time because his
music continues to be performed is nothing more than a truism, a tacit expression of a
performance-based view of the canon. Such an assertion explains virtually nothing about the
composer’s critical standing in particular or about his standing in musical life generally. From
this point of view, the differing degrees of importance (or unimportance) accorded Rachmaninoff
in musical literature can be regarded simply as manifestations of differing views of the canon.
Adopted as a concept rather than an entity, however, canon or canonicity—as opposed to
the canon—can serve to illuminate a composer’s general standing in musical life when
conceived as the product of multiple factors. In other words, a composer’s standing might be
meaningfully calculated by taking into account neither performance nor criticism in isolation but
performance and all forms of commentary together, as well as any other activity that positively
or negatively affects a composer’s legacy. Such a multifaceted view of canonicity reflects current
musicological thinking. Although canonicity was conceived primarily in terms of musical
commentary when it first entered musicological discourse in the 1970s and 1980s,
42
publications

41
Ibid., 430.
42
Dahlhaus’s definition of canon formation, which was first published in 1977 and is cited on
p. 17 above, is self-evident. Kerman, while acknowledging the traditional association between
repertoire and canon, nevertheless drew a sharp distinction between the two: “repertories are
20
of the 1990s explored a variety of other contributing factors. The collection of essays
Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons offers a vivid snapshot of this wide-ranging
approach to the subject.
43
Certain reception studies published since that time illustrate the utility
of a multifaceted conceptualization of canonicity in illuminating a composer’s reception in
musical life.
44

More direct investigation of canon per se can be found in two essays in another edited
collection from the 1990s, Rethinking Music, which have strongly influenced the present author’s
conception. These approach the subject from complementary angles. William Weber’s
contribution, “The History of the Musical Canon,” embraces an empirical approach to the
subject, reflecting the material and socio-institutional orientation of his research.
45
Whereas my
preceding discussion of canon and authority in musical life applies principally to the fully
formed world of “classical music” that emerged in the course of the nineteenth century, Weber
identifies three major types of canon that have varied in prominence and interrelatedness at

determined by performers, canons by critics.” Kerman, “A Few Canonic Variations,” in
“Canons,” special issue, Critical Inquiry 10 (September 1983): 112.
43
See Katherine Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman, eds., Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its
Canons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). The essays explore canon in various
contexts, including non-classical musics, neglected repertories, and disciplinary tendencies,
among others. For another study of canon written in this spirit, see Marcia J. Citron, Gender and
the Musical Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
44
See, for example, the four essays on Beethoven’s reception in Glenn Stanley, ed., The
Cambridge Companion to Beethoven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 239–305;
and James Deaville, “Liszt and the Twentieth Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to Liszt,
ed. Kenneth Hamilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 28–56.
45
See Weber, Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London,
Paris, and Vienna (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1975; 2nd ed., Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004);
Weber, The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual,
and Ideology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Weber, The Great Transformation of
Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008).
21
different points in the history of Western music. These are (1) “a scholarly canon, whereby
music is studied in theoretical terms,” that is, “philosophical and scientific consideration of
music, such as that discussed in treatises and taught in the medieval quadrivium”; (2) a
“pedagogical canon,” consisting of works emulated, beginning with sacred polyphony in the
sixteenth century but broadening significantly during the nineteenth; and (3) a “performing
canon,” beginning in the eighteenth century and involving “the presentation of old works
organized as repertories and defined as sources of authority with regard to musical taste.”
46
The
general premise of Weber’s essay is that, “if [musicologists] are to understand the canon
historically, [they] must become skeptical of it,”
47
and indeed the importance that he attaches to
the performing canon stands in stark contrast to the traditionally authoritative attitude of the
music scholar. “Performance,” he writes, “is ultimately the most significant and critical aspect of
musical canon. While editions and anthologies figured significantly within the pedagogical and
critical aspects of this problem, what emerged as the core of canonicity in musical life, beginning
in the eighteenth century, was the public rendition of selected works. . . . A performing canon is
more than just a repertory; it is also a critical and ideological force.”
48
While finding Kerman’s
distinction between repertoire and canon useful in some respects, Weber deems it “simplistic.”
“We cannot,” he continues, “write off musicians as shapers of the canon.”
49
Nevertheless, Weber
argues that canon consists of four distinct aspects that work in combination to imbue a work or
composer with canonic authority: craft, conceived primarily as contrapuntal mastery; repertory,

46
Weber, “The History of the Musical Canon,” in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and
Mark Everist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 339–40.
47
Ibid., 337.
48
Ibid., 340.
49
Ibid., 349
22
the continuing performance of distinguished old works; criticism, the force that “empowers”
repertory on its way to canonicity; and ideology, by which a musical canon acquires moral,
spiritual, and civic authority.
50

Whereas Weber approaches canon from an empirical and historical perspective, Mark
Everist does so from a more theoretical one in his contribution to the volume, “Reception
Theories, Canonic Discourses, and Musical Value,” arriving nonetheless at a similarly
multifaceted view of canon. Like Weber, Everist challenges Kerman’s rigid distinction between
repertory and canon, as well as the priority that Kerman accords critics in the process of canon
formation. “This curious formulation assigns a more important role to the critic and a less
important role to the performer than each seems to deserve,” writes Everist, arguing also that
performance, criticism, and composition “can be embodied in the same individual.”
51

Synthesizing literary and musical canonic discourses with reception theory, Everist adopts a
holistic theory of canon formation in which “locations of reception overlap substantially with
contingencies of value.” This is highly technical language, to be sure, but what Everist means is
that canonicity derives from a complex web of receptive acts that serve to perpetuate a
composer’s legacy in various ways, including not only performance and criticism but also other
institutional activities concerned with the reproduction of texts and documents such as books,
musical scores, and recordings.
52

In short, what is needed to elucidate Rachmaninoff’s critical reception in its relation to
other branches of musical life is nothing less than a comprehensive history of the subject. This

50
Ibid., 341–54.
51
Mark Everist, “Reception Theories, Canonic Discourse, and Musical Value,” in Cook and
Everist, Rethinking Music, 387–88.
52
Ibid., 402.
23
history must be international in scope and based on a wide array of data, including critical
assessments from all the principal genres of musical commentary (i.e., criticism, lexicons,
histories and historical surveys, biography, and analytical literature), each of which approaches
evaluation in its own way; performance and recording statistics; manifestations of his reception
in broader culture such as lay assessments (chiefly in correspondence of various kinds, only
more recently in online public media), the formation of societies, competitions, websites, and
publications in his honor, and appropriations of his music in popular media; and, insofar as such
might be identified and obtained, information concerning other factors that have impacted his
legacy, such as political actions and circumstances, personal animosity or jealousy, and editorial
influence, among others.
Writing this history is the objective of my ongoing research. The present study supplies a
foundation for that research by introducing the conceptual parameters of Rachmaninoff’s critical
reception through an exhaustive survey of music lexicons. Modern music lexicography began
only in the eighteenth century; until that time, independent musical compendia were rare, and the
lexicographical treatment of musical subjects often occurred in general compendia or in
subsections of various musical treatises.
53
What eventually defined lexicography in music, as it
had in other fields, was the encyclopedic principle, “a fierce natural urge,” as James Coover
called it, “to compile and compact the knowledge of the world or of a special interest into handy

53
James B. Coover and John C. Franklin, “Dictionaries and Encyclopedias of Music,” in The
New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., 7:306. Coover’s article just cited (to
which Franklin contributed only partially) is the single most authoritative source on music
lexicons in the English language and represents, as Vincent Duckles noted, “the distillation of a
lifetime of bibliographic work on the genre.” Duckles and Ida Reed, Music Research and
Reference Materials: An Annotated Bibliography, 5th ed. (New York: Schirmer Books, 1997), 1.
24
compendia in order to control it.”
54
It is this pretension to the mastery of knowledge that gives
lexicons their traditional authority in society.
While many types exist, “a simple way of classifying music dictionaries for purposes of
discussion,” as Vincent Duckles wrote, “is to separate those which deal with terms from those
which are concerned with biography.”
55
Indeed, these basic categories are represented by two
seminal eighteenth-century works, Sébastien de Brossard’s terminological Dictionaire de
musique (1703) and Johann Mattheson’s biographical Grundlage einer Ehren-Pforte (1740),
while a third, Johann Gottfried Walther’s Musicalisches Lexikon (1732), combined both terms
and persons in alphabetical order and thus “became the prototype for all comprehensive music
encyclopedias that followed.”
56
All subsequent music lexicons can be regarded as one of these
types or a related subtype, all of which had appeared by the early-nineteenth century.
57

Biographical music lexicons were, however, sporadic until the late-eighteenth century,
58
when
the genre came into its own with Ernst Gerber’s monumental Historisch-biographisches Lexikon

54
Coover and Franklin, “Dictionaries,” 7:306.
55
Duckles, “Some Observations on Music Lexicography,” College Music Symposium 11 (Fall
1971): 116.
56
Coover and Franklin, “Dictionaries,” 7:310. Although music encyclopedias, like music
dictionaries, are typically arranged alphabetically, this is not always the case, as Lavignac’s
Encyclopédie de la musique et dictionnaire du conservatoire illustrates.
57
Ibid., 7:313–15. Within these basic parameters, music lexicons of a seemingly endless variety
have been written. The subgenres named in the chapter on music lexicons in Duckles’s Music
Reference and Research Materials illustrate this variety: general; international biography;
nationally oriented dictionaries; biographical dictionaries: indexes; terms; country, jazz, popular,
and folk music; opera, theater, and film music; musical instruments: makers, performers, and
terminology; sacred music; quotations; compositional devices; and, finally, lists and handbooks.
Duckles and Reed, Music Research and Reference Materials, v–vi, 1–114.
58
Coover, Music Lexicography, 3rd ed. (Carlisle, PA: Carlisle Books, 1971), xvi; Coover and
Franklin, “Dictionaries,” 7:313.
25
der Tonkünstler (1790–92; new ed., 1812–14). This work paved the way for such similarly
monumental works as Joseph-François Fétis’s Biographie universelle des musiciens (1835–44;
2nd ed., 1860–65), Robert Eitner’s Biographisch-bibliographisches Quellen-Lexikon der
Musiker und Musikgelehrten (1900–04), and Theodore Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of
Musicians (9 eds., 1900–2001).
59
Meanwhile, the work of Walther, Mattheson, and Gerber,
among others, also prefigured the development of musical biography as an independent literary
genre.
60

Throughout the nineteenth century, the demand for music lexicons increased in tandem
with the rapidly increasing international development of public and professional musical life,
leading to an unprecedented proliferation of music lexicons during the twentieth century.
61

Emblematic of this increasing demand are two comprehensive works that were published at the
same time during the late-nineteenth century, Sir George Grove’s Dictionary of Music and
Musicians (1st ed., 1879–90) and Hugo Riemann’s Musik-Lexikon (1st ed., 1882), each
achieving renown in its own sphere. As Grove explained, “a strong desire is felt by a large,
important, and increasing section of the public to know something of the structure and
peculiarities of the music which they hear and play . . . [and] of the biographies and
characteristics of its composers.”
62
Rejecting the exhaustive single-handed approach of Gerber
and Fétis, Grove brought together numerous writers and aimed for encyclopedic

59
Coover, Music Lexicography, 3rd ed., xv–xvi; Coover and Franklin, “Dictionaries,” 7:313–16.
60
See Hans Lennenberg, chaps. 2, 5, and 6 of Witnesses and Scholars: Studies in Musical
Biography (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1988), 18–37, 66–116.
61
By the end of the twentieth century, the average number of music lexicons published each year
had risen to nearly one hundred, up from eight per year in the nineteenth century. Coover and
Franklin, “Dictionaries,” 7:315.
62
Grove, preface to A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1:v.
26
comprehensiveness, producing a four-volume work “based as far as possible on independent
sources” at the expense of “much time, and laborious, disinterested research” that he claimed
contained information on “all the points . . . on which those interested in the Art, and alive to its
many and far-reaching associations, can desire to be informed”
63
—claims the dictionary
maintains to this day.
64
Riemann, on the other hand, brought together scholarly excellence and
critical shrewdness in a single, eminently usable and attractive volume. This combination proved
both popular and versatile: within twenty-five years of its original publication, his Musik-Lexikon
had appeared in six German editions and been translated into Danish, English, French, and
Russian, edited in each case to reflect the musical life of the region. Works such as Grove’s and
Riemann’s could supply a documentary basis for musical literature of many other types,
including criticism, history, and biography.
While the traditional aim of terminological music lexicography has been to supply
unambiguous definitions and explanations, biographical music lexicography has rarely been
limited to the mere documentation of the basic facts of a person’s life and work. As Warren
Allen noted of Walther, Mattheson, and Gerber, “the activities of these men are linked up more
or less with musical criticism,”
65
and the same can be said of Fétis, Riemann, and subsequent
lexicographers such as Percy Scholes, with his Oxford Companion to Music (1st ed., 1938), Eric
Blom, editor, as we have seen, of the fifth edition of Grove’s (1954), and Nicolas Slonimsky,

63
Ibid., 1:v–vi.
64
The New Grove “seeks to discuss everything that can be reckoned to bear on music in history
and on present-day musical life” and was “written by almost 2,500 people,” specialists in their
fields. Stanley Sadie, preface to the 1980 edition of The New Grove, reprinted in the 2nd ed.,
1:xii, xiii.
65
Warren Dwight Allen, “Lexicons, Dictionaries, and Encyclopedias,” chap. 4 in Philosophies of
Music History: A Study of General Histories of Music, 1600–1960 (New York: Dover, 1962), 62.
27
editor of four outstanding editions of Baker’s (1958–92) that established his reputation as one of
the most distinguished lexicographers of the twentieth century. Such were valued as sources not
just of factual information but also of authoritative critical opinion. That Blom adhered to this
tradition of critical biographical music lexicography is evident not only in his assessment of
Rachmaninoff in Grove’s, cited above, but also in his preface to that edition:
I hope it [i.e., the present edition] will be felt not only to be worthy of the eminent name
it still bears, but to continue showing the personality of its founder, a personality who, if I
may judge by my own experience and feeling, has long been not only admired but loved.
Whatever the Dictionary’s faults may have been, and may still be, it has always had that
personal quality: its users have gone to it as to a living acquaintance, an expert they not
only trust, but personally admire.
66

As the one-man concise encyclopedia has given way increasingly since the mid-twentieth
century to the collaborative multi-volume work, “the gain in factual accuracy,” Coover wrote,
“has been balanced by the loss of a unique personality”
67
—a trend that some scholars initially
mourned. When, for example, Riemann’s Musik-Lexikon eventually underwent its posthumous
transition to a collaborative work (12th ed., 1959–75), Paul Henry Lang lamented—even
belittled, with ironic quotation marks—the “severely factual, ‘objective,’” tone of the new
edition, noting that Riemann’s “likes and dislikes, which he never hesitated to convey to the
reader, were an attractive part” of the original work.
68
Duckles likewise found the new edition
lacking “an element of personal taste, of bias even, . . . the kind of sparkle that is found in good
measure in such works as Scholes’s Oxford Companion or the new Baker-Slonimsky [i.e.,

66
Blom, preface to Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed., v.
67
Coover and Franklin, “Dictionaries,” 7:316.
68
Lang, review of vol. 1 of the Riemann Musik Lexikon, 12th ed., Musical Quarterly 45 (October
1959): 563–64.
28
Slonimsky’s 1958 edition of Baker’s].”
69
Even at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Stanley
Sadie, the general editor of the most recent print edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music
and Musicians (2000), could affirm that “intellectual critical and evaluative writing still have a
place in music lexicography.”
70

Music lexicographers also exercise critical judgment in deciding whom to include in their
lexicons, even in supposedly comprehensive works. In the same edition of The New Grove just
mentioned, Sadie supplied a rationale for inclusion based on perceived interest and historical
prominence. “Material relevant to scholars and inquirers in [earlier editions],” he wrote, “may be
of very much less interest in 2000, and if so it may no longer be included. . . . This particularly
affects entries on performers . . . who have left only a modest mark on musical history, . . . [and
also those on] composers whose reputations have faded.”
71
The reasonability of such criteria
should not obscure the fact that they are criteria nonetheless and thus critical in nature. Other
lexicographers have been less discriminating, only to be “corrected” by later editors. According
to Slonimsky, Theodore Baker and Hugo Riemann freely included “musicians with whom [they]
had been personally and professionally connected,” musicians who were, in Slonimsky’s
estimation, “perfectly deserving but utterly unknown” and therefore had to be removed.
72

Slonimsky himself devised a (tongue-in-cheek?) mathematical equation of sorts for

69
Duckles, review of vol. 1 of the Riemann Musik Lexikon, 12th ed., Notes 16 (March 1959):
242.
70
Sadie, preface to the 1980 edition of The New Grove, reprinted in 2nd ed., 1:xi. Although the
original statement was made in the preface to the 1980 ed., Sadie reaffirmed in the preface to the
2nd ed. (2000) that “the general principles of the compilation and editing of this dictionary
are . . . identical, or virtually identical, with those of the 1980 edition, the Preface to which is
reprinted below.” Sadie, preface to The New Grove, 2nd ed., 1:vii.
71
Sadie, preface to The New Grove, 2nd ed., viii.
72
Nicolas Slonimsky, preface to the eighth edition of Baker’s, reprinted in the 2001 ed., 1:lvii.
29
“lexicographical eligibility” based on the type, importance, quality, number, and popularity of a
composer’s works, or on the popularity and “greatness of musical penetration” of a performer.
73

In more ways than one, then, music lexicography has been broadly conceived as a form
of scholarly music criticism, a genre in which the authority of a distinguished commentator
merges synergistically with that of the lexicon. This authority is such that, unlike periodical
criticism, which can easily be dismissed, discarded, and forgotten, criticism in a music lexicon
can be difficult to ignore. Nowhere is this more evident than in the literature on Rachmaninoff.
While the composer’s advocates have sharply disagreed with Blom’s harsh assessment in
Grove’s, sometimes openly disparaging the assessment with such adjectives as “stupid” and
“notorious,” they have, nonetheless, felt compelled to cite and rebut it.
74
The assessment has also
strongly shaped perceptions of Rachmaninoff’s critical reception, even among those who have
disputed its accuracy. Not only, for example, did Schonberg believe that Blom’s commentary
represented “a prevalent view of Rachmaninoff and his music” in 1968, but he later mistook the
year of Blom’s edition for 1935, mentioning explicitly (but incorrectly) that it appeared during
the composer’s lifetime and was typical even then of a tendency among “so-called ‘serious’
critics . . . to underrate him.”
75
In a similar fashion, Glen Carruthers has asserted that the
assessment is “typical of critical appraisals from the 1950s and 1960s.”
76
We are thus led to

73
Slonimsky, Perfect Pitch: An Autobiography, new ed., ed. Electra Slonimsky Yourke (New
York: Schirmer Trade Books, 2002), 206–07.
74
Schonberg, “‘Rachmaninoff?’”; Martyn, Rachmaninoff, 16. The critical response to Blom’s
assessment is discussed in detail on pages 71–72 below.
75
Quoted in John C. Tibbetts, “Remembering Rachmaninoff,” American Record Guide 56
(January–February 1993), 6.
76
Carruthers, “Rachmaninoff, Sergei,” in Reader’s Guide to Music: History, Theory, and
Criticism, ed. Murray Steib (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999), 582–83.
30
believe that a single English assessment from 1954 accurately reflects international critical
opinion of Rachmaninoff from the 1930s through the 1960s. To a lesser extent, commentators
have also relied on other editions of Grove’s in drawing general conclusions about the
composer’s critical reception.
77
Such unguarded reliance on Grove’s as an infallible barometer of
general critical opinion has contributed significantly to the confusion surrounding
Rachmaninoff’s critical reception that this study aims to elucidate. More to the point, however,
the prominent position that Grove’s has occupied in commentaries on Rachmaninoff’s critical
reception shows just how far the authority of a distinguished music lexicon can reach.
The importance of music lexicons for a reception study—particularly one situated in the
twentieth century, such as this—should now be clear: music lexicons are an abundant,
authoritative, and international source of critical opinion. More than any other single genre of
musical commentary, they are capable of offering a well-rounded introduction to
Rachmaninoff’s international critical reception. Whereas periodicals tend toward discussion of
an individual event or work, and histories toward evaluation in variously calculated terms of
historical importance—in both cases with enormous variety in purpose and scope—lexicons
consistently offer critical assessment that is both direct and general. Moreover, they offer a
microcosmic view of musical commentary as a whole, since their authors and contributors
include not only critics and scholars but also composers and performers. Finally, they are
designed to last, and they occupy a prominent place in music bibliography, making them readily
accessible to the researcher. Obviously, music lexicons cannot supply a complete picture of
reception in musical commentary or in musical life, but they can supply a plausible introductory

77
See, for example, Teachout, “What Was the Matter with Rachmaninoff?” 47–48; Gehl,
“Reassessing a Legacy,” 5–6; Johnston, “Harmony and Climax,” 1.
31
view of international critical reception useful for establishing preliminary conclusions and
guiding further inquiry.
Music lexicons also have their idiosyncrasies, which must be acknowledged. As a
reviewer once stated, “a trouble with any encyclopedia is that by the time it is published it is
already out of date.”
78
This is an unavoidable consequence of the compilation process. Lexicons
can never match the immediacy of the periodical—nor are they meant to. Accordingly, they are
potentially good indicators of broad shifts in thinking but not of day-to-day ones. Another,
related tendency is that music lexicons often feature material retained from previous editions or
even borrowed from other lexicons, which is perhaps what Duckles had in mind when he wrote
that “dictionaries are among the most tradition-ridden of all publications.”
79
Slonimsky gained
firsthand knowledge of lexicographical borrowing when, as a contributor and associate editor of
the first edition of Oscar Thompson’s International Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians (1939),
he entered Thompson’s office one morning only to find “a prolixity of young men and women
busily copying bits of misinformation from such tainted sources as [Arthur Eaglefield-]Hull’s
Dictionary of Modern Music and Musicians [1924], the obsolete 1926 edition of Grove’s
Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and other flawed reference works.”
80
He dubbed such
borrowers “Grove-diggers” and “garbage collectors,”
81
and he further bemoaned the practice,

78
Anthony Gishford, review of Grove’s Dictionary of Music, 5th ed., Tempo, n.s., no. 34 (Winter
1954–55): 30.
79
Duckles, “Some Observations,” 116.
80
Slonimsky, Perfect Pitch, 193.
81
Ibid., 193–94; Slonimsky, “Lexicographis secundus post Herculem labor,” Notes 33 (June
1977): 767–68. Slonimsky referred to the scene in Thompson’s office as being “among the most
nightmarish recollections of lexicographic horrors, . . . indelibly etched in the corrugations of my
medulla oblongata.” Ibid., 766.
32
with characteristic wit, in a review of the Encyclopédie de la musique published by Fasquelle
(1958–61): “What a sense of frustration! As the Fasquelle volumes came off the press in stately
succession I pounced eagerly on them, and with bated breath and fevered brow je feuilletais les
pages hoping to find something not copied from the French Riemann of 1930, and/or Grove of
1954, and/or early volumes of MGG. . . . Rien, absolument rien!”
82

These idiosyncrasies do not disqualify music lexicography as a source of critical opinion.
The borrowing that Slonimsky witnessed pertains above all, as his accounts make clear, to the
copying of documentary information. Even the very edition of Thompson’s International
Cyclopedia in question—which earned Slonimsky’s scorn as “a hefty dinosaur egg with a yolk
betraying the admixture of protein from many other musicological reptiles”
83
—features a freshly
written article on Rachmaninoff. Nor should critical assessments that have been retained or
borrowed be regarded ipso facto as outdated or inauthentic, insofar as they have undergone the
editorial process contemporaneously; music lexicons are meant to contain information of a more
or less permanent nature, and as long as an editor finds an existing critical assessment
sufficiently fair and accurate, he or she will have little reason to change it.
84

* * *

82
“I leafed through the pages. . . . Nothing, absolutely nothing!” Quotation appended by the
editor to Coover’s review of vols. 2 and 3 of Encyclopédie de la musique, ed. Michel François,
Notes 18 (June 1961): 422. Riemann and Grove we have met, but “MGG” here refers to the
premiere German music encyclopedia, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, whose first
edition was still being issued serially at the time of Slonimsky’s remark.
83
Slonimsky, Perfect Pitch, 193.
84
In rare cases, an assessment may be retained for reasons other than editorial concurrence, and
such do not necessarily possess authority as expressions of contemporaneous critical opinion.
Casper Höweler, for example, forbade posthumous changes to his popular X-Y-Z der muziek,
which continued to be issued in new “editions” for decades after his death. Frits van der Waa,
“Snerpende sinustonen,” De Volkskrant, February 19, 2004. (This article can be viewed at Van
der Waa’s website, accessed May 12, 2016, https://fvdwaa.home.xs4all.nl/art/vk1480.htm.)
33
This study is based on a survey of 226 music lexicons published from 1900 to 2013 in Dutch,
English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, and
Swedish.
85
The assessments gleaned through this survey have been analyzed not merely to tally
negative and positive judgments of Rachmaninoff’s legacy as a composer but also to determine
the critical concepts and rationales that underpin these judgments. Conducting this analysis is
relatively straightforward in the case of assessments that offer some self-explanation, more often
the longer ones.
86
Lexicons, however, tend toward concision, and it is often desirable or
necessary to clarify an assessment by consulting, where possible, its author’s other entries or
writings. This can only be done when an assessment’s authorship is known. Much of the time,
assessments are unsigned, and such cannot always be assumed to have been written by a
lexicon’s editor or compiler, even when a lexicon bears the latter’s name. Baltzell’s Dictionary of
Musicians (1911) would appear, for example, to feature the critical opinion of prominent early-
twentieth-century American music writer and editor W. J. Baltzell. His prefatory note reveals,
however, that he did not claim authorship and was in fact “greatly indebted to Miss Marguerite
Barton, . . . who rendered valuable assistance in gathering the material upon which the sketches
were based and in preparing the first draft of the manuscript.”
87
By contrast, all of the more than
one thousand pages of the original, unassumingly titled Oxford Companion to Music were
authored by Percy Scholes, and his opinion, as Duckles noted above, is evident throughout.

