As a composer, a recluse who shunned publicity and self-promotion, Medtner, a noted Beethovenian no less than an ardent post-Schumannite, in Glazunov’s opinion (Paris, 1934), ‘firm defender of the sacred laws of eternal art’, was a musician steeped in Teutonic Tradition: the critic Sabaneiev estimated him to be ‘the first real, actual Beethoven in Russia—one who did not imitate but continued the master’s work’. Among his own compatriots he was drawn to early Scriabin, but had a higher regard for Tchaikovsky and Borodin. Chopin and Liszt, too, were happy hunting grounds. Like Chopin, Medtner expressed himself almost exclusively through the medium of the piano. Like Chopin, he knew how to invest a miniature with large-scale tension, how to generate a grand design. No salon soufflé journalist, his concern always was with the massive—as three piano concertos, a piano quintet, three sonatas with violin and over a dozen of imposing dimension for piano, plus a fine heritage of songs (recorded in their time by both Slobodskaya and Schwarzkopf) impressively testify. For sheer originality, his famous Skazki or ‘Legends’ (‘Fairy Tales’)—mercurial, fantastical, Russianized narratives of the soul, suggestive yet curiously private—are unlike anything else in the repertoire.
‘By far the most interesting and striking personality in modern Russian music is that of Nicolas Medtner’, avowed Sorabji in Around Music (1932). ‘If only for his absolute independence and aloofness from the Stravinsky group and its satellites on the one hand, and his equally marked detachment from the orthodox academics grouped around Glazunov and the inheritors of the Tchaikovsky tradition on the other … like Sibelius, Medtner does not flout current fashions, he does not even deliberately ignore them, but so intent on going his own individual way is he that he is simply unconscious of their very existence. In a word, he has made for himself, by the sheer strength of his own personality, that impregnable inner shrine and retreat that only the finest spirits either dare or can inhabit.’ Among the most enigmatic figures of our century, Medtner was an apostle of conscience. He placed a premium on baroque polyphony, on classical structure, on a manner of thematic integration and cyclic metamorphosis romantic in legacy. He celebrated, he developed, he concentrated the sonata ideal. He was a resolute tonalist, a poetic melodist of the old guard.
‘Everything [Medtner] wrote’, Gerald Abraham remarks, ‘is perfectly fashioned, complete in every sense of the word … his music ‘wears’ extremely well … subjective lyrical emotion: that is the essence of Medtner’s art. He sometimes gives his pieces suggestive titles, but they are never programmatic in the usual sense of the word … titles are the merest hints to guide the listener’s fantasy.’ Ernest Newman believed that Medtner was ‘one of those composers who are classics in their lifetime. He does what every notable composer has done—takes the current language of music, impresses his own personality on it, extends its vocabulary, and modifies its grammar to suit his own ends, and then gets on with the simple business of saying what he thinks in the clearest terms possible … his music is not always easy to follow at a first hearing, but not because of any extravagance of thought or confusion of technique, it is simply because this music really does go on thinking from bar to bar, evolving logically from its premises. Perhaps the technical secret of its vitality is its rhythm … each work is an individual self-evolving organic unity.’ Another contemporary, the philosopher Ivan Ilyin, perceived that in Medtner we have an example of a musician attuned to the primordial. ‘Medtner’s music astonishes and delights’, he says, ‘not only by the wealth and breadth of its melodies that seem to be living and breathing, but also by their inexpressible primariness. This may lead to actual mistakes and illusions: you may fancy that you have heard this melody before … but where, when, from whom, in childhood, in a dream, in delirium? You will puzzle your head and strain your memory in vain: you have not heard it anywhere: in human ears it sounds for the first time … and yet it is as though you had long been waiting for it—waiting because you ‘knew’ it, not in sound, but in spirit. For the spiritual content of the melody is universal and primordial … it is as though age-long desires and strivings of our forebears were singing in us; or, as though the eternal melodies we had heard in heaven and preserved in this life as ‘strange and lovely yearnings’, were remembered at last and sung again—chaste and simple.’
At once Germanic, Frankish, Russian, a man defiantly resistant of labelling or bracketing, Medtner’s credo is expressed in unequivocal terms in his book The Muse and the Fashion (published in Paris in 1935, with the help of his friend Rachmaninov): ‘I do not believe in my dicta on music, but in music itself. I do not wish to communicate my thoughts on music, but my faith in music … the Theme is above all in intuition (in German ‘einfall’). It is acquired, not invented. The intuition of a theme constitutes a command. The fulfilment of this command is the principal task of the artist, and in the fulfilment of this task all the powers of the artist himself take part. The more faithful the artist has remained to the theme that appeared to him by intuition, the more artistic is this fulfilment and the more inspired his work … the theme is the most simple and accesible part of the work, it unifies it, and holds within itself the clue to all the subsequent complexity and variety of the work … the theme is not always, and not only, a melody … it is capable of turning into a continuous melody the most complex construction of form … melody, as our favourite and most beautiful form of the ‘theme’, should actually be viewed only as a form of the theme … form (the construction of a musical work) is harmony … form without contents is nothing but a dead scheme. Contents without form, raw material. Only contents plus form is equal to a work of art … time (tempo) is the plane of music, but this plane, in itself, is not rhythm … a neglect of rhythm makes musical form the prose, and not the poetry, of sound … song, poetry and dance are unthinkable without rhythm, which not only bring them into close relation, but often unites music, poetry and dance into one art, as it were … sonority (dynamics, colour, the quality of sounds) can never become a theme. While the other elements appeal to our spirit, soul, feeling, and thought, sonority in itself, being a duality of sound, appeals to our auditory sensation, to the taste of our ear, which in itself is capable merely of increasing, or weakening, our pleasure in the qualities of the object, but can in no way determine its substance or value … where thought and feeling confer with each other, you will find the artistic conscience. Inspiration comes