85
The translations in this study are my own, save for that of the assessment from the Hungarian
Zenei Lexikon, in which case I was substantially aided by Bruce V. Chiarelli. To him I offer my
sincere gratitude.
86
An assessment’s length is not, it should be mentioned, a reliable measure of its author’s regard
for its subject. For a brief discussion of this sometimes assumed correlation, see Scholes, preface
to the first ed. of The Oxford Companion to Music, reprinted in the 9th ed., xii.
87
Winton J. Baltzell, editor’s note to Baltzell’s Dictionary of Musicians.
34
Although, as we have seen, it has generally been assumed that Rachmaninoff’s music has
been criticized primarily from the standpoint of modernism, the latter is, in fact, only one of
three distinct ideologies that have influenced his critical reception in varying mixtures. Much has
been, and still could be, written about these ideologies—far too much to cover in any detail
here—but all that the reader must know of them in order to comprehend this study can easily be
summarized. Classicism prized contrapuntal and formal mastery in combination with nobility of
purpose, and its arch-representative is Beethoven. Music that failed on any of these counts might
be deemed superficial, sentimental, or technically inept. Virtuosity was particularly suspect in
stricter formulations of this ideology and had lasting repercussions for the reception of Liszt, for
example. Modernism, by contrast, prized stylistic innovation conceived as the departure from
classic norms in an attempt to engage musically with the social, economic, and political
circumstances of modern life. Modernism had its roots in the nineteenth century but reached its
apex in the mid-twentieth, and Stravinsky is probably its best-known representative. Music that
failed to demonstrate stylistic contemporaneity thus conceived was regarded as old-fashioned,
academic, superficial, or sentimental, and its composers as epigones. It is safe to say that no
major composer has suffered more as a result of this ideology than Rachmaninoff; this popular
notion seems justified.
The other ideology is nationalism, a well-recognized one that has, nonetheless, passed
virtually unnoticed in connection with Rachmaninoff’s critical reception. The deconstruction of
this concept in its remarkably persistent application to Russian music has been one of Richard
Taruskin’s principal legacies and was the premise of his seminal Defining Russia Musically.
88

88
See Taruskin, “Others: A Mythology and a Demurer (By Way of Preface),” in Defining Russia
Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997),
xi–xxxii; and Taruskin, “Some Thoughts on the History and Historiography of Russia Music,”
35
Stated simply, according to this ideology, the individuality and authenticity of Russian
composers depended on their adherence to preconceived notions of Russianness in music that
were strongly colored by racism and colonialism. As Taruskin has written, “whether invoked in
praise or in blame, the arbitrarily defined or proclaimed Russianness of Russian music is a
normative criterion, and ineluctably an invidious one. If ‘How Russian is it?’ is your critical
question, then you have consigned Russian composers to a ghetto.”
89
Ironically, these
preconceived notions emanated in part from certain Russian composers and critics themselves—
the Five (i.e., Balakirev, Borodin, Cui, Musorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov) and their principal
critical mouthpiece, Vladimir Stasov—who sought recognition on the basis of national
authenticity in opposition to the popular and professional success of Anton Rubinstein and his
pupil Tchaikovsky, whom they regarded pejoratively as cosmopolitan. As elsewhere, the most
obvious hallmarks of nationalism in Russian music were the incorporation of folk tunes and
national subject matter, but Russian nationalists also set themselves in opposition to the
conventions of classical forms, identifying musically with the progressive romanticism of
Berlioz and Liszt. Because the most overtly nationalistic Russian composers lived and worked in
St. Petersburg, these propagated a (false) dichotomy between themselves and composers
operating in Moscow. They gained strong critical adherents in the West, especially in France and
England, fundamentally impacting the trajectory of the historiography of Russian music up until
the end of the twentieth century.

Journal of Musicology 3 (Autumn 1984): 321–39. Taruskin’s perspective is effectively
summarized in Francis Maes, “Introduction: Natasha’s Dance, or Musical Nationalism,” chap. 1
of A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans and
Erica Pomerans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 1–10.
89
Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, xvii.
36
While these ideologies will be encountered in varying degrees in the assessments in this
study, most of the latter neither praise nor dismiss the composer in overtly dogmatic terms;
throughout the twentieth century, universal criteria such as technical mastery and distinctness of
personality prevailed in critical assessments in music lexicons. Rachmaninoff’s music has
generally been evaluated favorably in these terms, and this study will argue that, considered
collectively over time, music lexicons have served to affirm his legacy as a composer rather than
to diminish it. For nearly four decades from his first appearance in the genre, Rachmaninoff
elicited not a single negative assessment in any lexicon surveyed, though the few French
lexicons published during this period were cooler than others in their treatment of him. A small
number of negative assessments appeared during mid-century, first in England, where
nationalism was a prominent critical ideology for Russian music, and then spreading into Central
Europe and Italy, where a modernistic viewpoint was more apparent, culminating in the 1970s.
Since that time, the ideologies of modernism and nationalism have both waned. There has been a
steady increase among music lexicons toward a balanced and detailed appreciation of
Rachmaninoff’s music, with the most recent scholarly works rejoining the many others that
never diverged from a basically affirmative assessment of his oeuvre.
37
Chapter 1

1900–1937: International Recognition

The first distinct period in Rachmaninoff’s reception in music lexicons extends from 1900
through 1937. Music lexicons of this period witness his rise to international fame throughout the
West, registering his successive achievements as composer and performer. These assessments
tend toward brevity, as might be expected, since his career was still in the process of unfolding.
None of them are negative, while those in several of the most prominent music lexicons are
unambiguously favorable. Rachmaninoff regularly elicited mention as a composer and pianist,
sometimes also as a conductor.
By the end of the first decade of the century, Rachmaninoff had appeared in Baker’s
Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Riemann’s Musik-Lexikon, and Grove’s Dictionary of
Music and Musicians, which at that time were the three most important lexicographical sources
of current musical biography.
1
The first music lexicon anywhere to feature Rachmaninoff was
the inaugural edition of Baker’s Biographical Dictionary, which appeared in 1900. The brief
entry features only the barest facts of his birth, education, and budding oeuvre, noting that he had
won the Moscow Conservatory’s “great gold medal” on graduating from that institution. Unlike
most later lexicon entries, this one does not mention the Prelude in C-sharp Minor specifically,
which serves as a reminder that the composer’s early reputation was not entirely dependent on
the popular success of that one work. Baker’s Biographical Dictionary proved from the
beginning to be the outstanding source of accurate biographical information that it was designed

1
Though published from 1900 to 1904, Eitner’s monumental Biographisch-bibliographisches
Quellen-Lexikon der Musiker und Musikgelehrten der christlichen Zeitrechnung bis zur Mitte
des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts extends only up to the mid-nineteenth century, as its title
indicates, and does not, of course, feature Rachmaninoff.
38
to be, and it evidently proved useful not only for lay readers but also for other lexicographers: its
pioneering entry on Rachmaninoff is clearly the same one that appears, discreetly modified, in
Rupert Hughes’s Music Lovers’ Encyclopedia, the first edition of which came out in 1903.
2

Rachmaninoff subsequently appeared in three editions of the Riemann, only the last of
which was one of Riemann’s own German editions. Riemann was perhaps the most distinguished
German music theorist and historian of his generation, and, as noted in the introduction, his
Musik-Lexikon was not only circulated widely in German but was also translated, in its various
editions, into many other languages. In 1904, Rachmaninoff appeared in IUlii Engel'’s Russian
translation, described as an “excellent pianist and gifted composer” (otlichnyi pianist i darovityi
kompozitor), and he also appears, without critical commentary, in the 1908 edition of John
Shedlock’s English translation.
3
Riemann himself included the composer for the first time only
in the seventh edition of his Musik-Lexikon, in 1909, where he notes that “Rachmaninoff . . .
made himself known first as an excellent pianist but soon drew attention as a composer as well,”
4

describing him further as a “promising talent” (vielversprechendes Talent).
A letter that Rachmaninoff wrote to Engel' in late 1899 offers an informative glimpse into
the process of biographical lexicography. Engel' had, evidently, written to the composer,
requesting some biographical information about him for inclusion in his forthcoming edition of

2
This work was issued simultaneously as The Musical Guide. Subsequent editions retain the title
named in the body text, save for the 2nd edition (1912), which bore the title Musical Lovers’
Cyclopedia and features the same borrowed article on Rachmaninoff from 1903.
3
Two later concise music lexicons compiled by Engel' also contain entries for Rachmaninoff,
without descriptive commentary, the Kratkii muzykal'nyi slovar' [Concise music dictionary]
(1910) and the Karmannyi muzykal'nyi slovar' [Pocket music dictionary] (1913). Engel'’s name
is often transliterated as “Joel Engel.”
4
“Rachmaninow . . . machte sich zuerst als ausgezeichneter Klavierspieler bekannt, zog aber
bald auch als Komponist die Aufmerksamkeit auf sich.”
39
the Riemann. In response, Rachmaninoff sent him a transcript of a biographical sketch of himself
that had been published in a London periodical earlier that year in connection with his first
appearance in the city, explaining that he had nothing more detailed to offer but that he was
willing to furnish Engel' with additional information personally should it be desired.
5

Rachmaninoff’s language suggests that Engel' had specifically requested published materials,
which reveals something of the relationship between the journalistic press and lexicography,
namely that the former tends to precede the latter. This exchange also shows that the old practice
of soliciting biographical information from one’s own subject, first employed by Mattheson in
the early-eighteenth century,
6
still retained its appeal for biographical lexicographers at the end
of the nineteenth. But who supplied the information for Rachmaninoff’s biographical sketch to
begin with? The answer, given in the sketch itself, reveals still more about the sources of
biographical music lexicography: “We are indebted,” it reads, “for the details of his [i.e.,
Rachmaninoff’s] life to Herr Gustav Ernst, to whom they were in a great measure personally
communicated by Rachmaninoff.”
7
Rachmaninoff, it seems, was given the chance of helping to
shape his own public image in more than one form of musical commentary, which may explain

5
Rachmaninoff to Engel', October 27 (OS), 1899, in S. Rakhmaninov: Literaturnoe nasledie
[S. Rachmaninoff: The literary legacy], ed. Zarui Apetian (Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor,
1978–80), 1:291–92. See also Apetian’s endnote for this letter, 1:549–50, where she names the
periodical and reproduces the (presumably original) Russian text of Rachmaninoff’s typewritten
transcript of the sketch. The concise work list appended to this transcript, however, does not
appear in the original article. Rachmaninoff probably added it to the transcript for Engel'’s
reference.
6
Coover and Franklin, “Dictionaries,” 7:311. See also Lennenberg, “Toward a Composite
Portrait of the Eighteenth-century Musician,” chap. 4 of Witnesses and Scholars, 46–65.
7
[Untitled article], Black and White, April 22, 1899, 481. Gustav Ernst was a professor at the
Crystal Palace School of Art, Science, and Literature and had offered a series of lecture-recitals
on contemporary Russian music in early 1899, including one on Rachmaninoff’s Trio élégiaque
in D Minor, op. 9. “Colleges, Schools, etc.,” London Standard, February 22, 1899, 1; [Untitled
article], Black and White, March 11, 1899, 313.
40
why the sketch emphasizes his greatest successes up to that point—the conservatory medal, the
fact that it had been awarded only once previously, and the success in Russian theaters of his first
opera, Aleko—without mentioning the now famous and then recent public failure of his First
Symphony at its premiere in 1897.
Rachmaninoff appeared in Grove’s for the first time in the second edition, in 1908, in an
entry whose biographical outline closely resembles the one in Engel'’s Riemann. It is one of
many entries on Russian composers in that edition written by Rosa Newmarch, who through
continuing correspondence and travel to Russia had become an important Western source of
information on the music of that country. Newmarch’s articles reveal her awareness of the
nationalistic musical discourse of the time, but her personal taste was not limited by it, for she
was an important early proponent of Tchaikovsky.
8
She describes Rachmaninoff as “a pianist of
repute, and one of the most talented of the younger Moscow school of composers,” noting that he
had “made a good impression in the threefold capacity of composer, conductor, and pianist” at
his London debut in 1899.
The next decade opened with Rachmaninoff’s inclusion in The Standard Musical
Encyclopedia of 1910 and Baltzell’s Dictionary of Musicians of 1911, the latter of which notes
the “novel and varied harmonic effects [of his piano music], well worth the effort of overcoming
the considerable technical difficulty.” A longer assessment appeared in 1919, in the third edition
of Baker’s, newly written by Alfred Remy, the editor of that edition.
9
A German-born New

8
See Newmarch, Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works (London: Richards, 1900); and Modest
Tchaikovsky, The Life and Letters of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, trans. Newmarch (London: J.
Lane, 1906).
9
Although the assessment bears no signature, Remy’s authorship may be presumed from
attributions on the title page and in the preface, as well as from the consistency in taste evident in
various entries.
41
Yorker and direct contemporary of Rachmaninoff, Remy was a linguist and educator by
profession but held arts degrees and was active as a program annotator, music critic for Vogue,
occasional lecturer, and head of the music division of the New International Encyclopedia.
10
His
glowing assessment praises Rachmaninoff’s music not only for its melodic richness but also for
its technical mastery, nobility, and individuality, the last in a manner that little concerns stylistic
innovation as conceived in much later twentieth-century criticism. Remy appears to have
considered Rachmaninoff to be potentially one of the world’s greatest contemporary composers,
and he did not, by contrast with later commentators, view his excellence as a pianist as a
liability:
Excellent pianist and gifted composer. . . . Among living Russian composers
Rachmaninoff unquestionably occupies the first place because of his pronounced
inventive power and finely developed sense of tonal beauty. He keeps aloof from both
impressionism and futurism. The stirring effect of his music proceeds from the inherent
beauty and expressiveness of his themes and their logical, masterly development.
Technically he has learned from the modern Russian and German masters, but his
remarkable inventive power and rich imagination impress upon his work the stamp of
unmistakable individuality. Although a master of all moods, he excels in the portrayal of
the heroic. Nobility, directness, fire, and strength are the prominent characteristics of his
music.
As an expression of high praise for the composer in one of the world’s leading
biographical music lexicons, Remy’s article contrasts starkly with the dismissive statements
about the composer in authoritative contexts that this dissertation took as its point of departure.
What distinguishes his assessment from those statements, however, seems to be not so much the
nature of the music under consideration as the predilections of the given commentator. Remy’s
admiration for Rachmaninoff can be understood as a reflection of his ardent admiration of
Wagner, whose late-romantic style Rachmaninoff shared in significant respects. Remy offered a

10
“Alfred Remy: Language Teacher and Musician Succumbs Here at 66,” New York Times,
March 1, 1937; “Prof. Alfred Remy’s Funeral Held Today,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 1,
1937.
42
series of lectures on Wagner for Columbia University’s Institute of Arts and Sciences during the
winter of 1914–15
11
and infused Baker’s article on Wagner from the second edition with even
more enthusiasm in the present edition: “In comprehensiveness and grandeur of conception,
originality and boldness of execution, vividness of characterization, intensity of expression and
sustained power Wagner towers like a colossus above all other dramatic composers.”
12

Given his romantic predilection, it is perhaps not surprising that Remy responded poorly
to what he (and many others at that time) termed “futurism” or the “ultra-modern.”
13
Indeed, his
relatively indiscriminate use of such stylistic terms suggests that Remy held little sympathy for
the progressive music of his time. He felt that, after Pelléas et Mélisande, Debussy’s style
exhibits “a decline, for the music seems to become even more intangible,” proof enough for
Remy of the meager aesthetic possibilities of impressionism. Remy praised Richard Strauss’s
symphonic poems up to 1895 for their “emotional intensity, soaring melodic invention, a
marvelous sense of orchestral color, extraordinary power of characterization and supreme
command of technical resources,” but later ones such as Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben
initiated a “steady decline” culminating with the opera Elektra, in which he reached “the lowest
level of decadence.” Nowhere is his antipathy for “futurism” on better display than in his
commentary on Stravinsky:

11
“Discuss Wagner Music: Mr. Alfred Remy Lectures Before the Institute,” Columbia Daily
Spectator, February 26, 1915; “To Lecture on Wagner,” Columbia Daily Spectator, March 10,
1915.”
12
For this and the following quotations from Remy, see, in order of their appearance here,
Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, 3rd ed., s.vv. “Wagner, (Wilhelm) Richard”;
“Debussy, Claude (-Achille)”; “Strauss, Richard”; and “Stravinsky, Igor Fedorovitch.”
13
Remy is also reported to have “termed both Weimar art and music aberrations.” Guy Stern,
“The Way We Were: Reminiscences of Columbia’s German Department,” Germanic Review 78
(Winter 2003): 14.
43
Unlike Schönberg or Scriabin, whose earliest music still rests on the foundation laid by
the masters, Stravinsky at once begins in a style which is a direct negation of all
acknowledged principles or standards. His combinations of tones defy analysis, for
haphazard combinations of dissonant intervals do not constitute a chord, as that term is
understood in music. The complete absence of even the most meager thematic
developments may surprise only those who do not know that the first law of futurism
forbids all “repetition.”
Remy’s assessment of Rachmaninoff thus becomes unequivocal. Keeping “aloof from both
impressionism and futurism” meant avoiding those two strains of modern music that Remy
found most objectionable, while Rachmaninoff’s kinship with Wagnerian late romanticism won
him Remy’s praise.
Positive impressions of Rachmaninoff’s music appear also in publications of the 1920s.
The 1924 New Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians reports that Rachmaninoff’s “renown rests
both upon his gifts in interpretation and impression at the keyboard and upon the originality and
nobility of his compositions.” The shorter assessments in Ralph Dunstan’s Cyclopaedic
Dictionary of Music and Carlo Schmidl’s Dizionario universale dei musicisti are in a similar
vein. Similar to Remy’s in length and enthusiasm was Granville Bantock’s assessment, also
appearing in 1924, in A Dictionary of Modern Music and Musicians, a significant work featuring
a global list of distinguished contributors. Bantock is not widely known, but he was one of the
most prominent English composers of his generation, succeeding Elgar at Birmingham
University in 1908 and remaining there until 1934. Bantock, like Remy, appealed to traditional,
rather than progressive, criteria in his evaluation of Rachmaninoff’s music, which he praises for
its idiomatic instrumentation, national color, and individuality:
His three pianoforte concertos . . . are welcome additions to the repertory of concert
pianists, being grateful to the soloist, and very effectively scored for orchestra. His style
is essentially melodious, and he makes frequent use of the national idioms in his music.
His music, classical in spirit and in technique, reveals a clearly defined and attractive
personality. As a song-writer, Rachmaninoff is in the front rank of Russian composers
and his songs cover a wide and varied range of expression.
44
The musical inclinations behind Bantock’s critical approach are not far to seek. He
composed on a large scale, sharing as a creator of music the predilection for the German late-
romantic aesthetic that Remy displayed as a writer.
14
He was an important early advocate of
Sibelius in England and, like Rachmaninoff himself, maintained an admiration for Tchaikovsky
that left its imprint on his music.
15
It is unclear, however, what Bantock meant by “national
idioms.” Perhaps he regarded Tchaikovsky’s style as national and hence regarded
Rachmaninoff’s as such on account of its similarity with the former.
Bantock’s assessment subsequently became the subject of a remarkable series of
borrowings, making it influential to a degree that would have been difficult to predict. Alfred
Einstein, one of the eminent musicologists of his time and a significant contributor to A
Dictionary of Modern Music and Musicians, borrowed Bantock’s stylistic commentary for his
edited German translation of that work, Das neue Musiklexikon: nach dem Dictionary of Modern
Music and Musicians, which appeared in 1926. There he paired Bantock’s commentary with
biographical information taken from Riemann’s Musik-Lexikon, the editorship of which he had
assumed on its author’s death in 1919. In this form, Einstein’s composite assessment enjoyed
considerable prominence. Einstein carried it into the eleventh edition of the Riemann, published
in 1929, where it commanded considerable attention and was not superseded for more than thirty

14
For a contemporaneous survey of Bantock’s works, see Herbert Antcliffe, “A Brief Survey of
the Works of Granville Bantock,” Musical Quarterly 4 (July 1918): 333–46; for a retrospective
view, see Peter J. Pirie, “Bantock and His Generation,” Musical Times 109 (August 1968): 715–
17.
15
Regarding Bantock and Tchaikovsky, see Michael Allis, “Bantock and Southey: Musical
Otherness and Fatalism in Thalaba the Destroyer,” Music and Letters 95 (2014): 50–54.
45
years.
16
This edition was cited by the 1932 Dutch Geïllustreerd muzieklexicon and also served as
the basis for the 1954 Diccionario de la música Labor,
17
both of which feature Einstein’s entry
on Rachmaninoff in slightly adapted form. But even before the assessment appeared in the
Riemann, its influence was felt from Das neue Musiklexikon, for it left an unmistakable imprint
on the assessment that appeared, also in 1929, in the Diccionario de la música ilustrado. From
there it was carried in turn, in 1952, into the Diccionario enciclopédico de la música.
This situation merits some reflection. First, as suggested in the introduction, music
lexicographers can be tenacious borrowers, undaunted by lingual barriers (overcoming these is
rather the point) and unconcerned by the potential irrelevance to their own readership of an
assessment written in a different place, time, or both. Such is the authority of the lexicon:
lexicographers, like their readers, turn to lexicons when they need information deemed too
difficult to obtain through independent effort. They borrow because they believe that lexicons
contain only factual information. Even so distinguished a musical commentator as Einstein—
critic, musicologist, editor of the Riemann and the Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft—was not
opposed to borrowing when confronted by the practical limits of his knowledge. Second,
Rachmaninoff was considered important enough that even lexicographers who, judging from the
directness of their borrowing from another source, lacked personal familiarity with his music still
felt it necessary to include him. Far from invalidating these assessments, this circumstance
suggests that Rachmaninoff was generally held in high regard. In any event, from the mid-1920s

16
Einstein likewise carried much else from Das neue Musiklexikon into this edition. Duckles and
Reed, Music Reference and Research Materials, 6. The 12th ed. of the Riemann began appearing
in 1959 and will be examined below.
17
Duckles and Reed, Music Reference and Research Materials, 11.
46
to the mid-1950s, Bantock’s enthusiastic description of the composer reached what can only be a
very large number of English, Dutch, German, and Spanish readers.
Assessments of the 1930s attest to Rachmaninoff’s continuing prominence in musical
life. The enthusiastic assessment that appeared in 1931 in the Hungarian Zenei Lexikon (Music
dictionary)—likely written by Rachmaninoff’s earlier biographer Oskar von Riesemann, the
lexicon’s listed contributor for Russian music—notes of the composer that, “since the [18]90s,
he has caused a worldwide sensation with the suggestive power and tremendous dramatic fantasy
of his brilliant piano playing and later with his classically oriented but essentially late-romantic
piano compositions, which have stood out from the body of recent Russian music mainly by
virtue of their brilliant exploitation of the piano’s tonal palette.”
18
The assessment that appeared
in 1935 in the first edition of Hans Moser’s Musik Lexikon offers, like Einstein’s, a brief stylistic
comment
19
but seems not to be grounded in personal familiarity with the music, suggested in this
case by editorial error. He notes that Rachmaninoff’s “cantata The Bells . . . attracted attention,
as did a second symphony (A Minor [sic]) and his recent variations on Corelli’s Folia for piano
and orchestra [sic]”—incorrectly indicating the key of the Second Symphony (E minor) and the
instrumentation of the Corelli Variations (for piano solo).
20
It was the fact that such works

18
“A 90-es évek óta világszerte feltűnést keltett szuggesztiv erejű, hatalmas drámai fantáziától
fűtőtt, szinpompás zongorajátékával, majd klasszicisztikus iranyú, de szelleműkben
későromantikus zongora kompozicióival, melyek főként a zongoraszinhatások bravuros
kiaknázásában magaslanak ki az ujabb orosz zeneirodalomból.”
19
“As a successful song and piano composer, Rachmaninoff is more closely associated with
Tchaikovsky than Musorgsky.” (Rachmaninow knüpfte als erfolgreich Lieder- und Klavier-
Komponist mehr bei Tschaikowski als bei Mussorgski an.)
20
“Seine Kantate Glocken . . . wurde ebenso beachtet wie eine 2. Sinfonie (a-moll) und
neuestens seine Variationen über Corellis Folia für Klavier und Orchester.” It was the
symphony’s key, not its number, that Moser mistook, for Rachmaninoff’s Third Symphony,
which is in A minor, was not completed until 1936.
47
“attracted attention” that seems to have been most relevant or important. Rachmaninoff’s
prominence was likewise the principle for his inclusion in the 1936 edition of Paul Frank’s
Kurzgefaßtes Tonkünstler-Lexikon and underlies his assessment in the 1937 Encyclopedia of
Music and Musicians.
To summarize, the most prominent music lexicons of England, Germany, Hungary, Italy,
the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, and the United States all featured favorable assessments of
Rachmaninoff during this period. No assessments from this period describe Rachmaninoff as
old-fashioned or shallow. Quite the opposite. Though Remy’s and Bantock’s stylistic
commentaries were longer than average, their tone is characteristic: Rachmaninoff was viewed
as a distinguished, multifaceted, distinctly Russian composer with a growing list of visible
musical achievements. The only noteworthy exception to this trend is France, where
lexicographical opinion was decidedly neutral. Rachmaninoff first appeared in George
Humbert’s French translation of the Riemann in 1913, in the second edition, which reproduces
Riemann’s original entry from the seventh German edition while omitting the phrase “promising
talent.” The entry in third French edition, which appeared in 1931, is updated but offers no
additional evaluative comment. Even in France, however, Rachmaninoff’s prominence was
acknowledged. The article on Russian music in Albert Lavignac’s important Encyclopédie de la
musique et dictionnaire du conservatoire names him with Arensky, Glazunov, and Scriabin as
“the most passionate and important representatives” of “the Wagnerian tendency” in
contemporaneous Russian music.
21
It should be noted that music lexicography was a relatively
unimportant channel for critical opinion in France during this period. Aside from the three

21
“La tendance qui se manifeste aujourd’hui le plus généralement est la tendance wagnérienne.
Arenski, . . . Glazounoff, . . . Rachmaninoff et Scriabine en sont les représentants les plus
passionnés et les plus importants.” René Delange and Henry Malherbe, “Russie,” in
Encyclopédie de la musique et dictionnaire du conservatoire, 5:2565.
48
editions of Humbert’s translated Riemann and Lavignac’s Encyclopédie, the only noteworthy
music lexicon to appear in France was Michel Brenet’s terminological Dictionnaire pratique et
historique de la musique.
49
Chapter 2

1938–1979: Regional Variation

Assessments from the late 1930s mark a shift in Rachmaninoff’s reception in music lexicons. On
one hand, in 1938, the first negative assessment of the composer in a music lexicon appeared, in
the first edition of Percy Scholes’s Oxford Companion to Music, initiating a clash of opinions in
the genre concerning Rachmaninoff’s legacy that would characterize the entire period lasting
until around 1980. On the other, in 1939, Rachmaninoff received favorable treatment in a new
entry longer than any yet written on him, in the first edition of Oscar Thompson’s International
Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians, which prefigured a general trend toward more detailed
coverage of the composer’s life and works in music lexicons of the period. Assessments
published at this time also exhibit greater ideological diversity than before. Universal criteria
continued to be employed but were now inflected, in some cases, by modernism or nationalism,
sometimes overtly. In America, Eastern Europe, and Italy, assessments initially gained in
enthusiasm, while appreciation in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden was more
tempered. In England, lexicographical opinion became sharply divided. Although some English
lexicons of the period continued to espouse a favorable view of the composer, Scholes proved
only the first of three influential English commentators to write negative assessments of
Rachmaninoff in high-profile music lexicons during mid-century, each of them evincing a
critical outlook strongly colored by nationalism. These prefigured a broader downturn in
Rachmaninoff’s reception in the genre on the European Continent, where modernism was the
more prominent ideology.

50
Growing Enthusiasm: America, Eastern Europe, and Italy
In the United States especially, assessments grew longer and more detailed. Rounding out the
1930s were two longer assessments that essentially expanded upon the international consensus
established up to this point.
1
The first of these was mentioned above and appeared in 1939 in the
first edition of Thompson’s International Cyclopedia. Written by Irving Kolodin, the new entry
would appear unchanged in each of the title’s ten subsequent editions, the last appearing in 1985,
and it was also reprinted in Thompson’s Great Modern Composers in 1941. Kolodin was then
writing for the New York Sun and would go on to become one of the most widely read American
critics of the mid-twentieth century, distinguished as a program annotator for the New York
Philharmonic, reviewer of recordings, and author of several books.
2
The biographical portion of
his article on Rachmaninoff is the longest yet offered in a music lexicon and clearly benefited
from Oskar von Riesemann’s 1934 biography of the composer.
3
Assessing his oeuvre, Kolodin
acknowledged the popularity of Rachmaninoff’s piano works but more especially praised the
songs and the symphonic and piano-symphonic works. His description of the Second Symphony
encapsulates his general regard for the composer at his best: “Allied to the late works of
Tchaikovsky in spirit and expression, it nevertheless speaks a vocabulary warmly individual and
strongly distinctive, flavored by accents not to be confused with those of any other composer.”
Kolodin also offered particular praise for Rachmaninoff’s orchestration: “Within its

1
There is a third American assessment from this period, the one in Albert Wier’s Macmillan
Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians (1938), which does not contain critical commentary.
2
See Kolodin, The Composer as Listener: A Guide to Music (New York: Horizon, 1958);
Kolodin, The Metropolitan Opera: 1883–1966, 4th ed. (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1966);
Kolodin, The Musical Life (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1958).
3
See Oskar von Riesemann, Rachmaninoff’s Recollections: Told to Oskar von Riesemann (1934;
reprint, Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970).
51
acknowledged boundaries,” he wrote, “it is writing of surpassing euphony and richness, not only
intimately understanding of the nature of the instruments employed, but also—and this is the test
of any orchestration—wholly related to the sense of the musical ideas. By this standard,
Rachmaninoff’s orchestration is among the soundest that the day’s music can offer.”
Unlike that of Remy and Bantock, Kolodin’s appreciation of Rachmaninoff cannot be
attributed to a predominantly romanticist predisposition, as his 1969 book The Continuity of
Music attests. Kolodin’s taste had its limits, to be sure: a prominent subsidiary goal of the book is
to blame Schoenbergian serialism for driving contemporary audiences and composers apart by
interrupting “the long sequence of continuity which prevailed over centuries” in European music
(that is, a system of melodic and harmonic hierarchies).
4
Kolodin’s primary objective is,
however, to foster an appreciation of a wide variety of music by tracing a continuous evolution
of musical style among celebrated works from the high Baroque to the mid-twentieth century.
Accordingly, Kolodin’s fondness for this varied repertoire is displayed throughout, including
eighteenth-century works as well as those by such moderns as Debussy, Stravinsky, and even, to
a certain extent, the members of the Second Viennese School. His basic concern was that music
satisfy the interests of “a large segment of the discriminating public”
5
—which, as anyone would
agree, Rachmaninoff’s music does.
The other American assessment also appeared in 1939, in a revised edition of the Music
Lovers’ Encyclopedia, and was written by Richard Leonard.
6
Leonard was a radio programmer

4
Kolodin, The Continuity of Music: A History of Influence (New York: Knopf, 1969), vi–vii, 4–
7, 356–66.
5
Ibid., vi.
6
This lexicon consists of two major parts: a “Biographical Dictionary of Musicians”—which
consists of concise entries and was published separately in 1940 as The Biographical Dictionary
of Musicians—and “Short Biographies of Musicians,” which contains articles running a few
52
for the National Broadcasting Company and the author of the popular mid-century A History of
Russian Music.
7
His commentary opens with a description of Rachmaninoff’s conservative
position vis-à-vis the musical developments of his day—the first mention of this issue that we
have yet encountered in music lexicons—noting that “much of Rachmaninoff’s music sounds
like a voice from the past, speaking the romantic speech of the eighteen-eighties and nineties.”
But whereas Rachmaninoff’s detractors have tended to interpret this circumstance as a symptom
of epigonism, Leonard attributes it to Rachmaninoff’s “proudly individualistic” nature,
describing the composer as “a man of forceful inner convictions that could not easily be shaken.”
More sharply contrasting views can hardly be imagined. Leonard proceeds with comment on
Rachmaninoff’s position among Russian composers. Like Newmarch, he displays an awareness
of the two late-nineteenth-century schools of Russian music but is not bound by a strict
nationalistic view of musical Russianness: “Rachmaninoff is often spoken of as a kind of
connecting link between the two main branches of Russian music in the nineteenth century,”
Leonard wrote. “. . . He possesses the technical equipment of an eclectic, a thorough knowledge
of the methods and procedures of the French and German schools of the nineteenth century; but
his thematic material, the whole color and feeling of his music, is unmistakably Russian.”
Commenting more specifically on the music itself, Leonard writes that the piano works “lack the
depth and subtlety of Chopin’s greater works, but they are brilliantly pianistic and exemplify the
composer’s mastery of the technical resources of the instrument.” By contrast, his praise of the
songs and symphonic works is offered without reservation, the last of which are said to “give
evidence of the composer’s masterful command of the orchestra, and his ability to sustain, in the

pages in length on prominent composers. Leonard’s article on Rachmaninoff appears in the
latter, but the former also features a concise, unsigned entry on the composer.
7
See Richard A. Leonard, A History of Russian Music (London: Jarrolds, 1956).
53
difficult large forms, a lofty inspiration.” In summary, Leonard, like Kolodin, held a balanced
view of Rachmaninoff’s oeuvre, not exhibiting any of the partisanship for or against the
composer that later came to be thought of as characteristic of his critical reception.
Rachmaninoff continued to garner balanced but essentially favorable treatment in music
lexicons published in the United States throughout this period. Subsequent editions of Music
Lovers’ Encyclopedia appearing in 1947, 1950, and 1954 reproduce Leonard’s earlier
commentary. The editors of the fourth edition of Baker’s, published in 1940, tempered Remy’s
enthusiasm but slightly: Rachmaninoff now occupied “a high place,” rather than “the first,”
among living Russian composers, while all of Remy’s other descriptive praise remained
unchanged. David Ewen, a versatile, prolific, and respected writer on music, wrote warmly of
Rachmaninoff in several of his surveys during this period. His 1959 Encyclopedia of Concert
Music displays his well-rounded appreciation of the whole range of twentieth-century musical
developments (as do his many other writings), which did not prevent him from deeming
Rachmaninoff “one of the preeminent musicians of the twentieth century, both as a musical
creator and as an interpreter.” Ewen notes, not disparagingly, that Rachmaninoff “was a
conservative” for whom “the structures and techniques of the past were completely serviceable.
If he did not discover any new worlds of sound,” Ewen continued, “he did succeed in bringing to
the old world of music a wealth of beauty, sentiment, nostalgia, and at times melancholy.” Like
Leonard, Ewen maintained a flexible view of the national character of Rachmaninoff’s music,
deeming it “Russian to its very core . . . not because he aspired towards a nationalist expression
or used folk idioms, but because he was a Russian, and everything he wrote was colored by his
54
own background and temperament.”
8
Ewen described Rachmaninoff similarly in his 1969
Composers Since 1900 and again in his 1978 Musicians since 1900.
9

Rachmaninoff also received favorable treatment in the most prominent American
biographical music lexicon of the period, Slonimsky’s significantly enlarged and completely
revised fifth edition of Baker’s, which appeared in 1958. A Russian-born American composer,
conductor, and musicologist of wide-ranging interests, Slonimsky was among the most
celebrated music lexicographers of the twentieth century, valued for his colorful style, erudition,
attention to detail, and tireless devotion to accuracy, the product of rigorous and continuous
independent research. He had assisted with The International Cyclopedia from its inauguration,
later editing four successive editions of that title, was heartily acknowledged by Blom for his
assistance with the fifth edition of Grove’s, was acknowledged also for his help with the twelfth
edition of the Riemann, and edited four editions of Baker’s famous for their accuracy.
10
Like
those of Leonard and Ewen, his assessment in Baker’s notes Rachmaninoff’s ties with the past
but emphasizes his individuality all the same:
Among Russian composers Rachmaninoff occupies a very important place. The sources
of his inspiration lie in the romantic tradition of nineteenth-century Russian music; the
link with Tchaikovsky’s lyrical art is very strong; melancholy moods prevail and minor
keys predominate in Rachmaninoff’s compositions, as in Tchaikovsky’s; but there is an
unmistakable stamp of Rachmaninoff’s own individuality in the broad, rhapsodic sweep
of the melodic line, and particularly in the fully expanded sonorities and fine resonant
harmonies of his piano writing; its technical resourcefulness is unexcelled since Liszt.

8
Here Ewen paraphrases a statement made by Rachmaninoff in an extended interview he
conducted with the composer for Etude magazine. See Rachmaninoff, “Music Should Speak
from the Heart,” Etude, December 1941, 848.
9
Ewen described him in the latter as “one of the great composers of the twentieth century.”
10
Slonimsky recounted the emphatic endorsements of his colleagues “with some measure of
pride” in the preface to the eighth edition of Baker’s. See also Slonimsky, Perfect Pitch, 201,
204.
55
This commentary would appear unchanged in each of the lexicon’s four subsequent editions and
in the several other titles derived from it.
Aside from its appearance in such an authoritative lexicon, Slonimsky’s positive
assessment gains in significance when viewed against the backdrop of his well-known advocacy
of modern music. Until 1937, when the publication of his unique musical chronicle, Music since
1900, made his name as a writer, Slonimsky was best known as a conductor of ultra-modern
music. He was the proud dedicatee of Edgard Varèse’s Ionisation and premiered both that work
and Charles Ives’s Three Places in New England, among others. In fact, his unrelenting
advocacy of such music was, according to his own account, what led to the “inglorious end of
[his] conducting career,” when, in 1933, his summer appointment at the Hollywood Bowl was
abruptly terminated by the board mid-season after a series of programs featuring works by Henry
Cowell, Roy Harris, Dane Rudhyar, and Varèse.
11

Slonimsky’s interest in modern music did not abate when he settled into his career as a
writer—it supplied, for example, the premise of his immensely popular Lexicon of Musical
Invective—but it never manifested itself in a doctrinaire opposition to late-romantic music as it
did with Stravinsky and many others at the time. His Music since 1900 chronicles the landmark
events of Rachmaninoff’s career right alongside those of Bartók, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky, in

11
Slonimsky, Perfect Pitch, 124–27. The critical and popular response to these concerts—some
of which Slonimsky recounts, along with commentary from the orchestra and its management—
makes for amusing reading. See, for example, Isabel Morse Jones, “Bowl Concert Features
Queen Mario’s Singing,” Los Angeles Times, July 22, 1933; Philip K. Scheuer, “A Town Called
Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, July 30, 1933; and Alma Whitaker, “Sugar and Spice,” Los
Angeles Times, July 30, 1933. Indeed, Slonimsky’s name mysteriously disappears from the Los
Angeles Times that summer after this press. At least one audience member, however, apparently
listened to Slonimsky’s programs with interest: John Cage. Slonimsky, “Return to the
Hollywood Bowl—58 Years Later,” transcript of a lecture given at the Hollywood Bowl on
April 15, 1991, in appendix to Exiles in Paradise, ed. Carol Merrill-Mirsky (Hollywood: Los
Angeles Philharmonic Association, 1991 [exhibition catalog]), 85.
56
addition to cataloging important modernist documents and Slonimsky’s own correspondence
with modernist composers. Registering Rachmaninoff’s death in the 1949 edition of that title, he
described the composer as “the towering giant of the golden age of Russian music, whose
emotional concertos and preludes are the perennials of pianism around the globe.”
12
Similarly,
his 1958 edition of Baker’s could accommodate both his positive assessment of Rachmaninoff
and a statement describing Schoenberg’s “music of great expressiveness and power, which, in
spite of the difficulties of performance and slowness of public comprehension, has become one
of the strongest influences in the art.”
13
Rachmaninoff’s treatment in other American lexicons of
this period is similarly benign.
14

Though no country produced as many extended assessments during this period as the
United States, many European lexicons maintained a comparable view. We have already seen
that the two most prominent Spanish lexicons of the period reiterated Bantock’s assessment.
Russian lexicographical opinion of Rachmaninoff likewise remained high. Russian music
lexicons containing composer biographies have not been great in number. After Engel'’s early
Riemann, the next significant work to appear was the 1959 Entsiklopedicheskii muzykal'nyi

12
Slonimsky, Music since 1900, 3rd. ed (New York: Coleman-Ross, 1949), 532. Slonimsky
revised this statement slightly for subsequent editions as follows: “Last giant of the golden age of
Russian music, great virtuoso pianist, composer of emotionally stirring, supremely pianistic
concertos and preludes imperishable in their romantic appeal to successive generations of music
lovers all over the world.” 4th ed. (1971), 768; 5th ed. (1994), 484.
13
Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, 5th ed., s.v. “Schoenberg, Arnold.”
14
The most concise of these abstain from critical commentary, while others feature favorable
commentary. See Christine Ammer, Harper’s Dictionary of Music (1972); The ASCAP
Biographical Dictionary (1966; this brief assessment was carried into the 1980 ed.); Norman
Lloyd, The Golden Encyclopedia of Music (1968); Kenneth Thompson’s Dictionary of
Twentieth-Century Composers (1973), which abstains from assessment generally but features an
informed biographical summary of Rachmaninoff, a meticulous work list, and a generous
bibliography; and Watson and Watson, A Concise Dictionary of Music (1965).
57
slovar' (Encyclopedic music dictionary), which features a brief but laudatory article describing
Rachmaninoff as a master Russian composer in multiple genres with a wide emotional range.
The assessment was polished up for the second edition, published in 1966, as follows:
One of the greatest representatives of the pianistic art in the world, an excellent
conductor, and an outstanding master of piano, symphonic, and vocal music. Romantic
pathos and masculine power combine in Rachmaninoff’s music with lyrical and
contemplative moods. It is characterized by expansive lyricism, harmonic richness, and
vivid national color.
15

The only noteworthy fluctuation in the composer’s reception in his native country was, in fact,
the temporary and politically motivated ban placed on his music in 1931 after he signed a public
letter condemning the Bolshevik regime.
16
His charitable support of the Soviet Army during
World War II restored him to favor, as the birthday congratulations sent him by the Union of
Soviet Composers in 1943 indicate.
17

15
“Odin iz velichaishikh predstavitelei mirovogo pianisticheskogo iskusstva, zamechatel'nyi
dirizher, vydaiushchiisia master fortepiannoi, simfonicheskoi i vokal'noi muzyki. Romanticheskii
pafos, muzhestvennaia sila sochetaiutsia v muzyike Rakhmaninova s lirikosozertsatel'nymi
nastroeniiami. Ei svoistvenny shirokaia napevnost', bogatstvo garmonicheskogo iazyka, iarkost'
natsional'nogo kolorita.”
16
For the original account of this ban, see Riesemann, Rachmaninoff’s Recollections, 200–04;
this account is enlarged somewhat in Seroff, Rachmaninoff, 200–07; for an introductory
discussion of Rachmaninoff’s rehabilitation in Soviet Russia during World War II, see ibid.,
233–38. Pauline Fairclough has brought additional light to Rachmaninoff’s critical reception in
the Soviet Union during this period; she is, however, unaware of the letter that touched off the
ban. See Fairclough, Classics for the Masses, 89–90, 185–91.
17
This telegram contains an informative assessment in and of itself: “We greet you as a
composer of whom Russian musical culture is proud, the greatest pianist of our time, a brilliant
conductor and public man who in these times has shown patriotic feelings that have found a
response in the heart of every Russian. We greet you as a creator of musical works penetrating in
their depth and expressiveness. Your piano concertos and symphonies, your chamber works,
songs, and other compositions are often played in the Soviet Union, and the public here watches
with close attention your creative activity and is proud of your triumphs.” Union of Soviet
Composers to Rachmaninoff, March 22, 1943, quoted in Bertensson, Sergei Rachmaninoff, 384.
Unfortunately, Rachmaninoff’s final illness had progressed to such an extent that he was unable
to receive these greetings, and he died less than a week later.
58
Lexicons from other Eastern European countries also featured highly favorable
assessments at this time. The 1960 edition of the Polish Mała encyklopedia muzyki (Little
encyclopedia of music) describes Rachmaninoff’s music as strongly Russian, bearing the traces
not only of Tchaikovsky but also, in the songs, of Musorgsky. It also praises the piano works,
“full of vividness and virtuosic brilliance” (pełne barwności i blasku wirtuozowskiego). A new
assessment appeared in the second edition, published in 1968, praising Rachmaninoff’s “formal
discipline” (dyscyplina formy). “In his piano works,” it continues, “Rachmaninoff eschewed
stunts of a purely virtuosic or daring nature; he employed a variety of accompanimental forms, as
well as varied dynamics and articulation.”
18
The Yugoslavian Muzicka enciklopedija features an
effusive assessment, published in 1963, by distinguished Czech-Serbian piano pedagogue and
music critic Emil Hajek:
The themes of his works are expansive and long-breathed, possessing extraordinary
melodic beauty; the romantic but essentially diatonic harmonic foundation is interesting
and often very effective; the architectural structure—within the limits of traditional
forms—is expertly crafted. Of his various works the Second and Third Concertos and
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini are among the most commonly performed works in
the piano literature. His songs are real pearls of Russian vocal lyricism. The piano works
significantly expand the expressive possibilities of the instrument, especially the original
design of the moving accompaniments. Through all his work there runs a single lyrical,
melancholic line, personal and typically Rachmaninoffian.
19

18
“W swych utworach fortepianowych Rachmaninow usunął chwyty czysto wirtuozowskie,
brawurowe; stosował różnorodne formy akompaniamentu, zróżnicowaną dynamikę i
artykulację.”
19
“Teme njegovih dela širokog su raspona i daha, vanredne melodijske lepote; romantička
harmonska podloga ali u biti dijatonska sveža je, zanimljiva i često veoma efektna; arhitektonska
struktura—u granicama tradicionalnih oblika—znalački izradena. Od njegovih raznovrsnih dela
II i III klavirski koncert pa Rapsodija na temu Paganinija ubrajaju se u najčešče izvodena dela
klavirske literature. Njegove pesme pravi su biseri ruske vokalne lirike. Klavirske kompozicije
znatno proširuju izražajne mogućnosti ovog instrumenta, naročito originalnim crtežima svojih
pokretnih deonica. Kroz sva njegova dela provlači se jedna lirska, setna crta, njegova lična,
tipična rahmanjinovska.”
59
The 1965 edition of the Hungarian Zenei Lexikon retains its earlier assessment, adapting the
wording but slightly and insignificantly.
By comparison with Schmidl’s Dizionario universale dei musicisti, noted briefly above,
Italian lexicons of the period suggest a firm establishment of Rachmaninoff’s reputation there as
a composer. The 1959 Dizionario Ricordi della musica e dei musicisti alludes to the question of
Rachmaninoff’s relative merits as a pianist and composer, siding with the latter: “A musician
rich in inventive genius and solid craftsmanship, his work as a composer is both as valid and
more lasting than as a virtuoso.”
20
The assessment that appeared in 1964 in the four-volume
Enciclopedia della musica likewise describes Rachmaninoff as “a composer of considerable
importance. In his oeuvre,” the entry continues, “the turbid and sensual romanticism of
Tchaikovsky continues, characterized, however, by a personal search in the domain of melody
and harmony.”
21
Both lexicons reserve special praise for Rachmaninoff’s songs.

Tempered Appreciation: France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden
Other European assessments of the period balance criticism and praise somewhat more evenly.
Their criticism is sometimes harsh—especially the notion, encountered more frequently in this
period, that Rachmaninoff’s music is superficial—but in none of these is his legacy negated
outright. In France, opinion appears to have been divided, for entries of this period vary
considerably in length and tone. The decidedly positive assessment in the 1957 Larousse de la
musique rejects a piano-centric view of the composer’s oeuvre and states that Rachmaninoff

20
“Compositore di notevole importanza. Musicista ricco di estro inventivo e di solida scienza
construttiva, la sua opera di compositore è altrettanto valida e più duratura di quella
virtuosistica.”
21
“Nella sua produzione continua il torbido e sensuale romanticismo di Ciakovski, caratterizzato
però da una ricerca personale nel campo melodico e armonico.”
60
combined the musical best of the West and of Russia. “Although he was one of the century’s
great pianists,” it reads, “he was no mere ‘piano composer’: his inspiration, very pure, is founded
on a perfect knowledge of Western music and of Russian folklore, and on a lyricism of the
highest order, making him one of the best Russian composers of the twentieth century. Sincerity
and sensibility are the dominant trademarks of his work.”
22

By contrast, the unsigned entry that appeared in 1961 in Fasquelle’s splendorous
Encyclopédie de la musique describes Rachmaninoff’s style with a single statement: “His work
is marked by the predominant influence of Tchaikovsky.”
23
This brusque treatment can probably
be attributed to the lexicon’s twentieth-century slant, which James Coover noted in his review of
the work.
24
Numbered among its editors, collaborators, and patrons were many of the most
prominent modernist composers of the mid-twentieth century, including Milton Babbitt, Pierre
Boulez, Pierre Schaeffer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Igor Stravinsky.
Falling somewhere in between these two is the assessment in Roland de Candé’s 1964
Dictionnaire des musiciens. The assessment, which identifies Rachmaninoff merely as
“pianiste,” laments the composer’s indifference to stylistic innovation but praises the
construction and inspiration of his music nonetheless:
This very great pianist is a very conventional composer who belongs neither to his time
nor to any definite school. His music is solidly constructed and brilliantly written for the
piano, but the generous lyricism that brought two of his works (the Second Concerto and

22
“Bien qu’il fût un des grands pianistes du siècle, il n’a jamais composé de la «musique de
pianiste»: son inspiration, très pure, fondée sur une parfaite connaissance de la musique
occidentale et du folklore russe, sur un lyrisme du meilleur aloi, fait de lui un des meilleurs
compositeurs russes du xx
e
siècle. Sincérité et sensibilité sont les marques dominantes de son
œuvre.”
23
“Son œuvre est marquée par l’influence prédominante de Tchaïkovsky.”
24
See Coover, review of vol. 1 of Encyclopédie de la musique, ed. François Michel, Notes 16
(June 1959): 382.
61
Prelude in C-sharp Minor) tremendous popular success adheres to an outmoded
romanticism. A contemporary of Florent Schmitt, Schoenberg, and Ravel, he seems to
have been totally indifferent to musical acquisitions of his time (Debussy was born
eleven years before him); it is remarkable that such a gifted musician could have
contented himself with the most worn-out formulas for utilizing a pleasantly rich melodic
invention and an inspiration not devoid of grandeur.
25

Assessments in two subsequent French works are brief but affirmative. “There is a certain
lyricism, refined but not insipid, that sings in Rachmaninoff’s works,” notes the 1965 La
musique: Les hommes, les instruments, les œuvres. “He never seeks to surprise; he moves
without trying expressly to do so; but because he is sincere and sensitive, he is ever a musician of
his time.”
26
The assessment also praises his “seventy-nine songs, for which he must be
considered the creator of the Russian lied.”
27
The assessment that appeared in 1976 in Marc
Honegger’s Dictionnaire de la musique notes that, “influenced by Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff
introduces romantic eloquence into a cantilena of brilliant national color. He is at his best,” it
adds, “in his piano pieces and symphonic compositions.”
28

25
“Ce très grand pianiste est un compositeur très conventionnel qui n’appartient ni à son temps,
ni à une école déterminée. Sa musique est solidement construite et brillamment écrite pour le
piano, mais le lyrisme généreux qui a valu à deux de ses œuvres (Deuxième Concerto et Prélude
en do dièse mineur) un prodigieux succès populaire se réclame d’un romantisme désuet.
Contemporain de Florent Schmitt, Schoenberg et Ravel, il semble être resté totalement
indifférent aux acquisitions musicales de son temps (Debussy était né onze ans avant lui); il est
remarquable qu’un musicien aussi doué ait pu se contenter des formules les plus usées pour
exploiter une invention mélodique agréablement fertile et une inspiration non dépourvue de
grandeur.”
26
“C’est une sorte de lyrisme épuré et sans fadeur qui chante dans les oeuvres de Rachmaninov.
Jamais il ne cherche à surprendre; il émeut sans tâcher expressément d'émouvoir; mais, parce
qu’il est sincère et sensible, il demeure toujours un musicien de son temps.” La musique: Les
hommes, les instruments, les œuvres, ed. Norbert Dufourcq (Paris: Larousse, 1965), 2:273.
27
“Rachmaninov a composé . . . soixante-dix-neuf mélodies qui doivent le faire considérer
comme la créateur du lied en Russie.” Ibid.
28
“Influencé par Tchaïkovski, Rachmaninov introduit l’éloquence romantique dans une cantilène
d’un brillant coloris national. Il a donné le meilleur de lui-même dans ses pièces pour piano et
dans ses compositions symphoniques.”
62
Rachmaninoff’s treatment in German lexicons at mid-century is brief, above all, but also
benign. The fourth edition of Moser’s Musik Lexikon, published in 1955, merely reproduces the
entry from 1935 in an updated, but not corrected, form.
29
The assessment in Friedrich Herzfeld’s
Lexikon der Musik of 1957 embraces the basic East-West dichotomy characteristic of Russian
musical nationalism but, at the same time, does not condemn Rachmaninoff on this basis. It notes
simply that, “like Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff was Western-oriented,” adding, somewhat
critically, that “there dwells in his piano works a Slavic melancholy of an elevated salon tone.”
The entry notes further the popularity of his Prelude in C-sharp Minor and attests that “his four
piano concertos are still performed, especially No. 2.”
30
Save for this last clause, this
commentary appears in all nine subsequent editions of this title published through 1989.
31
The
new entry on Rachmaninoff that appeared in 1961 in the overhauled twelfth edition of the
Riemann Musik Lexikon, edited by Wilibald Gurlitt, features somewhat enlarged biographical
coverage but is still scarcely longer than the one by Einstein that it replaced, devoting but three
sentences to Rachmaninoff’s creative work as composer and performer. Nevertheless, one of
these, noting the popularity of the Prelude in C-sharp Minor and the Second Concerto, makes an
appeal for other works that “have not found appreciation corresponding to their worth.”
32
It

29
The reference here to the Second Symphony in “A Minor” remains, not to be confused with
the Third Symphony (see p. 46 n. 20 above).
30
“Wie Tschaikowski war Rachmaninoff westlich orientiert. In seinen Klavierwerken lebt die
slawische Melancholie eines gehobenen Salontones. Am berühmtesten ist sein Prélude cis moll
aus den Klavier-Stücken opus 3. Seine 4 Klavierkonzerte werden noch gespielt, besonders das 2.
opus 18 in c moll.”
31
The 1965 edition was published under two titles reflecting the names of its two publishers,
DBG-Musiklexikon and Ullstein Musiklexikon, but all subsequent editions were published by
Ullstein and bear its name.
32
“Andere konnten keine ihrem Wert entsprechende Würdigung finden.”
63
features a helpful bibliography but omits Rachmaninoff’s last opus, the Symphonic Dances, from
its otherwise respectable work list. (The article on Rachmaninoff that appeared at this time in Die
Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart was written by English musicologist Gerald Abraham and
will be discussed below.)
Dutch lexicons published during this period are somewhat more critical of the composer.
“Rachmaninoff’s style,” reads Casper Höweler’s X-Y-Z der muziek, “is a mixture of Chopin,
Schumann, and especially Tchaikovsky but has here and there a more modern allure.
Unfortunately, even some of his best works sometimes suffer from a certain emptiness, which
must then be covered with many notes.”
33
The assessment also mentions the popularity of the
Prelude in C-sharp Minor and the Piano Concertos and offers passing compliments to the Second
Symphony and the chamber music. This popular lexicon appeared in sixteen editions between
1936 and 1966, in addition to several translations, before its author died in 1969.
34
Höweler
forbade posthumous changes to the book,
35
but it maintained its popularity, appearing in eighteen
posthumous “editions” (essentially reprints), the last in 1997. His assessment of Rachmaninoff
appears unchanged in all of these.
36

33
“De stijl van Rachmaninow is een mengsel van Chopin, Schumann en vooral Tsjaikowski,
doch heeft hier en daar een iets moderner allure; helaas lijden zelfs enige van zijn beste werken
bijwijlen aan een zekere leegte, die dan door veel noten bedekt moet worden.” X-Y-Z der muziek,
9th ed. (1949). This assessment must have appeared in this lexicon before 1949, because it
appears in a French translation published in 1947, but it does not yet appear in the third Dutch
edition (1939). Unfortunately, I have been able to survey only some of this title’s many editions.
34
Translations include French, German, Serbian, and Spanish, which, with the exception of the
German, appeared in multiple editions themselves.
35
Van der Waa, “Snerpende sinustonen.”
36
A revised Dutch edition appeared in 2003 under the title XYZ van de klassieke muziek. Only in
this edition did Rachmaninoff receive a new entry. See pp. 114–15 below.
64
Comparing Höweler’s assessment with its counterparts in translated editions reveals
nuances that may reflect, if only to a limited extent, critical trends in other regions. The French
translation, Sommets de la musique, first published in 1947, displays a trifle more sympathy than
the original, adding an “alas!” to the statement positing “a certain emptiness” in the music.
37
The
opposite is true of the German translation, Der Musikführer: Lexikon der Tonkunst, published in
1952: omitting the word “some,” the assessment reads, “even his best works display a certain
emptiness,” and the chamber music is no longer complimented.
38
The Spanish edition,
meanwhile, followed the original assessment closely in its first edition, published in 1958, but
the 1967 edition omits the statement about emptiness altogether.
39

The assessment that appeared in 1957 in the Encyclopedie van de muziek notes, like
Gurlitt, that the success of Second Concerto and Prelude in C-sharp Minor “has always
overshadowed that of his other compositions.”
40
Although the assessment states that
Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto “contained little that was new and . . . could also hardly hold its
own alongside the Second,” it otherwise bears a rather close resemblance to Slonimsky’s. Like
the latter, it notes Rachmaninoff’s kinship with Tchaikovsky but accords him an individuality
arising from the Slavic character of his music:

37
“Mais il arrive, hélas! que même ses meilleures compositions présentent des vides
d’inspiration.” Seven French editions were issued between 1947 and 1967.
38
“Leider zeigen selbst seine besten Werke eine gewisse Leere.”
39
The Spanish editions vacillate on this point: the 1978 edition again features the statement
alleging “a certain emptiness,” but the 2004 edition again omits it.
40
“De twee werken die hem wereldberoemd zouden maken en waarvan het succes dat van zijn
andere composities altijd heeft overschaduwd, componeerde Rachmaninow op betrekkelijk
jeugdige leeftijd: Tweede Pianoconcert in 1901 en de Prelude in cis op. 3 no. 2 in 1892.” An
earlier Flemish lexicon does not feature critical commentary, C. Werda’s Muzikaal
handwoordenboek (ca. 1940).
65
Almost his whole oeuvre is characterized by an intense melancholy, which [is evident]
among others in the frequent use of minor keys and in the broad, sustained melody. The
noble lyricism of his themes, and the brilliant, effective passage work with which he
surrounded this, are without question best exemplified by his Second Piano Concerto.
Rachmaninoff’s great veneration of Tchaikovsky was not without influence on his
oeuvre. Yet his best works have a distinctly personal character, which is determined
primarily through the assimilation of Slavic-tinged melodic material.
41

The two principal Swedish music lexicons published at mid-century both feature a
relatively thorough stylistic assessment of the composer. The 1946 Bonniers illustrerade
musiklexikon is similar to Leonard’s. Rachmaninoff’s conservatism is observed but not
criticized. His Western influences are noted, but he is still found to be authentically Russian, and
Rachmaninoff the pianist is seen in unity with the composer:
Rachmaninoff was a man of the world among the composers of our time. . . . His works
have an air of chivalry that was perhaps not up-to-date but that instead stood above time.
If they lacked the scent of Russian soil that one finds in Musorgsky, Stravinsky, and
Shostakovich, they had nevertheless a national accent of unmistakable origin. In our
country, he was known primarily for his piano concertos. . . . His piano pieces have also
attained great popularity. . . . His operas hardly reached over Russia’s borders, but the
two symphonies, the symphonic poems, the piano trio, and the cello sonata belong to the
international repertoire. Rachmaninoff the pianist exhibited the same characteristics as
the composer: supreme technical control, nobility, and imagination.
42

41
“Bijna zijn gehele œuvre wordt gekenmerkt door een intense melancholie, welke zich onder
andere uit in het veelvuldig gebruik van de mineur-toonsoorten en in de brede, gedragen
melodiek. Van de nobele lyriek van zijn themata en het briljante, effectvolle passagewerk
waarmee hij deze omrankt, vindt men ongetwijfeld in zijn Tweede Pianoconcert het beste
voorbeeld. De grote verering voor Tsjaikowski is niet zonder invloed op Rachmaninows
composities gebleven. Toch hebben zijn beste werken een uitgesproken persoonlijk karakter, dat
voornamelijk door de verwerking van het Slavisch getinte, melodische materiaal bepaald wordt.”
42
“Rachmaninov var världsmannen bland vår tids tondiktare. . . . Hans verk har ett drag av
ridderlighet, som kanske inte var tidsenligt, men som i stället stod över tiden. Om de saknade den
doft av den ryska myllan, som man finner hos Mussorgskij, Stravinskij och Sjostakovitj, så hade
de dock ett nationellt tonfall, om vars ursprung man inte kunde misstaga sig. I vårt land var han
närmast känd genom sina pianokonserter. . . . Stor popularitet nådde även hans pianostycken. . . .
Hans operor nådde väl knappast över Rysslands gränser, men de båda symfonierna, de
symfoniska dikterna, pianotrion och violoncellsonaten tillhör den internationella repertoaren.
Pianist Rachmaninov uppvisade samma karaktärsdrag som tonsättaren: suverän behärskning av
de tekniska hjälpmedlen, nobless och fantasi.”
66
The assessment by music critic Åke Brandel that appeared in 1952 in the Sohlmans
musiklexikon is similar.
43
It also acknowledges certain “harsh criticism” (bister kritik) facing the
composer, even conceding “that much of Rachmaninoff’s work is to be considered superficial”
(att åtskilliga av Rachmaninovs verk skatta åt det ytliga). This critical statement is followed,
however, by an affirmative one: “But the Second Symphony, symphonic poem Isle of the Dead,
Second and Third Piano Concertos, a long string of smaller piano pieces, songs, etc., seem to
possess the potential to survive temporary changes of taste.”
44
The ensuing stylistic commentary
notes his music’s “melodic richness” (melodirikedomen), “Slavic intensity” (den slaviska
intensiteten), “exemplary” (föredömlig) balance of the various performing forces in his music,
and “suggestive balance of agitated and quiet moments, tension and rest” (suggestiv avvägning
mellan upprörda och rofyllda moment, anspänning och vila).
The assessments from this period that have been surveyed up to this point vary
considerably in length, emphasis, and tone, but together they provide a strong corrective to
Carruthers’s assertion, quoted in the introduction, that Blom’s assessment is “typical of critical
appraisals from the 1950s and 1960s.” Although they shared Blom’s conceptual parameters—
evaluating the music in terms of its construction, stylistic contemporaneity, and Russianness—

43
A brief biographical description and a catalog of Brandel’s archival materials can be found at
the website of the Swedish Musik- och teaterbibliotek:
http://musikverket.se/musikochteaterbiblioteket/arkivregistret/ake-brandel-1923-2001/. In
addition to his criticism, Brandel was noted for his research on the Berwalds, a Swedish family
of musicians and composers active during the first half of the nineteenth century. See Brandel,
“Släkten Berwald: Dess tidigare historia och dess verksamhet i Ryssland” [The Berwald family:
Its past history and activities in Russia], in “Studier tillägnade Carl-Allan Moberg, 5 Juni 1961”
[A festschrift in honor of Carl-Allan Mobert], special issue, Svensk tidskrift för musikforskning
[Swedish journal for musicology] 43 (1961): 89–98.
44
“Men den 2. symfoni, den symfonisk dikten »Dödens ö», pianokonserterna nr 2 och 3, en lång
rad smärre pianostycken, sånger, med mera synas äga förutsättningar att överleva tillfälliga
smakväxlingar.”
67
they by no means shared his conclusions. In this period, as before, most lexicons described
Rachmaninoff as a multifaceted, technically skilled composer with a distinctive musical
personality.

English Dissent and Its Aftermath
What Blom’s assessment typified was a view held by a small echelon of the mid-century English
musical establishment that included Percy Scholes, Blom himself, and Gerald Abraham. These
three eminent English musical commentators all engaged in scholarly research and music
criticism in varying degrees and wielded important channels of musical opinion.
45
Like some of
the European commentators just cited, they acknowledged certain misgivings about
Rachmaninoff’s music; unlike the former, however, they concluded that his music had little
worth and would likely disappear. According to these, Rachmaninoff’s greatest achievement was
as a pianist, while otherwise he was little more than a cosmopolitan piano composer. Their view
was well-nigh diametrically opposed to that of their counterparts in the United States, as we have
seen, and in Russia as well, as we will see below. It is tempting to assume, as some have, that a
downturn in Rachmaninoff’s critical reception at mid-century such as we will observe presently
in England must be attributable somehow to the modernistic aesthetic disposition of the age,
46

45
A 1948 letter from Scholes to Abraham in which the former mentions all three of these
commentators together offers some indication that they may have conceived of themselves as
somewhat of a trio: “You, Eric Blom and I are laboring ants, rushing hither and thither and piling
ever higher our ant hills of paper.” Quoted in Kenneth Shenton, “Everyman and His Music:
Percy Scholes (1877–1958),” Musicweb International, May 2008, http://www.musicweb-
international.com/classrev/2008 /May08/Percy_Scholes.htm. If this is the case, however, it was
not a trio based on mutual admiration, which Slonimsky asserted did not exist between Scholes
and Blom. Slonimsky, “Lexicographis,” 765.
46
See Gehl, “Reassessing a Legacy,” 5.
68
but these assessments give no evidence of such bias. Indeed, musical modernism itself was felt
not nearly so strongly in England at this time as it was on the European continent.
In their unusually skeptical outlook on Rachmaninoff, these commentators departed not
only from general but also from English lexicographical opinion, which must be emphasized.
Newmarch’s benign entry in Grove’s had been reprinted and updated in intermittent editions of
that work, and Bantock’s favorable assessment was, as we have seen, widely circulated.
Additionally, several other British lexicons published throughout this whole period treat
Rachmaninoff in a much more normal light. For example, Robert Illing’s Dictionary of Music,
published by Penguin in 1950, describes Rachmaninoff as “a distinguished pianist and an able
composer.” Arthur Jacobs authored A New Dictionary of Music for Penguin in 1958, which notes
simply that Rachmaninoff “always maintained a Russian outlook and wrote in an emotional (and
sometimes melancholy) romantic style.” This assessment was carried into every subsequent
edition of this title by Jacobs, published in 1967, 1973, 1977, 1991, and 1996.
47
The Concise
Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians, which also appeared in 1958, acknowledges the
popularity of Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos but notes, not unlike Gurlitt’s Riemann, that “his
other music, including songs, choral works and the three symphonies, which some critics
consider his best works, are more rarely heard.” The editor of this lexicon, Martin Cooper,
carried this assessment unchanged into all three subsequent editions of this title, which appeared
in 1971, 1975, and 1978. Indeed, the assessment may have been written by Cooper, whose other
writings suggest an appreciative attitude of the composer.
48
The assessment in Jack Westrup and

47
Only the last of these editions contains any alteration: the last phrase has been replaced with
another one stating that Rachmaninoff’s Russian outlook “permeated his style.”
48
See both Cooper’s Ideas and Music (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1965) and the posthumous
volume edited by his son, Cooper, Judgments of Value: Selected Writings on Music, ed. Dominic
Cooper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
69
Frank Harrison’s 1960 New College Encyclopedia of Music abstains from evaluative
commentary.
Nevertheless, the dissenting trio of commentators wielded more authority, and their
assessments were more widely circulated. Scholes led the charge in 1938 in the inaugural edition
of his Oxford Companion to Music. Though active for a time as a critic at the Evening Standard,
Scholes became better known for his many popular books on music.
49
Like his Concise Oxford
Dictionary of Music, the Oxford Companion remains in print to this day, having undergone
periodic revisions by subsequent editors. Issued in no fewer than nine editions in its first eighteen
years, it was hailed by A. Hyatt King in the fifth edition of Grove’s as containing “the most
extraordinary range of musical knowledge, ingeniously ‘self-indexed,’ ever written and
assembled between two covers by one man.”
50
Scholes’s assessment of Rachmaninoff first
appeared in 1929, in his Listener’s History of Music,
51
and it appeared unchanged, save for
biographical updates, in each of the nine editions of The Oxford Companion produced by
Scholes before his death in 1958. Scholes viewed Rachmaninoff as an excellent pianist who as a
composer was little more than a gifted miniaturist. Whereas many assessments surveyed so far
describe Rachmaninoff as a distinctly Russian composer, Scholes maintained the opposite view
of the composer’s national musical identity:
As a pianist he has toured the world extensively, as a conductor he is much respected, and
as a composer he has made a mark, though possibly not a lasting one, since his works,
very skillfully written, are for the most part inspired by no very strong national or

49
For example, see Percy A. Scholes, The Listener’s Guide to Music (London: Oxford
University Press, 1919); Scholes, The Complete Book of Great Musicians (London: Oxford
University Press, 1923); and Scholes, The Listener’s History of Music, 3 vols. (London: Oxford
University Press, 1923–29).
50
Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed., s.v. “dictionaries,” by A. Hyatt King.
51
Scholes, The Listener’s History of Music, 1st ed., 3:81.
70
personal feeling, being cosmopolitan and general in their expression. . . . Probably some
of his best work has been put into the smaller piano pieces and the songs, many of which
are perfect in their kind.
Scholes’s opinion of Rachmaninoff’s relative musical merits can also be discerned in his 1955
Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music, where a carefully placed semicolon ensures that his high
regard of Rachmaninoff’s pianism will not be confused for that of his music: “Made high
reputation in old and new worlds as pianist of great artistry; composed operas, [etc.].”
52

As Scholes’s assessment is the first yet encountered in this study to question the
longevity of Rachmaninoff’s music, we can begin to take note of the reasoning behind such
dismissals and clarify this aspect of the composer’s reception. We will see later in this chapter
that some commentators have dismissed Rachmaninoff because of his adherence to a tonal
language and musical forms that were more common in the nineteenth century than in the
twentieth. Scholes is not one of them. He maintained a balanced appreciation of contemporary
music, but his taste and historical outlook were much more varied and all-encompassing than the
stereotypical modernist to seek an explanation of this kind for his negative regard for
Rachmaninoff’s music.
53
More importantly, his assessment itself does not evince a concern with
musical progressivism.
What it does concern is cosmopolitanism, the antithesis of authenticity as formulated by
the Russian nationalists. As a survey of various entries in Scholes’s Oxford Companion reveals,
he considered cosmopolitanism to be intrinsically indicative of a lack of musical value and thus

52
John Ward completed the first posthumous editions of both The Concise Oxford Dictionary
(1964) and The Oxford Companion (1970), leaving Scholes’s assessments of Rachmaninoff
unchanged.
53
For a detailed expression of Scholes’s views on early-twentieth-century musical developments
see, in addition to various entries in his Oxford Companion, “Period VIII: The Anti-romantics,”
in his Listener’s History of Music, 3:121–29.
71
of permanence.
54
Scholes associated musical quality with stylistic originality, which he defined
as “actual novelty in melody, harmony, form, orchestration, etc., and a strong expression of
personality allied to a high degree of craftsmanship.”
55
According to Scholes, a composer’s
“national or racial feeling” played an important role in fostering originality by “keeping himself
free from conventions.”
56
Scholes conceived of cosmopolitanism as the antithesis of originality
in both its individual and national manifestations and thus indicative of a lack of permanent
musical value. “Good music,” says Scholes, “is ‘individual’ and ‘personal,’” while “music
lacking vitality [i.e., bad music] . . . is generally found to be a diluted extract of that of some
other composer, or perhaps of so many other composers that no one composer can be named.”
57

Yet Scholes tended to reserve the term for use in a nationalistic context: a composer’s “racial or
national characteristics,” he explains, will lead to innovation only when they have not been
“stultified” by the adoption “of a mere cosmopolitan convention.”
58
By applying the term to
Rachmaninoff, Scholes implied that the composer’s claim to distinction hinged more on his
fidelity to stylistic hallmarks of Russian nationalism than on his individual characteristics.
Scholes commented on national character as a matter of course in his evaluations of
Russian composers. His view of Russian nationalism, such as he expressed in the following
description of Musorgsky, was typical: “Like some other Russian musical pioneers (cf. Glinka,

54
The following analysis takes as its text the ninth edition of The Oxford Companion to Music,
the last edition produced by Scholes himself. Owing to the length of some of the entries cited
here, I have opted to provide page numbers rather than entry titles in the notes that follow.
55
Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music, 9th ed., 223.
56
Ibid., 679.
57
Ibid., 854.
58
Ibid., 679.
72
Balakiref) he got much of his inspiration from folk music heard in childhood and the folk tales
he also heard gave him the literary basis for much of his composition.”
59
But Scholes was also
willing to adopt a more flexible view of Russianness, sometimes in what seems a justification for
an otherwise independent preference. “Tchaikovsky . . . is at once cosmopolitan and nationalist,”
wrote Scholes, “—and a good deal more nationalist than is often admitted, the intense
emotionalism of many of his works, with the love of extremes in both the bright colored and the
somber, being a clear reflection of one prominent side of the Russian temperament.”
60
Scholes
justified Scriabin’s Russianness in a similar manner: “Very Russian, at any rate in his quasi-
religious mysticism and forceful expression (though quite un-national in his musical idiom) was
Scriabin. . . . Less so,” Scholes continued, “was the romantic-classic Rachmaninoff.”
61
Given the
obvious similarities between Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, and even Scriabin—they all
utilized classic forms in varying degrees and espoused a passionate lyrical idiom—it is difficult
to discern the essential basis for the distinctions that Scholes draws between Rachmaninoff and
the other two, especially since his general view of Rachmaninoff hinged on this aspect of his
music.
Scholes’s designation of Rachmaninoff as a romantic-classic is, in fact, the only aspect of
his regard for the composer that appears to suggest a positive value relation between stylistic
progress and musical value. But the relation is at best superficial. The designation appears at first
to consign Rachmaninoff to a lesser category of romantic composers who utilized classic forms
such as the sonata and the symphony when these were, even in the nineteenth century,

59
Ibid., 674.
60
Ibid., 908.
61
Ibid. Similar comments about the Russianness of Scriabin and Tchaikovsky are also featured
in their entries in The Oxford Companion and his Listener’s History of Music, 3:51–52.
73
increasingly thought to be obsolete. Scholes’s dichotomy between conventionalism and
originality described above (the latter signifying musical value) would appear to imply a parallel
dichotomy with classicism and romanticism, since Scholes understood these terms to reflect
opposing attitudes toward formal procedure—classical as “a more or less consciously accepted
formalistic scheme of design,”
62
while romantic entailed “subordinating form to [some extra-
musical subject].”
63
Upon closer inspection, however, Scholes used the term “romantic-classic”
in a purely descriptive, as opposed to evaluative, capacity: Brahms, Bruckner, Dohnányi, Elgar,
Fauré, Mahler, and Reger are all discussed in terms of some combination of classical and
romantic elements, just as Franck and Richard Strauss are described as a “Christian romantic”
and a “Pagan romantic” respectively to distinguish their differing spiritual temperaments.
64

Scholes questioned the legitimacy of Rachmaninoff’s oeuvre not because he found it too
conventional or outmoded per se but because he thought it lacked distinction, especially in its
evocation of Russian national identity.
In assessing Rachmaninoff, Blom followed very much in Scholes’s footsteps. Blom’s
lexicographical activities came at the end of his career, most of which was spent as a critic with
successive posts at the Manchester Guardian, the Birmingham Post, and the London Observer.
He also wrote several books on music and served as editor of Music and Letters and Dent’s
popular Master Musicians Series, from which he excluded Rachmaninoff.
65
Blom first hinted at

62
Scholes, The Oxford Companion to Music, 9th ed., 174–75.
63
Ibid., 892.
64
Scholes, Listener’s History of Music, 2:137, 3:32, 3:43, 3:58, 3:60, 3:61, 3:67, 3:75, 3:85.
65
Geoffrey Norris, e-mail message to author, January 5, 2015. Jack Westrup assumed the
editorship of the series after Blom’s death in 1959 and subsequently admitted the composer,
whereupon Norris wrote the biography.
74
his disdain for Rachmaninoff’s music with a remark about the “notoriously popular C-sharp
Minor Prelude” in his founding edition of the Everyman’s Dictionary of Music, published in
1946. His commentary in the 1954 edition of Grove’s was outlined in the introduction. As an
encyclopedic work, Grove’s could accommodate a full expression of his view of the composer.
This did not, however, require much space, and the following excerpt reproduces all of the
independent evaluative commentary on Rachmaninoff that Blom contributed to this edition:
As a pianist Rachmaninoff was one of the finest artists of his time; as a composer he can
hardly be said to have belonged to his time at all, and he represented his country only in
the sense that accomplished but conventional composers like Glazunov or Arensky did.
He had neither the national characteristics of the Balakirev school nor the individuality of
Taneyev or Medtner. Technically he was highly gifted, but also severely limited. His
music is well constructed and effective, but monotonous in texture, which consists in
essence mainly of artificial and gushing tunes accompanied by a variety of figures
derived from arpeggios.
The enormous popular success some few of Rachmaninoff’s works had in his
lifetime is not likely to last, and musicians never regarded it with much favor. The third
pianoforte Concerto was on the whole liked by the public only because of its close
resemblance to the second, while the fourth, which attempted something like a new
departure, was a failure from the start. The only later work that has attracted large
audiences was the Rhapsody (variations) on a Theme by Paganini for pianoforte and
orchestra.
Though relatively brief, this commentary traverses several ideas that are best considered
one at a time. The only suggestion of any value relation based on stylistic contemporaneity
comes at the very beginning: the phrase “his time” creates a parallelism by which
Rachmaninoff’s excellence as a pianist is tacitly contrasted with his stature as a composer. This
relation is not openly stated or developed any further, and, as we will see below, Blom did not in
fact espouse such a value relation generally. Its presence here appears to be incidental, an act of
rhetorical play.
75
By contrast, two sentences are devoted to the national question that so preoccupied
Scholes. The two writers maintained virtually identical views of Russian music.
66
The only
changes Blom made to Newmarch’s original entry, aside from updating the biographical portion,
also reflected this nationalistic paradigm. Newmarch had written that “the musical influences of
Moscow are clearly evident in the works of Rachmaninoff”; Blom changed this to “the
cosmopolitan rather than the nationalist musical influences of Moscow.” This is not merely a
benign substitution, since, as we saw with Scholes, cosmopolitanism bore negative connotations
for Russian composers.
Blom also ventured criticism of Rachmaninoff’s compositional technique, by which is
presumably meant his handling of form and instrumentation as opposed to the intrinsic quality of
his musical materials per se. He was the first to do so in a music lexicon. Until now, comment on
this aspect of Rachmaninoff’s music was invariably and unambiguously favorable. Remy
attributed the “stirring effect” of his music not only to “the inherent beauty and expressiveness of
his themes” but also to “their logical, masterly development.” Bantock described the music as
“classical in spirit and technique” and the piano concertos as “grateful to the soloist, and very
effectively scored for orchestra.” Kolodin likewise praised Rachmaninoff’s orchestration and
noted that “in its technical aspects the [Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini] entitled him to a place

66
This is clear enough from their assessments of Rachmaninoff, but compare also the following
description of Tchaikovsky by Blom with Scholes’s description above: “His alternate elations
and depressions, his self-doubts and self-questionings, his changes from abject gloom by way of
frivolity to moods of fate-defying triumph, as in the Fifth Symphony, his plunges from deep into
deeper despair, as in the Sixth . . . all this is Russian and nothing else, even if we cannot point at
this or that musical passage and say that it is, or that it descends from, a genuine national song or
dance.” Blom, Some Great Composers (London: Oxford University Press, 1944), 107–08. This
book offers an interesting snapshot of contemporaneous views of the national and universal in
classical music. Nine of the fifteen composers featured are ethnically German, of which only two
(Bach and Haydn) occasion any noteworthy amount of nationally oriented commentary. By
contrast, all of the non-Germans are introduced with reference to their national traditions, and
none of these more extensively or apologetically than Tchaikovsky.
76
beside such masters of the variation form as Schumann, Brahms, Richard Strauss, and Elgar.”
Leonard praised Rachmaninoff’s “masterful command of the orchestra, and his ability to sustain,
in the difficult large forms, a lofty inspiration.” The assessment in Bonniers noted his “supreme
technical control” both as pianist and as composer. Even Scholes concurred, for he wrote that
Rachmaninoff’s works were “very skillfully written.” Blom, by contrast, appears to have
considered Rachmaninoff’s technical equipment not so much the product of skill or mastery but
of being “highly gifted,” with the presumably related caveat that he was at the same time
“severely limited.” Nevertheless, Blom is conflicted on this point, for he then describes the
music as “well constructed and effective, but monotonous.” At any rate, Blom clearly considered
Rachmaninoff a piano composer: he does not mention or discuss any music other than that for
the piano (mention of the first two symphonies was retained from Newmarch), and his phrase
“gushing tunes accompanied by a variety of figures derived from arpeggios” obviously bears
strong reference to that instrument.
The significance of Blom’s assessment in the history of Rachmaninoff’s critical reception
would be difficult to overestimate. “The article in Grove is important,” as Martyn correctly
observed, “because it remained holy writ for so long and enshrined prejudices and
misconceptions that were rehashed in different contexts again and again over the years.”
67

Indeed, the fifth edition of Grove’s remained in print for more than twenty-five years, being
reissued no less than ten times between its initial publication in 1954 and that of the edition that
supplanted it in 1980, on average every two to three years.
68
During this time and afterward, it
proved a source of obvious annoyance to the composer’s admirers, who have cited and rebutted

67
Barrie Martyn, Rachmaninoff, 16.
68
To be precise, in 1955, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1964, 1966, 1968, 1970, 1973, and 1975.
77
it with tireless persistence, making it in all likelihood the most frequently cited assessment of
Rachmaninoff in any form of musical commentary. This has, ironically, ensured the immortality
of the very assessment that the composer’s advocates would prefer more than any other to
consign to oblivion.
Blom’s commentary first elicited comment in 1968, when it provided the impetus for
Harold Schonberg’s New York Times editorial bewailing Rachmaninoff’s poor critical reception.
There Schonberg dismissed the commentary as “one of the most outrageous and even stupid
statements ever to be found in a work that is supposed to be an objective reference.”
69
Schonberg
subsequently adapted the editorial—including its derogatory description of the assessment, in
which “outrageous” now became “outrageously snobbish”—for inclusion in his immensely
popular Lives of the Great Composers.
70
First published in 1970, the book appeared in two
subsequent editions, in 1981 and 1997, and in numerous reprints, translations, and reprinted
translations, including versions in Chinese, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, and,
most recently, Turkish. In his 1973 centennial reappraisal of the composer, Stephen Walsh
referred to the assessment from Grove’s repeatedly, the last time referring to its author as “the
unfortunate Blom.”
71
Coolidge quoted the assessment in his 1979 article on Rachmaninoff’s
concerto forms, describing it as “all the more stinging because of its deceptively charitable
tone.”
72
The assessment found its way also into Martyn’s 1990 biography, introduced by the
author with the merciless comment that “prejudice, contempt, and ignorance were all

69
Schonberg, “‘Rachmaninoff?”
70
Schonberg, The Lives of the Great Composers (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), 506–08.
71
Walsh, “Sergei Rachmaninoff,” 17.
72
Coolidge, “Architectonic Technique,” 180.
78
ingloriously combined in the patronizing and by now notorious article.”
73
Teachout likewise
quoted Blom’s assessment in his 2002 editorial on the composer’s reception, deriding it as a
“sniffy passage” that reminded him of Percy Grainger’s remark that “the world around me is
dying of ‘good taste.’”
74
The article from Grove’s is now widely quoted on the Web, where
Wikipedia in particular is serving as a source for its further dissemination (and continuing
derision).
75

Surprisingly, no one has ever paused to evaluate Blom’s assessment against the backdrop
of his other writings. In their eagerness to dismiss the assessment, Rachmaninoff’s supporters
have failed to observe how uncharacteristically biased it is for Blom, how little it reflects the real
virtues that earned him his esteem as a commentator. His writings reveal him to be a thoughtful,
sensitive, erudite, intelligent, and even humorous critic possessed of high artistic standards but
by no means dogmatic in his appreciation of various musical styles. According to his colleague
Nicolas Slonimsky, Blom was, moreover, “a man of infinite charm.”
76
It is hoped that the detail
with which his views are presented in the following pages is justified by the prominence that his
assessment of Rachmaninoff has achieved. It’s time that Blom had a fair hearing.

73
Martyn, Rachmaninoff, 16.
74
Teachout, “What Was the Matter,” 47. See also, in chronological order, David Wright,
“Rachmaninoff Makes Converts of His Critics,” New York Times, May 19, 1998; Robert E.
Cunningham, Jr., “Harmonic Prolongation in Selected Works of Rachmaninoff, 1910–1931, PhD
dissertation (Florida State University, 1999), 319–20; Carruthers, “The (Re)Appraisal of
Rachmaninov’s Music,” 44–45; Gehl, “Reassessing a Legacy,” 5–6; Johnston, “Harmony and
Climax,” 1.
75
See Wikipedia, s.vv. “Eric Blom” and “Sergei Rachmaninoff.” For an example of its
dissemination via Wikipedia, see “Eric Blom’s Dictionary of Music,” Uninformed Comment
(blog), July 22, 2009, https://uninformedcomment.wordpress.com/2009/07/22/eric-bloms-
dictionary-of-music/. Amusingly, two of Blom’s grandchildren commented on this post.
76
Slonimsky, Perfect Pitch, 194. See pp. 192–99 for Slonimsky’s candid reminiscences not only
of Blom but also of Alfred Einstein, Scholes, and Oscar Thompson.
79
The book that offers the clearest exposition of Blom’s critical views in theoretical terms
is perhaps his Limitations of Music, where he posits a direct correlation between the value of a
composer’s work and that composer’s “ability to subordinate his invention to certain limitations”
prescribed by individual temperament and native musical environment.
77
Within these broad
parameters, Blom grants the composer a considerable degree of latitude in determining and
honoring individual limitations:
Nothing could be more wrong-headed in a music critic than a wish to prescribe the same
limitations to every composer; so long as there be some sort of clearly defined boundary
and he keep successfully inside, the drawing of the line may be determined by his
personal temper. The restrictions may be wholly of his own making or they may be
ordained by tradition: what matters ultimately is whether he knows how to respect them,
whatever they may be.
78

Blom would have the composer maintain this autonomy even at the risk of unpopularity. “An
artist must be honest with himself,” he wrote, “or he will not long impress his listeners as being
sincere. He must at all costs, even at the cost of seeming out of harmony with his time, show
himself as he is, not as he thinks he ought to be.”
79
The book closes with a “justification of
criticism” in which these sentiments now assume a creed-like status:
The critic’s first duty is to appreciate all the good in the object of his criticism without
becoming injudiciously appreciative. In order to do this he must be able to discover the
good; in other words, to distinguish it from the bad. In these circumstances he is
constrained to discuss the defects of a work at least as searchingly as its merits. . . .
. . . It is incumbent on him to reckon with the limitations of art and to judge how
far the artist overcomes them successfully without doing violence either to his work or to
his individuality. Once he has understood this obligation and gained the conviction that
limitations can form attractive features in art and indeed rise to the status of merits, he

77
Blom, The Limitations of Music: A Study in Aesthetics (London, 1928; repr., New York:
Benjamin Blom, 1972), 1, 15–18.
78
Ibid., 112.
79
Ibid., 88.
80
may censure safely and never fear that he will lose his benevolence towards the artist or
his reverence for art.
80

True to this statement, Blom maintained an appreciation of a variety of musical styles.
His affection for Mozart is well known, evident not only in his biography of the composer but
also elsewhere in Limitations: “All that is beyond dispute,” he wrote there, “is that he is the
greatest artist among creative musicians, just as Bach is the greatest craftsman and Beethoven the
greatest inventor.”
81
If a superlative declaration such as this reveals a classicist streak, Blom was
no less comfortable with romantic music. Nor were his allegiances exclusively German, as
indicated by his apologetic stance toward Tchaikovsky.
82
In fact, Blom questioned the fairness of
an overly nationalist critique of music in general:
Is it not enough for a composer to be English or French or Spanish or what not by race
and to express himself naturally according to his racial disposition? May he not be
allowed to give free rein to his personal idiosyncrasies as well? . . .
The true master reveals his artistic patriotism through things far more deep-seated
and subtle than idiomatic turns of expression.
83

Blom’s taste also encompassed twentieth-century modernism. Recounting the classical
conception of “absolute beauty,” which constrained realistic depiction and thus forced the artist
“to make a compromise between truth and beauty,” Blom wrote that “modern art does not
necessarily accept this obligation.”
84
“Bartók was born a genius,” he wrote, whose marked

80
Ibid., 166, 168.
81
Ibid., 19.
82
See, for example, page 75 note 64. Blom was also the author of Tchaikovsky: Orchestral
Works (London: Oxford University Press, 1927).
83
Blom, The Limitations of Music, 137, 139.
84
Ibid., 11.
81
individuality so assimilated his native folk idiom as to “become universally significant”;
85
he
also praised Bartók’s “amazing and hauntingly beautiful first violin and piano sonata,” whose
pervasive minor seconds and augmented octaves exposed ideas that “are surely among the
loveliest things music can be called upon to express.”
86
He also displayed sympathy for
emotionally cooler music:
If a composer chooses to be a geometrical rather than an emotional artist, he has a right to
be judged for such art as he is able to make out of mathematics. He may be only
producing the equivalent of wallpapers—as Prokofiev often does, for instance—but the
only reasonable attitude to take up is to decide whether the wallpapers are good as such,
not to complain that they are deficient in the qualities of autumnal sunsets, lyric poetry,
and golden syrup.
87

Blom did not, however, shun tradition and convention per se as enemies to modern art.
Modern art “may still, if its tendency lie that way, conform to [classical beauty] with success,”
he wrote.
88
So too in matters of form: “Much as one values the trials of new musical forms,”
wrote Blom, “it would be a distinct loss if composers did not continue to use the highly evolved
one of the sonata. It is nothing but an affectation of up-to-dateness to consider it as being worn
out.”
89
Though he thanked twentieth-century realists and rationalists for “reacting against what
they disdainfully call nineteenth-century mawkishness,”
90
Blom objected to extreme musical
objectivity: “If we do not want sentimentality—and the artistically well-bred of the nineteenth

85
Blom, “Bartók as Quartet Writer,” in his Stepchildren of Music (1926; repr., Freeport, NY:
Books for Libraries Press, 1967), 240–41.
86
Ibid., 241 and accompanying footnote.
87
Blom, “The Bugbear of Modernism,” in A Musical Postbag (New York: J. M. Dent and Sons,
1941), 155–56.
88
Blom, The Limitations of Music, 11–12.
89
Ibid., 121.
90
Blom, “Of Sentiment and Sentimentality,” in A Musical Postbag, 146.
82
century do so as little as those of the twentieth—we can, goodness knows, do with sentiment to
leaven the depressionist art of today. We do not want all barren leaves and dusty answers.”
91

In keeping with this flexible attitude, Blom called at various times for an appreciation of
music that he felt didn’t entirely possess the distinction of the core classical repertory. Such was
the case with what he termed “semi-permanent music”—that is, music so perfectly allied to its
time that it cannot and need not be expected to achieve permanence. “Is it necessary,” Blom
asks, “for music always to achieve permanence? May not a composer quite legitimately write
something that should entertain us for a while until fashion has left it behind? . . . We had far
better make up our minds that many things in art, including some quite good things, are
evanescent.”
92
As examples of such music Blom offered Gustav Holst’s Planets and William
Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast, neither of which he felt would “last very long; but they are
magnificent just now.”
93
He also wrote apologetically of “prettiness” in music, when such a work
possesses enough “character.” “This Sullivan’s operettas possess in full measure,” he wrote,
“both in the sense of individuality and genuineness of craftsmanship. His work has not only
refinement: it has features.”
94
He cites a number of classical pieces as well that fit such a
description.
95
On another occasion Blom wrote a piece defending “the lowbrow attitude to

91
Ibid., 147.
92
Blom, “Semi-Permanent Music,” in A Musical Postbag, 150–51, 152.
93
Ibid., 153.
94
Blom, “Prettiness,” in A Musical Postbag, 160.
95
Ibid., 161–62.
83
highbrow music,” which he found “as little deserving of censure . . . as the man in the street is
who likes his familiar tunes.”
96

If these statements reveal Blom’s open-minded approach to twentieth-century music—
indeed to all music—he was by no means a de facto modernist. In fact, he had reservations about
the two foremost modernists of his era, Schoenberg and Stravinsky. Though he admired
Stravinsky’s early ballets, he was selective in his appreciation of the neoclassical works and
thought that the composer’s thirst for innovation often led to works whose importance was more
theoretical than aesthetic: “More than half of Stravinsky’s work affords a dire example of the
futility of innovation for its own sake,” he wrote. “Everlastingly experimenting, pottering,
explaining intentions which ought to be perfectly clear, he has little time for real achievement.”
97

Blom’s refined sense of humor is on full display in his editorial on “the twelve-note system.” He
opens the piece with a characteristically levelheaded summary of the “democratic” virtues of the
system—a new musical “state” in which “the meanest chromatic retainer is its neighbor’s equal
and that ancient delinquent, the augmented fourth, has been abolished.”
98
Following an astute
and grateful comment on Ernst Krenek’s explanation of the system in the latter’s Über neue
Musik, Blom asks:
But what of his conclusions? Is the small group of composers who have embraced this
new creed doing anything more than writing what is unquestionably a “new music”? Is it
establishing the beginnings of a music of the future, perhaps the only possible music for
the future? One can only say that one hopes not, unless indeed one ventures to add that
one thinks anything of the kind quite impossible on the lines at present pursued by the
Schoenberg school. The utter frigidity and dryness and joylessness of most of the twelve-
note music so far turned out with the aid of this system makes even Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World with its synthetic humanity actuated by nothing but glandular functions

96
Blom, “Association and Appreciation,” in A Musical Postbag, 283.
97
Blom, The Limitations of Music, 117, 116–18.
98
Blom, “The Twelve-Note System,” in A Musical Postbag, 179.
84
look like a paradise of poetry by comparison: it is in fact as appalling as the worst of
H. G. Wells’s Things to Come. As the new resources are at present employed, they
amount to a system and nothing more. They are in fact not so much resources as a whole
series of deliberately contrived hindrances.
99

As these quotations show, Blom’s sympathies for modern music cannot be said to have
amounted to a firm allegiance to it, and, as this editorial was written in 1937, one can only guess
at how he might have responded to the even stricter serial procedures of the 1950s—the “height
of modernism” that his assessment of Rachmaninoff has been assumed to reflect.
Quite the contrary. In a grandly ironic twist, although Blom had a greater appetite for
modern music than Rachmaninoff, the two appear to have held similar views on the fundamental
nature of the art. To begin with, Rachmaninoff also maintained a negative outlook on interwar
twelve-tone music, or at least he strongly implied this in an article in 1941. “I have no
sympathy,” he wrote, “with the composer who produces works according to preconceived
formulas or preconceived theories. . . . [Music] should not be arrived at mentally, tailor-made to
fit certain specifications—a tendency, I regret to say, all too prevalent during the past twenty
years or so.”
100
Rather, Rachmaninoff regarded music as a purely emotional phenomenon. “My
constant desire to compose music,” he wrote in the same article, “is actually the urge within me
to give tonal expression to my feelings,” and he further wrote that music “must come from the
heart and must be directed to the heart.”
101
These statements bear an uncanny resemblance to a
passage from Blom’s Limitations of Music. “The third detrimental limitation [that a composer
may experience],” he wrote, “. . . is that of preconceived ideas. They are sometimes due to the
influence of a school or a master and often the outcome of the composer’s own theoretical

99
Ibid., 180–81.
100
Rachmaninoff, “Music Should Speak from the Heart,” 804.
101
Ibid.
85
reasoning. In either case they are apt to produce music lacking in spontaneity, because it is
written as the creator thinks it ought to be rather than as a record of what he feels.”
102

As a writer, Blom often demonstrated erudition and great care for his subject, not only in
his Mozart and Music in England, for example, but also in his other entries in Grove’s.
103
His
article on Sibelius, whom he greatly admired, is newly written and features systematic discussion
of the various parts of the composer’s oeuvre, including a note that the composer’s Finlandia and
other shorter pieces that had attained great popularity “have become so familiar that they are
liable to obscure the larger and profounder works.”
104
This same careful treatment is extended
even to figures whose music Blom plainly acknowledges to have been largely forgotten, such as
Arensky and Glazunov, the latter of whom Blom also approaches with sensitivity to the question
of national influence. Although, as Blom explains, he fell “under other and cosmopolitan
influences,” Glazunov maintained his link with Russian music in the “delicate and veiled
realism” that animates his application of conventional forms.
105

102
Blom, The Limitations of Music, 157. The unfortunate irony here is that Schoenberg himself
never regarded “composition with twelve tones” (as he called it) as a preconceived theory for the
composition of cerebral music; composition remained for him a creative and expressive act. “I
do not compose principles, but music,” he wrote to René Leibowitz in 1945. Arnold Schoenberg:
Letters, ed. Edwin Stein, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (London: Faber and Faber,
1964), 236. He insisted that he had always regarded his method as “a tool of composition but not
as a theory” and strongly resisted its use as an analytical tool. Schoenberg, “‘Schoenberg’s Tone-
Rows,’” in Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein, trans.
Leo Black (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 213–14. See also Schoenberg,
“Compositions with Twelve Tones (1),” in ibid., 223–24; and Schoenberg to Rudolf Kolisch,
July 27, 1932, in Arnold Schoenberg: Letters, 164–65.
103
See Blom, Mozart (London: J. M. Dent, 1935); Blom, Music in England (London: Pelican
Books, 1942).
104
Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed., s.v. “Sibelius, Jean.”
105
Ibid., s.v. “Glazunov, Alexander Konstantinovich.”
86
We can begin to see how uncharacteristic Blom’s assessment of Rachmaninoff really is
for its author. Far from being newly written, the entry is essentially unchanged, save for Blom’s
pejorative additions, from Newmarch’s original, which was appropriate in 1908 for the emerging
composer-performer that Rachmaninoff then was but hardly reflected the stature that his music
had attained in the repertoire by 1954. In Sibelius’s case, popularity to Blom was “liable to
obscure”; in Rachmaninoff’s it was “notorious.” Although the same appeal to broader
consideration he made on behalf of Sibelius could be made for Rachmaninoff—and indeed
would be in Gurlitt’s Riemann, as we have already seen—Blom allowed the popularity of such
pieces as the Prelude in C-sharp Minor and Second Concerto to dominate his characterization of
their composer. Because Blom was clearly aware of the dimensions of Rachmaninoff’s oeuvre,
as the appended work list makes plain, this circumstance amounts to irony.
Blom’s assessment is not only uncharacteristic; his criticisms of Rachmaninoff’s music
are also clearly inconsistent with his own published views. He asserts a composer’s right to
individual limitations, even “at the cost of seeming out of harmony with his time,” but dismisses
Rachmaninoff as one who “can hardly be said to have belonged to his time at all.” He defends
the “evanescent,” “prettiness,” “sentiment,” and the unsophisticated concertgoer apt to confuse
such qualities for greatness, but he dismisses Rachmaninoff’s music as “artificial and gushing
tunes” right along with its “enormous popular success.” He challenges the fairness of an overly
nationalistic critical perspective but confines Rachmaninoff to a Russian context. Even then, he
aligns Rachmaninoff with Glazunov to emphasize his conventionalism but grants the latter a
circuitous route back to Russianness.
Moreover, he made these criticisms without a thorough knowledge of the oeuvre. His
stylistic description may approximate the lyrical themes of the Second Concerto as presented by
87
the piano, but it does not account for the variety of textures even in that whole work, let alone the
rest of the piano music or the music for other media. Indeed, he does not name any of
Rachmaninoff’s songs, choral works, chamber music, or symphonic music. Given the significant
differences between the Second and Third Concertos, his equation of the two works reduces
them to their most general features. His work list, like his stylistic commentary, omits the Third
Symphony and Symphonic Dances, though they had been published more than a decade before,
and with them a crucial moment in the composer’s stylistic development. As a result, he
mischaracterizes Rachmaninoff’s music just as he had mischaracterized the twelve-tone music of
Schoenberg before, but without the element of curiosity with which he had approached the latter.
This analysis has been ventured in an effort to understand why Blom assessed
Rachmaninoff’s music as he did, but what it has revealed is that Blom’s critical views do not
explain the assessment. By his own logic, he should have maintained at least some modest
appreciation of Rachmaninoff’s music. Written without sufficient knowledge of his subject,
teetering on the verge of self-contradiction, and inconsistent with his own views, Blom’s
assessment is the very definition of prejudice.
106
This being the case, its ultimate value lies not in
what it reveals about Rachmaninoff’s music but in what it reveals about how Blom himself
regarded it: as popular gush unworthy of careful attention. Indeed, it seems it was the very
popularity of the music, as opposed to the music itself, that irked Blom. Recall his comment
about the “notoriously popular C-sharp Minor Prelude.” Better yet, take a closer look at his
statement that “the enormous popular success some few of Rachmaninoff’s works had in his
lifetime is not likely to last, and musicians never regarded it with much favor.” At first glance,

106
“2 a (1) preconceived judgment or opinion (2) : an adverse opinion or leaning formed
without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge b : an instance of such judgment or opinion
c : an irrational attitude of hostility directed against an individual, a group, a race, or their
supposed characteristics.” Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed., s.v. “prejudice.”
88
Blom seems here to dismiss the music, and no doubt this is what he meant, since this statement
comes on the heels of another one describing the music as a monotonous hodgepodge of gushing
tunes. What it actually says, however, is that what musicians never regarded with much favor
was the enormous popular success, this being the only noun phrase to which the pronoun it can
refer in its immediate syntactical context. With this rich Freudian slip, Blom revealed the true
source of his aversion to Rachmaninoff’s music. The real question that must be asked, then, is
how popular success led in Rachmaninoff’s case to an aversion while it did not, for example, in
the case of Sibelius, as noted above. That is a question for another time.
107

The final member of this English trio was Gerald Abraham. Whereas Scholes and Blom
typically wrote to a general audience, Abraham’s writings appeared primarily in musicological
publications. He was a widely respected authority on Russian music, and his assessment of
Russian music carried enormous weight throughout the West. Like other prominent Western
scholars of Russian music of his time, Abraham maintained an abiding reverence for the
nationalist idiom of the Mighty Handful.
108
In addition to writing a substantial body of scholarly
works, Abraham was an active editor and collaborator for such major publications as the
Monthly Musical Record and The New Oxford History of Music.
109
He also authored the

107
It is possible that the popular 1945 British romance Brief Encounter, whose score was derived
almost exclusively from Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto, triggered a downturn in the
composer’s critical reception at mid-century. I find the film’s appropriation of the concerto to be
thoughtful and creative, but it certainly exploits the nostalgic element of the music, and it is easy
to see how this effect would have been off-putting to persons for whom nostalgia held negative
aesthetic value.
108
See Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically, xiv.
109
The New Oxford History of Music, 10 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1954–90); see
also, for example, Abraham, Studies in Russian Music (London: William Reeves, 1935);
Abraham, On Russian Music (London: William Reeves, 1939); Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi and
Abraham, Masters of Russian Music (London: Duckworth, 1936).
89
impressive Concise Oxford History of Music, which was translated into German and published as
part of Das grosse Lexikon der Musik in 1983.
Abraham wrote the assessment of Rachmaninoff that appeared in 1962 in the first edition
of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, commonly referred to as MGG. As we noted above,
this was the preeminent music encyclopedia of its time, far surpassing the fifth edition of
Grove’s in its level of scholarship and breadth of coverage. It remained unrivaled until the
publication, in 1980, of The New Grove. Abraham’s article offers a detailed summary of
Rachmaninoff’s life, a discussion of his works, and a bibliography and is but one of several of
the author’s writings that spell out his unenthusiastic view of the composer. Just as Kolodin’s
article represents an expansion of the prevailing sentiment of the early decades of the century,
Abraham’s assessment represents the most detailed expression of the English category of
assessment under consideration. Unquestionably owing to the prestige of MGG, Abraham’s
article would exert a strong influence in subsequent music lexicons. For both of these reasons, it
warrants fairly extensive quotation.
A progression from Scholes and Blom is evident in Abraham’s sweeping declaration of
Rachmaninoff’s indebtedness to the piano. Scholes acknowledged Rachmaninoff’s
compositional skill while commending the miniatures; Blom called his technique into question
and otherwise implied that he was a piano composer; Abraham reduced and attributed much of
Rachmaninoff’s compositional identity to his pianism per se. As elsewhere, Abraham intertwines
praise and criticism of Rachmaninoff in a subtle, skillful, and almost dizzying manner:
Rachmaninoff was an excellent pianist who has emerged as a composer not only of
effective piano works and song accompaniments, but whose orchestral works and even
the orchestral parts of his operas seem as though they were basically conceived for the
piano. He was influenced first and foremost by Liszt and Chopin, but his keyboard style
was still more luxuriant than his models, so that the almost continuous richness of
sonority and beautifully applied figurations of the left hand eventually tire the ear. This
90
superabundance of the setting perfectly suits, however, the luxuriant melancholy of
which so many of his melodic ideas and his romantic but essentially diatonic harmony
speak.
110

Abraham then turns his attention, like Scholes and Blom, to the question of Russianness, positing
Rachmaninoff’s reliance on Western-European models. In his peculiar way, Abraham seems to
hail Rachmaninoff as Tchaikovsky’s heir but then suggests that he is inferior. He seems to
celebrate the individuality of Rachmaninoff’s style but then laments its limitations:
Just as Rachmaninoff as a piano-composer was the heir of Liszt and Chopin, he also
claimed the spiritual heritage of Tchaikovsky and Arensky, though the feature of fatalism
noticeable in most of his works is less tragic than Tchaikovsky and more resigned and
elegiac, particularly in the characteristic Isle of the Dead. When Rachmaninoff rebels
against fate, the protest seems to be more of a rhetorical type than an expression of real
passion; his Weltschmerz is a little too elegant and refined. In some of his early
works . . . the influences of Balakirev and Borodin are unmistakable, but little by little
these recede from Rachmaninoff’s works. As soon as his own style had developed with
the Concerto in C Minor (1900), he was content to refine it and apply it to new forms.
This “Rachmaninoff-style” is just as unmistakable as it is limited. It manifested itself in
new musical forms from work to work (for example, in Isle of the Dead, The Bells, and
the Paganini Rhapsody), while the composer’s creative personality scarcely developed
further. . . . Uniformity and self-repetition are apparent not only in his choice of keys,
. . . [but also] in his tendency to repeat textures, thematic ideas, and even whole sections
from work to work, even in the dramatic material of his operas.
111

110
“Rachmaninow war ein ausgezeichneter Pianist, der als Komponist nicht nur mit
wirkungsvollen Klavier-Werken und -Begleitungen seiner Lieder hervorgetreten ist, sondern
dessen Orchester-Werke und sogar die Orchester-Partien der Opern den Eindruck machen, als
seien sie im Grunde für das Klavier konzipiert. Er ist in erster Linie von Liszt und Chopin
beeinflußt, doch wurde sein Klavier-Satz noch üppiger als der seiner Vorbilder, so daß das Ohr
angesichts der fast ununterbrochen vorhandenen Klangfülle und der schön angelegten
Figurationen der linken Hand schließlich doch ermüdet. Diese Überfülle des Satzes paßt jedoch
genau zu der üppigen Melancholie, die aus so vielen seiner melodischen Einfälle und aus seiner
romantischen, aber im wesentlich diatonischen Harmonik spricht.”
111
“Wie Rachmaninow als Klavier-Komponist der Erbe Liszts und Chopins war, so trat er
geistig das Erbe Tschaikowskys und Arenskys an, obgleich der in den meisten seiner Werke
spürbare Zug von Fatalismus weniger tragisch als bei Tschaikowsky und eher resignativ und
elegisch ist, so vor allem in der charakteristischen Toteninsel. Sobald Rachmaninow sich gegen
das Schicksal auflehnt, scheint dieser Protest mehr rhetorischer Art als ein Ausdruck echter
Leidenschaft zu sein; sein Weltschmerz ist ein wenig zu elegant und raffiniert. In einigen seiner
Frühwerke . . . sind Einflüsse von Balakirew und Borodin nicht zu verkennen, doch gehen sie im
Schaffen Rachmaninows nach und nach zurück. Sobald dieser mit dem Klavier-Konzert c (1900)
seinen eigenen Stil entwickelt hatte, gab er sich damit zufrieden, ihn zu verfeinern und auf neue
91
Abraham thus regarded Rachmaninoff much as Scholes and Blom did. The composer’s
style was thought to be insufficiently well-defined and to depend too much on the piano.
Abraham’s assessment carried more weight, however, not only because he specialized in Russian
music but also because he clearly possessed a detailed familiarity with Rachmaninoff’s music.
Owing to the detail with which Abraham described his views in the foregoing assessment, it is
not necessary to dwell extensively on them here. All of his other statements on Rachmaninoff
convey more or less the same impressions but merely in fewer words. His passing comment in
his One Hundred Years of Music is representative. There he states that Rachmaninoff was an
epigone of Tchaikovsky, one in a group of second-generation nationalists that tried “to establish
themselves as universalists. That would matter less,” he continued, “if they were something more
than talented mediocrities. But it would be stupid to pretend that Glazunov, Lyadov,
Rachmaninoff and Arensky . . . are anything but pale shadows of their masters and
predecessors.”
112

The assessments of Scholes, Blom, and Abraham give form to John Culshaw’s
description of Rachmaninoff’s antipathetic reception among the British musical elite in the years
immediately following World War II. “Having been passionately fond of Rachmaninov’s music”
since his early teens, Culshaw continued nurturing his love for the music during his military
service. While in training, he and his fellow cadets would gather in the airfield cinema to listen

Formen anzuwenden. Dieser „Rachmaninows-Stil“ ist ebenso unverwechselbar wie begrenzt. Er
entwickelt von Werk zu Werk (z. B. in der Toteninsel, in den Glocken und in der Paganini-
Rhapsodie) neue Spielformen seiner selbst, während die künstlerische Persönlichkeit des
Komponist sich kaum weiterentwickelte. . . . Die Gleichförmigkeit und Selbstwiederholung zeigt
sich nicht nur in der Wahl der Tonarten . . . [sondern auch] in seiner Neigung, Fakturen,
thematische Einfälle und sogar ganze Abschnitte von Werk zu Werk zu wiederholen, selbst in
seinen Opernstoffen.”
112
Abraham, One Hundred Years of Music: After Beethoven and Wagner, 3rd ed. (Chicago:
Aldine, 1964).
92
to records, and Rachmaninoff would fill the hall. “There was something in his music that
touched a nerve in that generation at that time,” Culshaw later recalled, “and I wanted to know
why, and to find out more about the man and the music.” After returning from the war, Culshaw
wrote a survey of Rachmaninoff’s works, which was, in fact, the first complete posthumous
survey of Rachmaninoff’s music to be published anywhere.
113
He discovered while writing the
book, however, that “in academic circles his [i.e., Rachmaninoff’s] music was regarded with
contempt”:
114

It proved highly undesirable even to mention the name of Rachmaninoff in London
musical circles in 1946, let alone admit that one was trying to write a book about him. . . .
The writing of the book became a sort of clandestine operation. Valuable scores
and sometimes manuscripts turned up in the most unlikely places, as if people were
slightly ashamed of harboring such unworthy efforts.
115

Describing this same setting on a later occasion, Culshaw wrote that
the prevailing “professional” attitude to Rachmaninoff’s music was that it was hopelessly
outdated. . . . Our attitude was discounted by our superiors; when I tried to explain to an
Oxford professor the enthusiasm that had been aroused by the playing of Ormandy’s
Minneapolis recording of Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony in the airfield cinema in
Trinidad in 1943, his response was that it was “nothing but nostalgia.”
116

Culshaw “could not see . . . what could possibly arouse nostalgia in cadets with an average age
of nineteen.”
117
Nevertheless, the influence of these musical superiors—figures such as Scholes,

113
John Culshaw, Putting the Record Straight (New York: Viking, 1982), 25, 32, 61. See
Culshaw, Sergei Rachmaninov (London: Dobson, 1949).
114
Culshaw, “Rachmaninov Revisited,” Soundings 3 (January 1973): 2.
115
Ibid., 2–3.
116
Culshaw, Putting the Record Straight, 76. Culshaw’s suggestion that Rachmaninoff’s music
was regarded as “outdated” (nostalgia being part of this), and that this was the primary reason for
its low critical regard, may well be true—we have no reason to discount his testimony—but if so,
this sentiment was not expressed in any music lexicons of the period, as we have seen.
117
Ibid.
93
Blom, and Abraham
118
—ran deep. Although he was a self-described Rachmaninoff “enthusiast,”
Culshaw later admitted that “some of the prevailing antipathy to Rachmaninoff had had an
influence on me. . . . I had not set out to write uncritical gush, but I had no intention of being
destructive; yet it seems to me now that the book managed to achieve both of those dubious
objectives.”
119

With the cumulative weight of their successive assessments—each combining
advantageously the acknowledged authority of its author with the prominence and permanence of
the lexicon in which it appeared—Scholes, Blom, and Abraham established a new, negative line
of lexicographical assessment for Rachmaninoff; as we have seen, these are not the only
assessments in music lexicons of the period to mingle praise and criticism of Rachmaninoff’s
music, but they are the only ones in which criticism extends to dismissal. Their assessments
appeared in the most widely circulated and authoritative music lexicons of the mid-twentieth
century: The Oxford Companion became one of the most popular concise music encyclopedias
ever, Grove’s enjoyed an even broader readership and remained in print for twenty-five years,
and MGG was, at the same time, the unrivaled scholarly music encyclopedia of its day. The
visibility and weight of these assessments must not, however, obscure the fact that they were
vastly outnumbered at the time of their publication and thus represent a minority view. Scholes
stood alone as Rachmaninoff’s sole detractor in music lexicons from 1938 until 1954, when he
was joined by Blom. These were joined in turn by Abraham in 1962, but the 1960s were also

118
Culshaw, in fact, knew Abraham, and it is highly likely that he was familiar with the writings
of Scholes and Blom as well, for he indicates that during these same postwar years he “continued
to read just about every music book I could find, not just in the local library but in the specialist
collections in Liverpool and Manchester.” Ibid., 49–51.
119
Ibid., 76–77.
94
characterized by widespread approbation for Rachmaninoff in music lexicons. Abraham’s
influence in particular would eventually show itself in other lexicons, but not until the 1970s.
Among the lexicons surveyed, Abraham’s article in MGG was, in fact, one of only three
negative assessments to appear in the 1960s. The other two appeared within a few years of
Abraham’s and were likewise published in continental Europe. The first was written by Horst
Seeger, a German musicologist, critic, and lexicographer active in the German Democratic
Republic. His 1966 Musiklexikon gives the composer short shrift: “Rachmaninoff was one of the
greatest pianists of his era. . . . As a composer he was able to succeed with only a few works that
were influenced by Tchaikovsky.”
120
The second, written by Dutch pianist and composer Alex
de Vries, is more extended and appeared in 1963 in the large Algemene muziek-encyclopedie. De
Vries’s stylistic commentary opens by aligning Rachmaninoff with “the more West-leaning
Moscow School” in late-nineteenth-century Russian music.
121
On the question of
Rachmaninoff’s stylistic contemporaneity, he takes a negative stance, expressed in terms that
reflect De Vries’s avid interest in psychology:
122

Considered psychologically, he was a typical secondary-reactionary, by nature not very
open to new impressions. Creatively, he seldom or never outgrew a surely very talented
epigonism; he is and remains a Tchaikovsky admirer. The message of renewal brought by
Musorgsky—born 39 years before him—passed by him; the evolution of Scriabin, his

120
“Rachmaninow war einer der bedeutendsten Pianisten seiner Epoche. . . . Als Komponist
vermochte er sich nur mit einigen Werken, die im Bannkreise Tschaikowskis stehen,
durchzusetzen.”
121
“Rachmaninoff vertegenwoordigde de meer bij het Westen aanleunende Moskou-richting.”
122
See Alex de Vries, Inleiding tot de algemene en muzikale geheugenleer [Introduction to the
theory of general and musical memory] (Leuven, Belgium: De Monte, 1973). Biographical
information for De Vries can be found at “De Vries, Alex,” Studiecentrum voor Vlaamse Muziek
vzw, accessed December 4, 2014, http://www.svm.be/content/de-vries-alex?display=biography&
language=en.
95
contemporary, was foreign to him, to say nothing of Stravinsky, who was but nine years
younger.
123

In matters of technique, De Vries regarded Rachmaninoff as a talented melodist who wrote
brilliantly for the piano but failed to reconcile these virtues with the demands of form:
Rachmaninoff’s principal quality is melodic wealth. His indisputable talent as a melodist
is evident already from the first theme of his Piano Concerto No. 1 in F-sharp Minor, op.
1, and perhaps even more clearly from the main theme of his Third Piano Concerto in D
Minor. The endless “passage-play” that follows the exposition of this gorgeous theme,
however, betrays at the same time the limits of his talent and an eminently deficient
structure.
In some privileged moments he reaches higher summits—among others, in the
Paganini Rhapsody—and in any event Rachmaninoff’s oeuvre remains a monument of
ingenious, grandly conceived, and richly varied pianistic writing.
124

Like Blom, De Vries omitted some significant works from the work list, in this case the
composer’s first opera, Aleko, and his final symphonic work, the Symphonic Dances.
The 1970s witnessed the highest concentration of negative lexicographical assessments of
Rachmaninoff, although these continued to be far outnumbered by neutral and favorable
assessments. His treatment in Italian lexicons suffered an especially noteworthy decline—the
assessment that appeared in 1971 in La musica, which abstains from descriptive commentary, is
the exception among these. A new edition of the Enciclopedia della musica features a negative

123
“Psychologisch beschouwd, was hij een typisch secondair-reagerende, weinig voor nieuwe
indrukken openstaande natuur. Creatief is hij zelden of nooit boven een overigens zeer begaafd
epigonisme uitgegroeid; hij is en blijft een Tsjaikofski-bewonderaar. De boodschap van
vernieuwing, gebracht door Moessorgski — 39 jaar vóór hem geboren — is hem voorbijgegaan;
de evolutie van Skrjabin, zijn tijdgenoot, bleef hem vreemd, om te zwijgen van de maar negen
jaar jongere Stravinski.”
124
“De voornaamste kwaliteit van Rachmaninoff is de melodische rijkdom. Zijn onbetwistbare
gave als melodicus blijkt reeds uit het eerste thema van het pianoconcerto Nr. 1, Op. 1, in fis, en
nog duidelijker wellicht uit het hoofdthema van zijn 3e pianoconcerto, in d. Het eindeloze
„passage-spel” dat echter op de expositie van dit prachtige thema volgt, verraadt tevens de
beperking van zijn talent en een bij uitstek gebrekkige constructie.
“In sommige geprivilegieerde momenten bereikt hij hogere toppen—onder anderen in de
Paganini-rapsodie—en in ieder geval blijft het œuvre van Rachmaninoff een monument van een
vernuftige, groots opgezette en rijk gedifferentieerde pianistieke schrijfwijze.”
96
assessment that accords Rachmaninoff little respect as a composer, and that strongly qualified.
The assessment appeared in 1972 and was written by Piero Rattalino, who would emerge as one
of Italy’s most prominent music critics and has written many books on the piano and its lauded
performers. Like Rachmaninoff’s English detractors, Rattalino emphasizes the composer’s
Moscow heritage in a negative light. Unlike them, however, he applies an overtly modernist
paradigm that links “historical importance” with musical progressivism:
Rachmaninoff’s work as a composer is rather less significant [than as an interpreter]. In
his early piano works, Rachmaninoff was harmed less by the evident derivation from the
Tchaikovsky matrix as he was by the influence of A. S. Arensky, which manifests itself
in trite sentimentalism and in the frequent banality of the melody. Later, particularly
during the Dresden period, Rachmaninoff’s melody lost the sentimental attitude typical of
the fin de siècle and became at times very original. The number of compositions,
however, does not correspond to a continuity of stimuli and creative invention, and often
the superbly pianistic writing does not redeem the impersonal materials and academic
forms. . . .
Rachmaninoff’s indifference to the major creators among his contemporaries and
immediate predecessors . . . limits his historical importance and makes him worthy to be
remembered at the very most for a few happy moments in the first two symphonies and
Kolokola [The Bells].
125

An assessment published in 1974 in the Enciclopedia della Garzanti della musica likewise aligns
Rachmaninoff with Moscow’s “cosmopolitan-style eclecticism” (eclettismo stilistico
cosmopolitico), also chiding him for “a certain bombast and inclination, especially in the piano
concertos, toward a wholly superficial virtuosity” (una certa ampollosità e inclini, specie i

125
“Minore è invece la portata dell’opera di Rachmaninov come compositore. Nei suoi lavori
giovanili per pianoforte, l’evidente derivazione dalla matrice ciakovskiana non nuoce a
Rachmaninov quanto gli nuoce invece l’influenza di A. S. Arenski, che si manifesta nel trito
sentimentalismo e nella frequenta balanità della melodia. Più tardi, specie nel periodo di Dresda,
la melodia di Rachmaninov perse i caratteri sentimentali tipici della fine del secolo, e divenne
talvolta molto originale. Il numero delle composizioni non corrisponde però ad una continuità di
stimoli e di invenzione creativa, e spesso la superba scrittura pianistica non riscatta i materiali
impersonali e le forme accademiche. . . .
“L’indifferenza di Rachmaninov verso i maggiori creatori che immediatamente lo
precedono e che gli sono coetanei . . . limita la sua importanza storica e lo fa tutt’al più ricordare
per alcuni felici momenti delle prime due sinfonie e di Kolokolá.”
97
concerti per pianoforte, a un virtuosismo tutto esteriore). The 1976 Nuovo Dizionario Ricordi
della musica e dei musicisti still accords Rachmaninoff “inventive genius and solid
craftsmanship,” but he is now “prone to superficiality” (anche se spesso incline all’esteriorità).
Other less favorable assessments of the 1970s appear to have been directly influenced by
Abraham’s assessment in MGG, much as Bantock’s assessment in the trusted Dictionary of
Modern Music and Musicians had influenced others decades earlier. This time, however, the
influence was negative rather than positive. The 1974 Dictionary of Contemporary Music echoes
Abraham’s criticism of Rachmaninoff’s compositional technique in a rare departure from the
composer’s typically favorable treatment in American music lexicons. “He was one of the great
piano virtuosos of his time,” the entry reads, “and the piano is at the heart of his compositions.
His songs depend very much on their accompaniments, and the texture of his orchestral music is
often pianistic in origin.” The second edition of the Yugoslavian Muzicka enciklopedija
reproduces Hajek’s original article, save for an inserted statement, reproduced below, that was
obviously borrowed from MGG. The now jarringly conflicted assessment probably represents
editorial interference, since Hajek died in 1974 and this volume was published in 1977:
Primarily a composer of pianistic inspiration, in his piano music Rachmaninoff follows
Chopin and Liszt, but his keyboard texture is denser almost to the point of saturation, as,
for example, in the extravagant assortment of appealing figuration in the left hand. In
some of his early works . . . one perceives the influences of Balakirev and Borodin, but
they later disappear completely. By about 1900 Rachmaninoff’s personality as a creator
was completely developed. Rachmaninoff’s particular style neither changes significantly
nor develops further, and in later works often leads to monotonous self-repetition.
126

126
“Kompozitor primarno pijanističke inspiracije, Rahmanjinov u svojoj klavirskoj muzici sledi
Chopina i Liszta ali mu je klavirska faktura zgusnutija gotovo zasićena, npr. preteranim
redanjem dopadljive figuracije u levoj ruci. U pojedinim njegovim ranim delima . . . opažaju se i
uticaji Balakireva i Borodina, ali oni posle sasvim nestaju. Oko 1900 Rahmanjinov je kao
stvaralac potpuno izgradena ličnost. Specifičan stil Rahmanjinova posle se nije bitno menjao ni
dalje razvijao pa u kasnijim delima često dolazi do jednoličnog ponavljanja vlastitih postupaka.”
98
Likewise, the assessment that appeared in 1979 in the Brockhaus Riemann Musiklexikon displays
more sympathy with MGG than with the Riemann that preceded it: “Rachmaninoff’s often
overladen style,” it reads, “is influenced by Liszt, Chopin, and Tchaikovsky; his musical
language stands occasionally in the vicinity of salon music.”
127

Other assessments from this period show Abraham’s influence not by adopting his
negative tone but by naming, like the Brockhaus Riemann, Chopin, Liszt, and Tchaikovsky as
Rachmaninoff’s principal musical influences—a new stylistic configuration. These include the
assessments in Theodore Karp’s 1973 Dictionary of Music and Das grosse Lexikon der Musik in
acht Bänden.
A fair terminating point for this period of marked regional variation is 1983. That year De
Vries’s assessment was carried into a new edition of the Algemene muziek encyclopedie, with its
final two paragraphs struck. This change—editorial, since De Vries died in 1964—is ambivalent:
it removes almost all of De Vries’s favorable commentary but also his criticism of
Rachmaninoff’s formal technique. The work list remains incomplete, as in the original, which
was curious before but even more so by 1983.

127
“Rachmaninows oft überladener Stil ist von Liszt, Chopin und Tschaikowsky beeinflußt;
seine Musiksprache steht gelegentlich in der Nähe der Salonmusik.”
99
Chapter 3

1980–2013: A New Consensus

By the time De Vries’s modified assessment appeared in 1983, a return to a favorable
international consensus was already under way. Culminating in the early twenty-first century,
this would be a new consensus, one based on a familiarity with Rachmaninoff’s music that far
exceeded the level evident in assessments up to 1938. In places where the composer’s reception
in music lexicons had declined, assessments were rewritten or edited from older editions to
present him in a more positive light. Whereas the two most prominent music lexicons of the mid-
twentieth century, Grove’s and MGG, had featured negative assessments, by the end of this
period these and other, comparable encyclopedic works would all feature detailed, balanced, and
affirmative ones. While his reputation as a pianist had not faded, Rachmaninoff was widely
viewed once again as a skilled, multifaceted composer, and his enduring prominence in the
spheres of Russian music and twentieth-century music was universally acknowledged in music
lexicons.
Ironically, this return first emerged in England in the 1970s, when the decline in
Rachmaninoff’s reception in music lexicons that English writers themselves had initiated was at
its peak. Driving this reevaluation in music lexicons was a younger generation of musicians who,
as Culshaw explained, “found no embarrassment in embracing the work of a composer whose
style was out of step with his period.”
1
The articles of Richard Coolidge and Stephen Walsh that
were cited in the introduction were also part of this broader reevaluation of the composer in
England at this time. The first definite trace of this development in music lexicography is found
in Jack Westrup’s 1971 edition of Everyman’s, where the word “notoriously” has been struck

1
Culshaw, Putting the Record Straight, 77.
100
from Blom’s original description of the Prelude in C-sharp Minor; the entry also appears thus in
the subsequent and final edition of this title, the 1988 New Everyman Dictionary of Music.
2

Reassessment of the composer is also evident in the 1971 Larousse Encyclopedia of Music (an
English edition of La musique—see p. 61), in which the original French assessment has been
modified to read that “his music is moving and has been criticized for occasional excessive
romanticism, but it is always sincere and sensitive, and his later works are coming to be more
and more admired.”
3
Rachmaninoff’s late works are also the focal point of the new assessment
that appears in Conrad Wilson’s 1976 edition of the New College Encyclopedia of Music, where
the dismissive stance of the previous English generation was contested directly in an act of open
revisionism:
At one time it was fashionable to disparage Rachmaninoff as a romantic born out of his
period, to condemn many of his large-scale works because of their “structural
weaknesses,” and to claim that his inspiration dwindled as he grew older. But now that
his music has come more fully into focus, it is easy to refute these accusations. . . . His
romanticism was an asset rather than a liability, and in any case irrelevant to works like
the Third Piano Concerto and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini—finely integrated
scores, in which style and content are perfectly suited to each other. As for the loss of
inspiration, one need only point out that one of his most progressive and compelling
works, the Symphonic Dances for orchestra, dates from the very end of his career.
Within a few short years, The Concise Oxford Dictionary, The Oxford Companion, and
The New Grove all regrouped in Rachmaninoff’s favor. The late Michael Kennedy’s
substantially revised third edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary, published in 1980, featured
a new assessment that has been reprinted up to the present day in all five subsequent editions of

2
It is probable that David Cummings, editor of The New Everyman, also carried the entry in this
form into two subsequent music lexicons that he edited, The Hutchinson Encyclopedia of Music
(1995) and its American edition, The Random House Encyclopedic Dictionary of Music (1997),
but I have not examined these.
3
Larousse Encyclopedia of Music, ed. Geoffrey Hindley (London: Hamlyn, 1971; reprint, New
York: Excalibur Books, 1981), 425.
101
it and its twin title, The Oxford Dictionary of Music.
4
The assessment acknowledges
Rachmaninoff’s excellence as a performer but emphasizes his legacy as a composer, just as it
acknowledges his piano music but emphasizes his works in other genres. It also celebrates the
composer’s relation to his nineteenth-century predecessors as one of heritage rather than of
epigonism. In other words, it inverts the view of the earlier, dissenting English commentators:
Rachmaninoff was one of the greatest of pianists, as is proved by his recordings not only
of his own concertos but of other composers’ music. . . . The vigor and attention to detail
of his conducting are also preserved on records. But it is as a composer that his name will
live longest. He was the last of the colorful Russian masters of the late-nineteenth
century, with their characteristic gift for long and broad melodies imbued with a resigned
melancholy which is never long absent. His operas have failed to hold the stage, mainly
because of defects in their librettos, but recordings have enabled their splendid music to
be appreciated. Three of the four piano concertos are an ineradicable part of the romantic
repertory, and the symphonies, though long overshadowed by the pianoforte works, have
gained esteem and popularity. The songs are at last being recognized as among Russia’s
best. In his later years his style grew subtler. . . . But his masterpiece is The Bells, in
which all his powers are fused and unified.
Rachmaninoff’s most important advocate among this younger generation of British
musicians was Geoffrey Norris, who worked simultaneously in the spheres of biography,
documentary history, music lexicography, and music criticism to project a more well-rounded
and sympathetic image of the composer.
5
Norris wrote the much enhanced article in The New
Oxford Companion to Music, published in 1983, which has been carried into all subsequent
editions of that title, including Oxford Music Online. More significantly, drawing on the
experience of his research on the composer, Norris wrote a new article for the 1980 New Grove

4
The commentary from this assessment reproduced here includes two minor editorial changes
introduced after the first edition and retained up to the present. The phrase “three of the four
piano concertos” originally read “the four piano concertos,” and the comment about the
symphonies originally read “gained in popularity.”
5
See Geoffrey Norris, “Rakhmaninov’s Second Thoughts,” Musical Times 114 (April 1973):
364–68; Norris, “Rakhmaninov’s Student Opera,” Musical Quarterly 59 (July 1973): 441–48;
Norris, Rakhmaninov (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1976; 2nd ed. pub. 1994 as Rachmaninoff).
Norris has also written variously on other Russian composers.
102
to supersede the composite entry by Newmarch and Blom. The article, which far exceeded the
length and detail of coverage of any previous entry on Rachmaninoff in a music lexicon, was
retained with slight emendations in the second edition of The New Grove in 2001, is cited
repeatedly in the current English-language article on Rachmaninoff in Wikipedia, and has also
appeared in titles derived from The New Grove.
6
Like those of Wilson and Kennedy, Norris’s
assessment reads like a corrective to Scholes, Blom, and Abraham. Norris opens by placing
Rachmaninoff firmly in the pantheon of Russian composers, without any reference to abstracted
notions of stylistic contemporaneity:
He was one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, the last great
representative of Russian late romanticism. The influences of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-
Korsakov, and other Russian composers soon gave way to a thoroughly personal idiom,
with a pronounced lyrical quality, expressive breadth, structural ingenuity, and a palette
of rich, distinctive orchestral colors.
Norris discusses the composer’s output and stylistic development with subtlety and discernment.
In the process, he acknowledges the piano’s importance in Rachmaninoff’s career and output but
emphasizes his well-roundedness as a composer, noting his achievements in various genres and
in many aspects of compositional technique, such as melodic inventiveness, formal structure, and
orchestration, among others. The following is but an excerpt of Norris’s extensive commentary,
but it serves to illustrate the care and expertise with which he approaches his subject:
Understandably, the piano figures prominently in Rachmaninoff’s music, either as a solo
instrument or as part of an ensemble. But he used his own skills as a performer not to
write music of unreasonable, empty virtuosity, but rather to explore fully the expressive
possibilities of the instrument. Even in his earliest works . . . he revealed a sure grasp of
idiomatic piano writing and a striking gift for melody. . . .
With his works of the mid-1890s Rachmaninoff began to strike a more individual
tone: the six Moments musicaux (1896) have the characteristic yearning themes,
combined with a rise and fall of dynamics and intricate passagework. Even his First

6
See Norris, “Sergey Rakhmaninov,” in The New Grove Russian Masters 2, 1st American ed.,
ed. Gerald Abraham (New York: Norton, 1986), 75–105; and the assessments in The New Grove
Dictionary of American Music (1986) and The Grove Dictionary of American Music (2013).
103
Symphony (1895) . . . has many original features. Its brutal gestures and uncompromising
power of expression (particularly in the finale) were unprecedented in Russian music;
and, although it must be said that the work has a tendency to ramble, nevertheless its
flexible rhythms, sweeping lyricism, and stringent economy of thematic material . . . were
features used with greater subtlety and individuality later on.
After the three vacuous years that followed the poor reception of the symphony in
1897, Rachmaninoff’s style began to develop significantly. In the Second Piano Concerto
(1900–01) the headstrong youthful impetuosity of the symphony has largely given way to
Rachmaninoff’s predilection for sumptuous harmonies and broadly lyrical, often
intensely passionate melodies. At its most inspired, Rachmaninoff’s lyrical inspiration is
matchless. Taking only a few examples from many possible others, the long opening
theme of the Second Concerto, the broad melodic expanse of the Second Symphony’s
slow movement, or the central section of The Isle of the Dead all demonstrate an ability
to imagine seamless lines stretching ever onwards to their ultimate goal. . . .
The years immediately following the premieres of the two operas [1906–17] . . .
were Rachmaninoff’s most fruitful as a composer, and it was during this period that his
style reached full maturity. The Second Symphony (1906–7) and Third Piano Concerto
(1909) display his fully-fledged melodic style (particularly in the slow movement of the
symphony), his opulent but infinitely varied and discerning use of the orchestra (notably
in the symphony’s scherzo), and a greater confidence in the handling of large-scale
structures.
If this commentary focuses primarily on Rachmaninoff’s larger works, Norris also reserves
favorable comment for the composer’s shorter pieces. Beginning with his opus 21 songs, Norris
wrote, Rachmaninoff “began to achieve a perfect balance between voice and accompaniment,
using the piano to echo the sentiments of the text.” The piano preludes, he wrote further, “all
have a common characteristic in that they demonstrate Rachmaninoff’s ability to crystallize
perfectly a particular mood or sentiment: each prelude grows from a tiny melodic or rhythmic
fragment into a taut, powerfully evocative miniature.”
All subsequent noteworthy British music lexicons to date likewise feature favorable
assessments of Rachmaninoff.
7
Among these, the lengthy assessment in Norman Lebrecht’s

7
See assessments in Paul Griffiths, The Thames and Hudson Encyclopaedia of 20th-Century
Music (1986), later expanded in Griffiths, The New Penguin Dictionary of Music, (2006); David
Pickering, Brewer’s Twentieth-century Music (1994), revised and published as The Cassell
Companion to 20th-century Music (1997); The Norton/Grove Concise Encyclopedia of Music
(1988); Encyclopedia of Music in the 20th Century (1999).
104
1992 Companion to 20th-Century Music, carried into the second edition in 2000, might be
mentioned, for it displays the renewed English favorability in a specifically twentieth-century
context. Lebrecht refers to the Second Concerto as “great art,” to the Third as “the most
confident and accomplished of his concerted works,” and to Rachmaninoff himself as
“inextricably Russian.” Also consistent with English reappraisal is Lebrecht’s acknowledgement
of Rachmaninoff’s late works: the Fourth Concerto (Blom’s “failure from the start”) was simply
“too perplexing for its American audience,” and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini contains
the composer’s “most sumptuous tune” and would be “the last of Rachmaninoff’s works to
vanish.” Lebrecht sought not only to affirm the music per se but also to rescue Rachmaninoff
from his own popularity:
The scope of his ambitions alone confirms that Rachmaninoff was not a composer who
pandered to public taste, any more than Mozart was. Nor was he an empty-minded
musician who chased from one stage to the next in pursuit of the highest dollar. He was a
reflective man who thirsted after new ideas, relished the company of intellectuals and
held a liberal humanist outlook. Much misunderstood, he belonged to the fraternity of
pre-war idealists who believed that music could make a better world.
It should be noted that not everyone who participated in this British reassessment of
Rachmaninoff belonged to the younger generation. The late Robert Threlfall, for example, had
been studying the composer’s music since the 1930s and wrote, like Norris, an article on
Rachmaninoff’s revisions and a biography of the composer during the 1970s.
8
Together, in 1982,
Norris and Threlfall published A Catalogue of the Compositions of S. Rachmaninoff, an essential
reference for the Rachmaninoff scholar, establishing a direct historical link between these

8
See Robert Threlfall, “Rachmaninoff’s Revisions and an Unknown Version of His Fourth
Concerto,” Musical Opinion 96 (February 1973): 235–37; Threlfall, Sergei Rachmaninoff: His
Life and Music (London: Boosey and Hawkes, 1973).
105
different generations of British Rachmaninoff enthusiasts.
9
That Threlfall had been there all
along is an important reminder of what we observed above: that the views of Scholes, Blom, and
Abraham, were never universally shared, even among English commentators. Recall in this
context that subsequent editions published during this period of The Concise Encyclopedia of
Music and Musicians and Jacobs’s New Dictionary of Music featured their original benign
assessments from 1958—no reassessment in these cases was deemed necessary.
In a similar fashion, critical opinion in music lexicons softened also in Italy. As in
England, the beginnings of this trend were modest: in the 1983 La nuova enciclopedia Garzanti
della musica, the virtuosity of Rachmaninoff’s music is no longer “wholly” superficial, even if
the music itself still suffers from “bombast.” Also as in England, reassessment soon manifested
itself in a major encyclopedic work, in this case the Dizionario enciclopedico universale della
musica e dei musicisti. Published in thirteen volumes from 1983 to 1990, the Dizionario
enciclopedico is one of the largest music lexicons of the twentieth century, and the fact that it
features a more favorable (though not uncritical) assessment of the composer is significant. The
assessment appeared in 1988 and was written by Bruno Cerchio, a composer and a scholar of
music and philosophy.
10

Cerchio’s assessment opens, however, with criticism of Rachmaninoff’s formal
technique. Having quoted from some of the composer’s own commentary describing music as
something primarily emotional rather than intellectual (some of which is reproduced above on p.

9
See Norris and Threlfall, A Catalogue of the Compositions of S. Rachmaninoff (London: Scolar
Press, 1982).
10
See, for example, Cerchio’s Il suono filosofale: musica e alchimia (Lucca, Italy: Libreria
musicale italiana, 1993). Cerchio’s Krishna Suite was given its world premiere in 1992 by the
Boston Symphony Orchestra.
106
84), Cerchio avers that the composer “was always indifferent to (or wary of) any linguistic
innovation thought to be ‘cerebral,’” continuing as follows:
. . . It is therefore understandable that his real weak point was always form, which is the
most intellectual (“cerebral”) aspect of composition. . . . The classic forms are passively
accepted as containers in which to pour his typical desire to sing. It goes without saying,
then, that his weakest compositions are the three symphonies, where length and
diffuseness may erroneously suggest a Brucknerian ancestry: in Bruckner, sonata form is
expanded according to a conscious plan that is completely missing in Rachmaninoff,
whose verbosity is only lack of measurement.
11

This criticism is but a prelude to thoughtful praise that at once reverses and transcends several
criticisms ventured in Italian music lexicons of the 1970s. “These defects are mitigated,
however,” Cerchio continues, “by such qualities as a genuine harmonic sensibility, a personal
and unmistakable melodic vein, and an orchestral color that reveals its excellent relationship with
the Russian national school.”
12
Cerchio also ventures a levelheaded assessment of the differing
ways in which Rachmaninoff has been regarded by audiences and music professionals:
Judgments of Rachmaninoff have been divided and lacking in composure. The concert-
going public (above all American) made of him one of its favorites, rightly seeing in him
the last great romantic pianist-composer and bestowing an understandable preference for
his Piano Concertos, above all the Second and Third. Musicians, on the other hand,
considered Rachmaninoff a holdover from the past who was just as bothersome as he was
famous. The truth is probably (as always) in between. The public undoubtedly admires

11
“Egli fu sempre indifferente (o diffidente) verso ogni innovazione linguistica che bollava come
«cerebrale». . . . Da ciò si comprende come il suo vero punto debole sia sempre stata la forma,
cioè l’aspetto più intellettuale («cerebrale») della composizione. . . . Le forme classiche vengono
supinamente accettate come «contenitori» in cui riversare il proprio desiderio di canto. È ovvio
quindi che le sue composizioni più deboli siano le 3 sinfonie, dove lunghezza e dispersività
potrebbero erroneamente far pensare ad ascendenze bruckneriane: in Bruckner vi è un cosciente
piano di dilatazione della forma-sonata che manca completamente in Rachmaninov, la cui
verbosità è solo mancanza di misura.”
12
“Questi difetti sono però mitigati da pregi quali una genuina sensibilità armonica, una vena
melodica personale e inconfondibile, un colore orchestrale che rivela la sua ottima parentela con
la scuola nazionale russa.”
107
Rachmaninoff’s more superficial qualities, but the potency of his musical personality is
undeniable.
13

The rest of Cerchio’s assessment proceeds on the premise that Rachmaninoff’s critical reception
has been complicated by his excellence as a pianist.
14
This perspective not only yields favorable
comment on once neglected corners of Rachmaninoff’s output such as his choral music, choral
symphony (The Bells), and post-emigration works, but it also leads him to a unique calculation
of the composer’s historical importance (the very thing denied him earlier by Rattalino) based on
the most neglected genre in Rachmaninoff’s output of all—opera:
In his opera The Miserly Knight . . . the dark geometry of Pushkin’s passions is rendered
with such a density of accents as to make it the ideal path between Musorgsky and
Strauss’s Elektra, constituting on the other hand the most valid antecedent of Bartók’s
Bluebeard’s Castle, with which it shares the contrast between the small number of
characters on stage, no choir, and extremely thick and dense orchestral sonorities.
15

This attitude of reappraisal is evident also in one of the most popular Italian general
music dictionaries of recent years, Piero Mioli’s 2006 Dizionario di musica classica. Mioli opens
with a dispassionate description of Rachmaninoff’s style, mentioning his proclivity for classic

13
“I giudizi su Rachmaninov sono stati contrastati e privi di serenità. Il pubblico concertistico
(soprattutto americano) ne fece uno dei suoi beniamini, vedendo giustamente in lui l’ultimo
grande pianista-compositore romantico e tributando una comprensibile preferenza ai suoi
Concerti per pianoforte e orchestra, soprattutto al Secondo e al Terzo. I musicisti d’altro canto
considerarono Rachmaninov come un sopravvissuto, particolarmente fastidioso in quanto
famoso. È probabile che (come sempre) la verità stia in mezzo. Il pubblico ammirò
indubbiamente in Rachmaninov le qualità più esteriori, ma non gli si può negare una potente
personalità.”
14
“As in the case of Liszt, his career as a pianist has harmed knowledge of parts of his oeuvre in
which his best works are found.” (Come nel caso di Liszt la carriera di pianista nocque alla
conoscenza di parti della sua produzione in cui è forse dato trovare le sue cose migliori.)
15
Nell’opera Il cavaliere avaro . . . la cupa geometria delle passioni puskiniana è resa con tale
densità di accenti da farne il tramite ideale tra Musorgskij e l’Elettra straussiana, costituendo per
altro verso il più valido antecedente del bartokiano Castello di Barbablù, con cui condivide il
contrasto tra numero esiguo di personaggi in scena, assenza di coro e sonorità orchestrali
oltremodo spesse e massicce.”
108
forms, romantic idiom, “keen harmonic sensibility,” and “great skill in orchestration.” He also
praises Rachmaninoff as “an outstanding melodist,” though his description of Rachmaninoff’s
melodies is mixed: they are “often inspired and captivating” but also (perhaps echoing Garzanti)
“sometimes grandiloquent and a bit superficial.”
16
This introductory commentary gives way to a
validating statement positing Rachmaninoff’s close relation to the romantic and post-romantic
currents of his time. As with many other reappraisals, this one makes special reference to
segments of Rachmaninoff’s oeuvre that were initially overshadowed by his more famous works:
With Richard Strauss and Sibelius, Rachmaninoff was truly the last of the romantics, a
blessed survivor who had the courage of his convictions and, on the part of certain critics
wholly bent on the merciless liquidation of the past, has met with far too much mistrust.
All the more so, since in his last years in his native country he had made somewhat of a
reversal that on closer inspection prevents his total identification with the style of the
nineteenth century. This concerns such music as the cantata Kolokola [The Bells] set to
text by Edgar Allan Poe, the collections of romances set to verses by symbolist poets, and
the Etudes-tableaux, where an irregularity and a boldness of writing are accompanied by
a tragic, grotesque mode of expression much closer to Mahler and Schoenberg than to
Tchaikovsky and Brahms: an authentic break from the aspiration to an absolute classic-
romantic beauty that he sought in other earlier and later works that were more well-
known and performed in the American period.
17

16
“Affrontò quasi tutti i generi e le forme classiche; fece uso di un linguaggio assolutamente
romantico, cioè forte, sostenuto, patetico e comunicativo; alla viva sensibilità armonica aggiunse
una grande bravura di orchestratore (sull’esempio di Rimskij-Korsakov); e brillò nell’invenzione
melodica, stagliando temi spesso felici e accattivanti ma talvolta enfatici e un po’ superficiali.”
17
“Con Strauss e Sibelius Rachmaninov è veramente l’ultimo dei romantici, un beato
sopravvissuto che ha avuto il coraggio delle sue scelte e da parte di certa critica tutta protesa
verso l’impietosa liquidazione del passato ha trovato molta, troppa diffidenza. Anche perché
negli ultimi anni della permanenza in patria aveva operato una sorta di inversione di marcia che a
ben vedere ne impedisce l’inserimento totale in quello stile ottocentesco. Si tratta di musiche
come la cantata Kolokola su testo di Edgar Allan Poe, le raccolte di romanze su versi di poeti
appartenenti al Simbolismo, le stesse Études-tableaux, dove all’irregolarità e all’audacia della
scrittura s’accompagna un’espressione tragica, grottesca, molto più vicina a Mahler e Schönberg
che a Čajkovskij e Brahms: un’autentica parentesi, nell’ambito dell’aspirazione a una bellezza
classico-romantica assoluta poi cercata in altre opere precedenti e successive, quelle più note ed
eseguite del periodo statunitense.”
109
All noteworthy German music lexicons of this period adopted a more favorable stance
toward the composer. In 1981, Das grosse Lexikon der Musik in acht Bänden—an expanded and
revised translation of Honegger’s Dictionnaire de la musique, and one of the more noteworthy
lexicons of the later twentieth century—replaced Honegger’s short entry on Rachmaninoff with a
somewhat longer one by Erik Fischer. As noted above, this entry, like Abraham, cites Chopin,
Liszt, and Tchaikovsky as Rachmaninoff’s principal influences, but Fischer describes the
composer’s style in positive terms: “Rachmaninoff had total command,” he writes, “of an
emotional late-romantic musical idiom that for all its chromaticism was quite traditionalistic and
lucid, and which could often give rise to melancholic or elegiac associations.”
18
In 1996
Fischer’s article appeared again in a revised edition of Das grosse Lexikon der Musik published
under a new title, Das neue Lexikon der Musik, and again in 2005 in a second edition of the latter
title published as Musiklexikon: in vier Bänden. The second edition of Seeger’s Musiklexikon,
published in 1981, features a revised assessment that, though still brief, exhibits quite a different
tone than before: Rachmaninoff “was able to succeed at first with only a few works, but in more
recent times he has found an increasing place in European and American concert programs.”
19

The assessment in the 1984 Meyers Taschenlexikon Musik abstains from assessment, noting
merely that the Second Concerto and Prelude in C-sharp Minor were “extremely popular.”
20

18
“Rachmaninow verfügte souverän über eine spätromantisch-pathetische, bei aller Chromatik
durchaus traditionalistische und eingängige Tonsprache, die oftmals Assoziationen des
Melancholisch-Elegischen hervorzurufen vermag.”
19
“Vermochte er sich zunächst nur mit einigen Werken durchzusetzen, gewinnt aber neuerdings
in den europäischen und US-amerikanischen Konzertprogrammen zunehmend an Raum.”
20
“Von seinen Kompositionen wurden sein 2. Klavierkonzert c-Moll op. 18 (1901) und das
Klavier-Prélude cis-Moll op. 3, 2 (1892) äußerst populär.”
110
Although subsequent editions of the Brockhaus Riemann published in 1995 and 2001
retained its laconic original assessment from 1979, which was influenced by MGG, a new edition
appeared in 2012 under the earlier title Riemann Musik Lexikon that features a significantly
revised assessment. The new entry also updates the bibliography for the first time since 1979. A
change of tone is evident in the opening sentence of the stylistic commentary, which formerly
constituted all of the commentary but now became only a point of departure: it was no longer
Rachmaninoff’s “musical language” but his “compositions” (Kompositionen) that “stand
occasionally in the vicinity of salon music.” Unlike the original statement, this is actually
objective, since Rachmaninoff’s opus ten bears the title Morceaux de salon pour piano. The rest
of the assessment is devoted to reappraisal. A statement describing past criticism prepares the
way for an affirmative one that sounds almost like a direct response to Blom:
Rachmaninoff’s musical language was criticized, in some cases severely, by
contemporaries such as Stravinsky or Tchaikovsky for its forceful timbre, which was
often felt to be ostentatious. Rachmaninoff’s oeuvre must not, however, be reduced to a
monotonous and superficial compositional manner; in particular the late works are born
of a rather introverted characteristic; a change was emerging already between 1910 and
1917. The liturgical choral works, . . . which at the same time pointed the way for the
revival of Russian sacred music, attest to this development.
21

More significant than all these, however, is the new article that appeared in 2005 in the
much awaited second edition of MGG. It was written by Christoph Flamm, a German

21
“Rachmaninows Musiksprache wurde von Zeitgenossen wie Strawinsky oder Tschaikowsky
hinsichtlich ihrer häufig als plakativ empfundenen Klanggewalt teilweise heftig kritisiert.
Rachmaninows kompositorisches Gesamtschaffen darf jedoch nicht auf eine in der Textur wenig
differenzierte und stark auf Außenwirkung bedachte Kompositionsweise reduziert werden;
insbesondere das Spätwerk ist von einer eher introvertierten Charakteristik; bereits zwischen
1910 und 1917 zeichnete sich ein Wandel ab. Die liturgischen Chorwerke, . . . die zugleich
richtungsweisend für die Erneuerung der russischer Kirchenmusik wurden, geben Zeugnis von
dieser Entwicklung.”
111
musicologist specializing in Russian music.
22
Like Norris vis-à-vis Blom, Flamm not only
surpassed Abraham’s original article in length and detail but also succeeded in assessing
Rachmaninoff with a broader historical perspective. A noteworthy aspect of Flamm’s lengthy
assessment is its determined objectivity; it displays at all times an air of genuine scholarly
disinterest, as does, for example, his statement concerning Rachmaninoff’s musical identity:
In the sum of his activities, Rachmaninoff was one of the most important Russian
musicians of his time. His multiple talents were registered almost in disbelief by his
contemporaries. Personally, he saw himself torn back and forth between three careers that
could be realized not parallel but only alternately. He saw his real purpose in life in
composing, for which he specifically sought space. Nevertheless, it is his compositional
work, unlike his achievements as a practicing musician, that is not uncontroversial.
23

This objectivity is attained in part through an extensive familiarity with the scholarly
literature on Rachmaninoff, most of which did not yet exist when Abraham wrote his earlier
assessment. Flamm cites David Cannata’s meticulous study of Rachmaninoff’s compositional
process as a corrective to simplistic notions of that process akin to those expressed by Cerchio
above.
24
Like Wilson, Flamm rejects the idea that Rachmaninoff’s late works evince creative
decline. Citing an article by Dorothea Redepenning, he interprets the stylistic heterogeneity of
the Fourth Concerto as a “speechlessness” (Sprachlosigkeit) born of Rachmaninoff’s alienation

22
See Flamm, Der russische Komponist Nikolaj Metner: Studien und Materialien (Berlin: E.
Kuhn, 1995); Flamm contributed several additional articles on Russian musicians to this edition
of MGG and has edited numerous Russian scores as well.
23
“Rachmaninov ist in der Summe der Aktivitäten einer der bedeutendsten russischen Musiker
seiner Zeit gewesen. Seine Mehrfachbegabung wurde von den Zeitgenossen geradezu ungläubig
registriert. Er selbst sah sich zwischen drei Karrieren hin- und hergerissen, die sich nicht parallel,
sondern nur abwechselnd realisieren ließen. Seinen eigentlichen Lebensinhalt erblickte er im
Komponieren, für das er gezielt Freiräume suchte. Doch ist sein kompositorisches Schaffen,
anders als seine Leistungen als ausübender Musiker, nicht unumstritten.”
24
See David Butler Cannata, Rachmaninoff and the Symphony (Innsbruck: Studien, 1999), 39–
88.
112
from his homeland.
25
Referring to the possibility, described in Martyn’s biography, that
Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances were conceived as early as 1915, and to the composer’s
enigmatic self-quotations therein, Flamm validates the work “as a synthesis, as a sum of trodden
and untrodden paths.”
26

By comparison with Abraham, Flamm offers a subtler, more objective, and more
perceptive interpretation of Rachmaninoff’s compositional outlook and development. Abraham’s
commentary in this regard consisted of his complaint that Rachmaninoff’s “Weltschmerz is a
little too elegant and refined” and that his style was “as unmistakable as it is limited,” but noting
a new “harmonic roughness” and sparer orchestral textures in the later works.
27
Flamm
comments on Rachmaninoff’s musical predisposition non-judgmentally and not only
acknowledges but also ventures an interpretation of the stylistic change evident in the late works:
“To him,” Flamm writes, “music was by nature an expressive art, a personal confession, and
hence confined predominantly to a lyrical or a dramatic mode. Only much later did signs of
objectivization, ironic refraction, or material alienation appear.”
28

25
See Dorothea Redepenning, “‘. . . Das Undurchdringliche Schweigen erstarrter
Erinnerungen . . .’: Anmerkungen zu Sergej Rachmaninovs Werken der Emigration,”
Hamburger Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft 13 (1995): 257.
26
“Diese Musik ist etwa ein Vierteljahrhundert zu spät entstanden, weiß aber um diesen
Umstand; sie begründet sich als Synthese, als Summe beschrittener and unbeschrittener Wege.”
See Martyn, Rachmaninoff, 252, 349–53.
27
The original German for Abraham’s latter comment, not quoted earlier, is as follows: “Von
den Liedern des op. 38 an begegnen viele harmonische Rauheiten (so in der 3. Sinfonie), und die
orchestrale Faktur der Werke aus den 1930er Jahren ist weniger überladen.”
28
“Musik war ihm wesensmäßig Ausdruckskunst, persönliches Bekenntnis, und daher
vorwiegend lyrischen oder dramatischen Tonfällen verhaftet. Erst sehr spät machen sich
Anzeichen einer Versachlichung, ironischen Brechung oder Materialverfremdung bemerkbar.”
113
Owing in large part to his detailed familiarity with the oeuvre and the secondary
literature, Flamm is able to offer a perceptive statement on Rachmaninoff’s reception. Until the
late-twentieth century, comment on Rachmaninoff’s reception was restricted, as we have seen,
largely to the observation of his popularity with audiences. The very fact that methodical
retrospective comment such as Flamm’s could be written at all is itself indicative of the
improved state of Rachmaninoff’s reception, the lexicographical effects of which are the subject
of the present chapter. Commenting on the appropriation of the Second Concerto in the 1955
film The Seven Year Itch, Flamm notes that Rachmaninoff’s music “was and is perceived as a
medium for unleashing frenzied emotions, as a narcotic that approaches the borders of the
pathological, and it has served precisely this function for the entertainment industry.”
29
Flamm
observes that “Rachmaninoff continues now as before to be identified essentially with his works
of the optimistic decade 1900 to 1910. The extraordinary popularity of these pieces,” he
continues, “their supposedly undemanding intellectuality, but also the sometimes embarrassing
exhibitionism of their interpreters, have always fueled detractors’ fires.”
30
Finally, Flamm notes
that “for decades central-European musicology passed over the Rachmaninoff phenomenon with
silence” and that “even today well-known Western authors grant him a marginal position at best
(R. Taruskin).”
31
Nevertheless, Flamm, referring no doubt to such musicological literature as that

29
“Sie wurde und wird empfunden als Medium zur Entfesselung rauschhafter Emotionen, als
Narkotikum bis an die Grenze des Pathologischen, und genau in dieser Funktion bedient sich
ihrer die Unterhaltungsindustrie.”
30
“Rachmaninov wird nach wie vor im wesentlichen mit seinen Werken des optimistischen
Jahrzehnts 1900 bis 1910 identifiziert. Die außerordentliche Popularität dieser Stücke, ihre
vermeintliche intellektuelle Anspruchslosigkeit, aber auch der bisweilen peinliche
Exhibitionismus ihrer Interpreten haben stets Öl in das Feuer der Verächter gegossen.”
31
“Die mitteleuropäische Musikwissenschaft überging das Phänomen Rachmaninov
jahrzehntelang mit Schweigen. . . . Noch heute räumen ihm namhafte westliche Autoren eine
allenfalls marginale Position ein (R. Taruskin).”
114
which he cites elsewhere in his assessment, suggests that “since the Perestroika scholarly
interest, in Russia as well as in the Anglo-American world, has newly awoken. A new picture of
Rachmaninoff seems to be emerging,” he continues, “that rejects the mutually dependant hysteria
of the critics and the anti-intellectual combativeness of his disciples. This new image is as
levelheaded and multilayered as the composer himself was.”
32

Among Dutch music lexicons, Guido Peeters’s Encyclopedie van de muziek, published in
1990, displays none of the negativity of De Vries’s assessment, noting simply that Rachmaninoff
“extends the Western school of Tchaikovsky. Representative,” the entry continues, “of his broad
melodic, melancholic style is, among others, the brilliant Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.”
33

More significantly, a new edition of Höweler’s classic X-Y-Z der muziek was published in 2003
under a slightly different title, XYZ van de klassieke muziek, in order to circumvent Höweler’s
prohibition of posthumous changes to his book while retaining its popular appeal.
34
Among the
many changes made to the lexicon was the replacement of Höweler’s original, critical
assessment of Rachmaninoff—reprinted without change through the 34th edition, published in
1997—with a new, favorable one by Onno Schoonderwoerd that bears several of the hallmarks
of reassessment already observed in other places: Rachmaninoff’s relationship to the past is
celebrated as one of tradition rather than epigonism, his reputation as a performer is noted but

32
“Doch seit der Perestrojka ist das wissenschaftliche Interesse in Rußland wie im
angloamerikanischen Sprachraum neu erwacht. Es scheint sich ein neues Rachmaninov-Bild
abzuzeichnen, das auf die Hysterien der Kritiker wie auf die anti-intellektuelle Kampfeshaltung
seiner Jünger, die sich gegenseitig bedingen, verzichtet—das so nüchtern und so vielschichtig ist,
wie es der Komponist selbst war.”
33
“In zijn composities zette hij de westers georiënteerde richting van Tsjaikovski voort.
Representatief voor zijn breedmelodische, melancholische stijl is onder meer zijn virtuoze
Rapsodie over een thema van Paganini.”
34
Van der Waa, “Snerpende sinustonen.”
115
subordinated to his identity as a composer, and his compositional achievements beyond the realm
of the piano are stressed:
[Rachmaninoff was] the last of the great romantic composers from Russia. He was
initially influenced both by Tchaikovsky and by Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin but
created an individual idiom characterized by great lyricism, economic use of materials,
and tight-knit structures. Rachmaninoff was, moreover, a phenomenal pianist . . . and a
celebrated conductor. . . . The piano figures in many of his works, but in his songs, choral
works, operas, and orchestral works Rachmaninoff proved himself also a formidable
melodist and an original orchestrator.
35

This movement among British, Dutch, Italian, and German music lexicons toward a more
affirmative, nuanced, and detailed assessment of Rachmaninoff’s music brought them back into
company with those that had never really espoused a negative or ambivalent view of the
composer. Spanish music lexicons evince a broadening of historical perspective. The assessment
in Manuel Valls Gorina’s 1971 Diccionario de la música notes briefly that, “celebrated for his
piano pieces, his style oscillates between Russian musical nationalism and post-romanticism
taken from Chopin.”
36
Josep Soler’s 1985 Diccionario de música notes similarly that
“Rachmaninoff . . . ignored the path opened by Debussy in 1894 and remained faithful to post-
romantic aesthetics, traditional forms, and inherited compositional techniques.”
37
Like the 1993
Gran Vox diccionario de música, Henry Lindemann’s Enciclopedia de la música, published the
same year, praises the composer’s versatility: “Rachmaninoff was one of those few musicians

35
“De laatste van de grote romantische componisten uit Rusland. Hij werd aanvankelijk
beïnvloed door zowel Tsjaikovski als Rimski-Korsakov en Borodin, maar creëerde een eigen
idioom, gekenmerkt door een grote lyriek, economisch materiaalgebruik en hechte structuren.
Rachmaninov was bovendien een fenomenaal pianist . . . en een gevierd dirigent. . . . De piano
figureert in veel van zijn werken, maar in zijn liederen, koorwerken, opera’s en orkestwerken
bewees Rachmaninov zich ook als een formidabel melodicus en een origineel orkestrator.”
36
“Célebre por sus piezas pianísticas, su estilo oscila entre el nacionalismo musical ruso y post-
romanticismo de corte chopiniano.”
37
“Rachmaninov . . . ignoró el camino abierto por Debussy desde 1894 y se mantuvo fiel a la
estética postromántica, a las formas tradicionales, y a las técnicas de composición heredadas.”
116
noted equally as a composer, pianist, and conductor, combining the three activities throughout
his life.”
38

Rachmaninoff’s reception in Russian music lexicons of this period remained enthusiastic.
The most extensive assessment ever to appear in a Russian music lexicon is the one that was
published in 1978 in the Muzykal'naia entsiklopediia (Musical encyclopdia), the premier Soviet
music encyclopedia. This very detailed assessment was written by IUrii Keldysh, a prominent
Soviet musicologist who specialized in Russian music and had already authored a scholarly
biography on the composer. Keldysh was also the encyclopedia’s general editor. His assessment
proceeds along two lines, one sociopolitical and one musico-historical. The latter describes
Rachmaninoff’s relation both to Tchaikovsky and to the Five, the breadth of his expressive
range, and the individuality and distinction of his approach to harmony, melody, and
orchestration—all common features of positive assessments. The former is one of many efforts
on the part of Soviet commentators to present Rachmaninoff’s political views in as favorable a
light as possible, presumably in order to ensure his continuing viability as a subject for approved
study in the Soviet Union. His public support of the Soviet Army during World War II was
enormously significant but couldn’t, apparently, entirely erase from memory his earlier clash
with the regime and its damaging effects on his reception in that country. Keldysh’s solution to
this problem, as articulated in his assessment, was to cite the composer with the lesser charge of
incomprehension: “Rachmaninoff warmly greeted the overthrow of the autocracy in Russia in
February 1917 but couldn’t understand the significance of the October Revolution.”
39
Citing

38
“Rachmaninov es uno de los pocos músicos que destacó tanto como compositor, como pianista
y como director de orquesta, compaginando las tres actividades a lo largo de su vida.”
39
“Rakhmaninov goriacho privetstvoval sverzhenie samoderzhaviia v Rossii v fevrale 1917, no
ne smog poniat' znachenie Oktiabr'skaia revoliutsii.”
117
Rachmaninoff’s statement from a 1934 interview that “losing my country I lost myself also,”
40

Keldysh emphasized the composer’s rootlessness during his exile period and interpreted the late
works as a synthesis of “the theme of the homeland . . . with the motive of the tragic solitude of
an artist torn from his native soil.”
41
If these statements justify Rachmaninoff’s political
dissidence, Keldysh sought also to justify the pre-Revolutionary music, through an act of willful
socialist interpretation. Rachmaninoff became unwittingly “a twentieth-century artist keenly
responding to the demands of his time” (khudozhnik 20 veka, chutko otklikavshiisia na zaprosy
svoego vremeni):
In his works he powerfully expressed the expectant pathos of coming changes—the
passionate impulse toward a better future that preoccupied many avant-garde works of
Russian literature and art of the period. Artists frequently equated the protest against
social and political oppression with the fight for the liberation of mankind’s identity. This
impulse also resonates in Rachmaninoff’s works. It is the source of the bright, intense
expression in his music and its predominantly lyrical origin. But Rachmaninoff’s lyricism
is distant from the exclusive, subjectively obtained lyric of the decadent salons. His
oeuvre is characterized by sociability, “openness” of feeling—is always directed to a
wide audience.
42

40
Keldysh ignored, however, the composer’s immediately following reference to himself as an
“exile whose musical roots, traditions and background have been annihilated,” which makes it
clear that Rachmaninoff was not merely pining for a country to which he could not return on
principle. Rachmaninoff, “The Composer as Interpreter,” Monthly Musical Record 64
(November 1934): 201.
41
“Tema Rodiny perepletaetsia s motivom tragicheskogo odinochestva khudozhnika,
otorvannogo ot rodnoi pochvy.”
42
“V svoem tvorchestve on s bol'shoi siloi vyrazil pafos ozhidaniia bliziashchikhsia peremen,
strastnyi poryv k luchshemu budushchemu, kotorymi proniknuty mnogie proizvedeniia
peredovoi russkoi literatury i iskusstva etogo perioda. Protest protiv sotsial'nogo i politicheskogo
gneta khudozhniki chasto otozhdestvliali s bor'boi za osvobozhdenie chelovecheskoi lichnosti.
Etot motiv zvuchit i v tvorchestve Rakhmaninova. Otsiuda iarkaia, napriazhennaia ekspressiia
ego muzyki, preobladanie v nei liricheskogo nachala. No lirizm Rakhmaninova dalek ot
zamknutoi sub"ektivno-izyskannoi liriki dekadentskikh salonov. Ego tvorchestvo
kharakterizuetsia obshchitel'nost'iu, «otkrytost'iu» chuvstva, ono vsegda obrashcheno k shirokoi
auditorii.”
118
These sentiments are echoed in highly abbreviated form in Keldysh’s Muzykal'nyi
entsiklopedicheskii slovar' (Musical encyclopedic dictionary) of 1990. More recently,
assessments in Muzyka: Chto o nei dolzhen znat' sovremennyi chelovek (Music: What the
modern person should know about it) and Kompozitory i muzykal'nye deiateli (Composers and
musicians), both published in 2002, derive their stylistic commentary from Keldysh’s assessment
but forgo its sociopolitical element.
Assessments in Polish music lexicons of the period likewise adhere to their traditional
favorability toward the composer. The third edition of the Mała encyklopedia muzyki (Little
encyclopedia of music), published in 1981, retains the favorable assessment from the second. As
in England, Germany, and Italy, a significant indicator of Rachmaninoff’s standing in Polish
music lexicography is the detailed assessment that appeared in the country’s landmark music
encyclopedia, the twelve-volume Encyklopedia muzyczna PWM (Encyclopedia of Music PWM).
The assessment appeared in 2004 and was written by musicologist, theorist, and critic Leszek
Polony. Polony has written much on twentieth-century aesthetic issues
43
and demonstrates
unusual sensitivity to this aspect of Rachmaninoff’s reception, positing an “essentially
modernistic” interpretation of the oeuvre while at the same time “objectifying” the twentieth-
century anti-romantic tendency. Polony affirms Rachmaninoff’s legacy, rejecting the view that
the composer was epigonic, eclectic, or compositionally defined by the piano:

43
See, for example, his Hermeneutyka i muzyka [Hermeneutics and music] (Kraków: Akademia
Muzyczna, 2003); “Powikłania ideologii estetycznych w powojennym pięćdziesięcioleciu”
[Complications of aesthetic ideology in the postwar half-century], in Muzyka polska 1945–1995:
Materiały sesji naukowej 6-10 Grudnia 1995 w 20-lecie Zakładu Analizy i Interpretacji Muzyki
[Polish music 1945–1995: Materials of the academic session December 6–10, 1995, on the
occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Department of Musical Analysis and Interpretation], ed.
Krzysztof Droba, Teresa Malecka, and Krzysztof Szwajgier ([Kraków]: Akademia Muzyczna,
1996), 41–52; Symbol i muzyka [Symbol and music] (Kraków: Akademia Muzyczna, 2011). For
a biographical summary of Polony, see “Leszek Polony,” The Fryderyk Chopin Institute,
accessed December 5, 2014, http://en.chopin.nifc.pl/chopin/persons/detail/id/258.
119
Rachmaninoff’s oeuvre diverged from the anti-romantic aesthetic tendencies of the avant-
garde composers of the first half of the twentieth century, much like the late works of
Richard Strauss. It grew out of late romanticism and was its continuation, but it was at the
same time also a highly original and essentially modernistic development. It has been
unfairly accused of epigonism and eclecticism, and its individual character and artistic
value have been underappreciated. . . .
Rachmaninoff’s significance in the history of music of the end of the nineteenth
century and first half of the twentieth century was wrongly reduced to his virtuoso
activities and to a few of his most popular pieces from the rich catalogue of piano works.
Rachmaninoff, however, was also an outstanding symphonist. . . .
With the perspective of time objectifying the sharp aesthetic opposition between
the first avant-garde music of the twentieth-century and currents emanating from
romanticism, it is possible to appreciate the figure of Rachmaninoff as one of the most
comprehensive musicians of the twentieth century, equally outstanding as a performer
and a creator of music.
44

Swedish lexicons of this period present a balanced but improving view of the composer.
The new assessment in the 1975 edition of Bonniers musiklexikon hails Rachmaninoff as a
“distinctive late-romantic” (en utpräglad senromantiker), places more emphasis than before on
his Russian roots, and notes the popularity of the Second and Third Concertos. “A blossoming,
broad cantabile melodic idiom, tonal splendor, and a brilliant keyboard part distinguish these
concertos,” the assessment notes, while adding that they “in their elegiac, but rousing, but also

44
“Twórczość Rachmaninowa rozmijała się z radykalnymi, antyromantycznymi tendencjami
estetyki awangardy kompozycji 1. połowy XX wieku, podobnie jak późna twórczość R. Straussa.
Wyrosła z późnego romantyzmu, była jego kontynuacją, ale zarazem wysoce oryginalnym i
modernistycznym w duchu rozwinięciem. Obarczono ją niesłusznie zarzutem epigonizmu i
eklektyzmu, nie doceniano jej indywidualnego charakteru i wartości artystycznej. . . .
“Znaczenie Rachmaninowa w historii muzyki końca XIX i 1. połowy XX wieku
niesłusznie sprowadzono do jego działalności wirtuozowskiej oraz kilku najpopularniejszych
utworów spośród bogatej twórczości fortepianowej. Rachmaninow był zaś także wybitnym
symfonikiem. . . .
“Perspektywa czasu, obiektywizująca ostre opozycje estetyczne między I awangardą
muzyki XX wieku a prądami wyrosłymi z romantyzmu, pozwala dowartościować postać
Rachmaninowa jako jednego z najwszechstronniejszych muzyków XX wieku, równie wybitnego
wykonawcy, jak twórcy muzyki.”
120
brilliantly pathetic feelings sometimes acquire an air of mundanity.”
45
The ultimate effect is
affirmative: the Second Symphony is “a magnificent work in his lugubrious mood” (är ett i sin
lugubra stämning ståtligt verk), the Paganini Rhapsody “masterful” (mästerliga). This
assessment was carried verbatim into the 1983 edition, but an abridged version that appeared in
the 2003 edition no longer features the critical comment about the concertos. Similarly, the
revised assessment that appeared in 1979 in the second edition of Sohlmans no longer features its
earlier ambivalent portion but features instead a new, nuanced statement concerning
Rachmaninoff’s place vis-à-vis early-twentieth-century artistic currents:
Throughout his life he stood apart from the modern musical language of the twentieth
century and developed classic Russian and nineteenth-century romantic principles into
his own original and distinctive style; on the other hand his work reflected to a great
extent the aesthetic and stylistic manner during the early decades of the twentieth century,
in particular symbolism and impressionism.
46

French lexicons of the period present a balanced picture as before. A measure of the
difference between Rachmaninoff’s reception in music lexicons in the United States and in
France can be found by comparing his treatment in Ewen’s Musicians since 1900 with that in
Alain Paris’s contemporaneous Dictionnaire des interprètes et de l’interprétation musicale au
XXe siècle. Both lexicons are devoted to performers, but while the former comments in this
context on Rachmaninoff’s stature as a composer, the latter doesn’t in any of its three editions,
published in 1982, 1995, and 2004.

45
“En blommande, brett kantabel melodik, klanglig prakt och en briljant klaversats utmärker
dessa konserter, vilka emellertid i sina elegiska, än smäktande, än till det glansfullt patetiska
stegrade stämningar ibland får ett drag av mondänitet.”
46
“Han stod under hela sitt liv vid sidan om 1900-t:s moderna tonspråk och utvecklade de
klassiska ryska och 1800-talsromantikernas principer till en egen, originell och särpräglad stil;
hans verk avspeglade å andra sidan i hög grad den estetiska och stilistiska hållningen under
1900-t:s första decennier, i synnerhet symbolismens och impressionismens.”
121
Candé’s balanced modernist assessment, quoted above, appeared without modification in
three subsequent lexicons by the author published in 1983, 1996, and 2000.
47
A second edition of
Honegger’s Dictionnaire de la musique appeared in 1986, retaining its earlier assessment but
adding further that Rachmaninoff’s piano and symphonic works are “characterized by a
rhapsodic spirit” (caractérisées par un esprit rhapsodique).
Once again, the most favorable assessment in French music lexicons of the period is to be
found in Larousse de musique, the second edition of which appeared in 1982. The new
assessment was written by French musicologist André Lischke, who is of Russian descent and
has written extensively on Russian music.
48
Like Gurlitt’s Riemann, he notes that “the inordinate
success of the Second Concerto and Prelude in C-sharp Minor may have harmed other
compositions that are no less interesting.”
49
He reserves special praise for Isle of the Dead, “an
underappreciated masterpiece,” adding the uncommon observation that in this work
“Rachmaninoff proves himself an authentic symbolist.”
50
Like earlier commentators such as
Ewen and Slonimsky, Lischke notes Rachmaninoff’s conservative position in twentieth-century
music but emphasizes his individuality all the same:

47
These are, in chronological order, Candé’s Nouveau dictionnaire de la musique, Dictionnaire
des compositeurs, and Nouveau dictionnaire de la musique, new ed.
48
In addition to his numerous articles, see André Lischke, Alexandre Borodine (Paris: Bleu Nuit,
2006); Histoire de la musique russe: Des origines à la Révolution (Paris: Fayard, 2006); Igor
Stravinsky (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1986); La musique en Russie depuis 1850 (Paris: Fayard,
2012); Piotr Ilyitch Tchaikovski (Paris: Fayard, 1993). Biographical information for Mr. Lischke
can be found at “André Lischke,” France Inter, accessed November 27, 2014,
http://www.franceinter.fr/personne-andre-lischke.
49
“Le succès démesuré du 2
e
Concerto ou du Prélude en ut dièse mineur a pu nuire à d’autres
compostions non moins intéressantes.”
50
“Un chef-d’œuvre trop peu connu, dans lequel Rachmaninov se montre authentiquement
symboliste.”
122
A contemporary of Scriabin, Ravel, and Bartók, Rachmaninoff, invariably attached to the
tonal system, is without question the last romantic composer in the tradition of Chopin,
Liszt, and Tchaikovsky, his three principal models. If this explains his lack of esteem
with musicologists, his favor among music lovers and performers has never suffered. It
would be wrong to see in Rachmaninoff an exclusively imitative composer. His pianistic
style in particular and his melodic invention bear an undeniable stamp of individuality.
His tormented, tumultuous, and mournful lyricism takes no deliberate stand with regard
to an aesthetic trend, but it directly reflects his nervous, anxious, and introverted
personality.
51

Lischke’s assessment later appeared in the first two editions of Larousse’s subsequent
Dictionnaire de la musique, published in 2005 and 2011.
Rachmaninoff’s reception in American music lexicons of the period might be
summarized by Wilson Lyle’s statement, in his 1984 Dictionary of Pianists, that “today his stock
has never been higher.”
52
As mentioned above, Slonimsky’s favorable commentary from the fifth
edition of Baker’s appeared in all subsequent editions of that title, published in 1978, 1984,
1992, and 2001, and was carried also into several related lexicons of the late-twentieth century:
both editions of The Concise Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Baker’s
Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-century Classical Musicians, Slonimsky’s posthumous

51
“Contemporain de Scriabine, de Ravel et de Bartók, Rachmaninov, immuablement attaché au
système tonal, est sans conteste le dernier compositeur romantique, dans la lignée de Chopin, de
Liszt et de Tchaïkovski, ses trois principaux modèles. Si cela explique le peu d’estime que lui
portent les musicologues, sa faveur auprès des mélomanes et des interprètes n’en a jamais
souffert. Il serait inexact de voir en Rachmaninov un compositeur exclusivement imitatif. Son
style pianistique en particulier et son invention mélodique possèdent un cachet indiscutablement
personnel. Son lyrisme tourmenté, tumultueux, douloureux n’est pas une prise de position
délibérée par rapport à un courant esthétique, mais le reflet direct de sa personnalité nerveuse,
angoissée et introvertie.”
52
Concise lexicons, as usual, do not generally feature critical commentary, but others contain
favorable commentary while ignoring the vicissitudes of Rachmaninoff’s reception. The
assessment in Christine Ammer, Harper’s Dictionary of Music, 1st ed. (1972), was carried into
three subsequent editions (1987, 1995, and 2004, the last published as The Facts on File
Dictionary of Music). See also the Biographical Dictionary of Russian/Soviet Composers (1989);
John Michael Cooper, Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music (2013); Philip D. Morehead, The
New American Dictionary of Music (1991); and The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music
(1996).
123
Baker’s Dictionary of Music, and (in slightly abridged form) Webster’s New World Dictionary of
Music.
53
A smaller number actively engaged in reappraisal. The 1983 Dictionary of Music,
edited by Alan Isaacs and Elizabeth Martin, echoed Norris’s assessment from The New Grove.
Perhaps referring to Blom, David Greene’s 1985 Biographical Encyclopedia of Composers
attributed Rachmaninoff’s low regard among some past critics to his “enormous popularity,”
while noting that “today hindsight has done a good deal to elevate his rank as a composer.”
Finally, Ted Libbey put an exclamation point on the reappraisal of this period in his 2006 NPR
Listener’s Encyclopedia of Classical Music.
Rachmaninoff continues to be thought of as a throwback, a romantic who was left at the
station when the Twentieth-Century Limited pulled out. In fact, as scores such as the
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and the Symphonic Dances (1940) show, he was a
reluctant modernist, seeking to convey emotion, and perhaps a sense of nostalgia, in an
idiom that took into account a good many twentieth-century trends in rhythm, harmony,
and scoring. For no other reason than that his music has always been popular and is
melodically generous, Rachmaninoff has regularly been dismissed by critics and musical
scholars as second-rate. It is an assessment that can no longer be defended.

53
While Slonimsky never altered this commentary, he did change his initial description of the
composer in Baker’s twice in a manner that suggests a certain amount of uncertainty on his part
concerning Rachmaninoff’s ultimate critical standing. The fifth edition describes Rachmaninoff
as “famous Russian composer,” the sixth and seventh editions (and hence the 1988 edition of The
Concise Baker’s) as “great Russian composer and superb pianist,” and the eighth as “greatly
renowned Russian-born American pianist, conductor, and composer” (whence his description in
the 1994 edition of The Concise Baker’s and the other titles mentioned above).
124
Conclusion

Rachmaninoff’s Legacy Affirmed

In conclusion, music lexicons have served broadly to affirm Rachmaninoff’s legacy as a
composer. The very fact of his continuous inclusion in music lexicons is itself important
evidence of his sustained prominence in Western musical life. He has appeared in virtually every
general music lexicon published since his international career began in the early-twentieth
century. At first, while his career was still unfolding, entries tended to be brief and journalistic,
concerned primarily with reporting basic biographical and stylistic information. By the end of his
career, when his music was consolidating a place in the repertoire and inspiring a budding
secondary literature, entries had begun to grow in length and detail. At that point, his music also
began to elicit criticism in music lexicons. In retrospect, it should come as no surprise that, at the
very moment when he seemed poised to achieve canonical status, critical voices arose to
question his worthiness. That is the very raison d’être of music criticism in any form. While
many mid-century assessments, especially European ones, bear witness to this spontaneous
process, few commentators adopted a truly dismissive attitude toward him, and even fewer went
so far as to negate his legacy as a composer as Scholes, Blom, and Abraham did. Between 1938
and 1972, the only really negative assessments to appear were those by the latter three, De Vries,
and Seeger. A similarly small but more concentrated number of negative assessments appeared
in Europe during the 1970s and early 1980s, but by then a deliberate reappraisal had already
begun. By the early twenty-first century, a new international consensus had emerged, signaled by
affirmative assessments in numerous music lexicons of all sizes.
Rachmaninoff’s reception in music lexicons has varied not nearly so much in the terms in
which it has been conceived as in the relative importance attached to those terms by the
125
individual commentator. As mentioned in the introduction, these conceptual parameters are
rooted in the three ideologies of classicism, modernism, and nationalism, prompting evaluation
in terms of depth of thought or feeling, compositional technique, individuality, Russianness, and
stylistic contemporaneity. All of these concepts existed in some form before Rachmaninoff was
born but none were used to criticize his music in music lexicons until late in his career, in some
cases until after his death. Rachmaninoff’s national musical identity elicited comment as early as
1908, in Grove’s, but his Moscow heritage was not interpreted as cosmopolitanism until 1938, in
The Oxford Companion, as it was by some as late as 1983, for example La nuova enciclopedia
Garzanti. Similarly, Rachmaninoff’s conservatism did not elicit comment until 1939, in
Leonard’s assessment, and though it was noted by Blom and even lamented by Candé, the only
commentator to dismiss Rachmaninoff unequivocally on this basis was Rattalino, in 1972.
Leonard was also the first to imply any shortcoming on Rachmaninoff’s part in terms of
traditional classical criteria, when he wrote that the composer’s works for solo piano “lack the
depth and subtlety of Chopin’s greater works.” Thereafter superficiality would prove the most
recurring criticism of Rachmaninoff’s music, being cited repeatedly during mid-century by
commentators of varying national origins and all ideological perspectives. Rachmaninoff’s
compositional technique also met with universal approbation until Blom suggested otherwise in
1954, followed by Abraham and others. All of the foregoing criticisms of Rachmaninoff’s music
enjoyed limited circulation and had virtually disappeared from the genre by the early-twenty-first
century.
It follows from all this that the historical controversy surrounding Rachmaninoff’s music
cannot be ascribed to any single ideology or rationale, even one so tempting as modernism.
Although the negative assessments of Scholes, Blom, and Abraham appeared during a period of
126
modernism, they were motivated by nationalism and classicism. Just as importantly, many who
have maintained open appreciation of modernistic music have not ipso facto disliked
Rachmaninoff, including Kolodin, Ewen, Slonimsky, and even Candé. Thus, the coincidence of
Rachmaninoff’s English reappraisal with the emergence of post-modernism in the West may
simply be coincidence plain and simple.
Nor can dismissive attitudes toward Rachmaninoff be ascribed to any single category of
commentator as Schonberg’s comment about “so-called ‘serious’ critics” suggests. As shown in
chapter three, the current international consensus itself is signified in part by affirmative
assessments in scholarly music lexicons. Authoritative commentators have both praised and
criticized Rachmaninoff in equally authoritative music lexicons, their opposing assessments
sometimes appearing at roughly the same time. Blom’s assessment was followed closely by
Slonimsky’s, and Abraham’s assessment appeared in the same year as the one in Gurlitt’s
Riemann, to name but two of many possible examples.
We have noted instances when commentators with opposing views of Rachmaninoff
seem to agree on the nature of his music but disagree concerning its value. Indeed, as Glen
Carruthers has noted, “what Rachmaninoff’s advocates applaud, and what his detractors decry, is
frequently one and the same thing.”
1
Just as often, however, critical opinions have strayed so far
from each other as to suggest a lack of consensus at the level of perception itself—commentators
seem sometimes to be describing not the same phenomenon differently but different phenomena
altogether. How can Rachmaninoff’s music be “Russian to its very core,” possess “a clearly
defined and attractive personality,” and at the same be “inspired by no very strong national or
personal feeling”? Do his themes “possess extraordinary melodic beauty” or are they “artificial

1
Carruthers, “The (Re)Appraisal of Rachmaninov’s Music,” 44.
127
and gushing tunes”? Do his compositions possess “nobility” or do they “stand occasionally in the
vicinity of salon music”? Does the virtuosity of his piano works “explore fully the expressive
possibilities of the instrument,” or is it “wholly superficial”? Was his orchestration “among the
soundest” of the early-twentieth century, or do his symphonic works “seem as though they were
basically conceived for the piano”? Was he “a twentieth-century artist keenly responding to the
demands of his time” or “a typical secondary-reactionary character, by nature not very open to
new impressions”?
Questions such as these fall outside the scope of this study. We can observe by way of
conclusion, however, that assessments of Rachmaninoff’s music have generally grown more
favorable as his music has grown more familiar. Some of the most pointed assessments, for
example those by Blom and De Vries, appear to have been formed without a thorough
knowledge of his oeuvre, judging from the incompleteness of their appended work lists. Other
negative assessments were clearly derived from Abraham by way of deference. All of the
affirmative assessments in recent scholarly music lexicons, by contrast, feature detailed
commentary on the whole oeuvre. A significant characteristic of reassessments in music lexicons
is the emphasis on Rachmaninoff’s traditionally lesser-known works, in particular those for
unaccompanied choir and those that he composed after leaving Russia. Performers
unquestionably played a crucial role in strengthening and furthering knowledge of his music, but
we have observed that scholars have also done so in a way that has directly contributed to the
improvement of his critical standing in music lexicons. The favorable assessments in The New
Grove and the recent MGG, by Norris and Flamm respectively, rest on a foundation of scholarly
studies to which the former contributed personally and to which the latter referred in overturning
certain entrenched criticisms.
128
We can conclude that the tendency to deduce the historical trajectory of Rachmaninoff’s
international critical reception from his treatment in Grove’s has contributed to general
misunderstanding. Blom’s assessment in the fifth edition of Grove’s was not typical of
lexicographical assessments of the 1950s and 1960s. Nor was it typical of assessments published
during the composer’s lifetime or during any other period generally. What Blom’s assessment
typifies is the negative opinion of a very small but very authoritative echelon of mid-century
English commentators whose assessments were not typical but atypical for the period.
Ultimately, it is the atypicality of Blom’s assessment that makes it so remarkable: traversing the
whole range of conceptual parameters for Rachmaninoff’s music, he dismissed it on each point.
Similarly, Norris’s assessment in The New Grove must be seen, like Blom’s before it, as part of a
regional shift in opinion that anticipated and perhaps contributed to—but did not culminate—an
international one. Nevertheless, this shift of opinion has occurred in music lexicons. No current
assessments describe Rachmaninoff’s music as cosmopolitan, old-fashioned, superficial, or
technically inept. Quite the opposite. They describe Rachmaninoff as “one of the finest pianists
of his day and, as a composer, the last great representative of Russian late romanticism,” “one of
the most comprehensive musicians of the twentieth century, equally outstanding as a performer
and a creator of music”; these yield a “new image [of Rachmaninoff that] is as levelheaded and
multilayered as the composer himself was.”

129
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract The Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) has long occupied a prominent place in the concert repertoire, but his critical standing has been ambiguous: some have viewed him as one of the greatest of his time, while others have strongly questioned the value of his music. Although many writings on the composer note this paradox, his critical reception has not previously been the subject of a thorough independent study, and, as a result, there is little consensus concerning its basic ideological, temporal, and geographical circumstances. This dissertation begins the task of elucidating Rachmaninoff’s international critical reception by examining his treatment in 226 music lexicons published from 1900 to 2013 in eleven European languages, employing a straightforward mode of reception history within the theoretical context of canon formation. ❧ The dissertation presents two principal findings. First, the ideological composition of the critical reception is more complex than has generally been believed. Rachmaninoff’s music was disparaged not only by modernists, who found it old-fashioned, but also by nationalists, who considered it cosmopolitan for not adhering overtly to the idiom of the kuchka, as well as from the broader critical standpoint of classicism itself—that is, from the nexus of values that has defined the tradition of Western “classical music” since the nineteenth century. Second, this criticism notwithstanding, most critical evaluations of the composer, as in music lexicons, have been affirmative. Rachmaninoff elicited not a single negative assessment in the genre until 1938, and Eric Blom’s oft-cited belittling of the composer in the 1954 edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians was exceptional for its period. The highest concentration of negative assessments occurred in the 1970s on the European continent. These still constituted a minority, however, and the same decade also witnessed the rise, in Great Britain, of an affirmative reappraisal of the composer in music lexicons that would spread, by the early-twenty-first century, to every region surveyed. A new international consensus emerged as negative assessments were replaced with affirmative ones and those that were already affirmative increased in detail and favorability.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Reesor, Keenan A. (author)

Core Title Rachmaninoff in music lexicons, 1900–2013: toward a history of the composer's reception

School Thornton School of Music

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Music (Historical Musicology)

Publication Date 08/01/2016

Defense Date 05/11/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag canon formation,critical reception,music lexicography,OAI-PMH Harvest,reception history,Russian music,Sergei Rachmaninoff

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Demers, Joanna (committee chair), Simms, Bryan R. (committee chair), Bowlt, John E. (committee member), Weber, William (committee member)

Creator Email keenanreesor@gmail.com,reesor@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-289119

Unique identifier UC11281272

Identifier etd-ReesorKeen-4693.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-289119 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-ReesorKeen-4693.pdf

Dmrecord 289119

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Reesor, Keenan A.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA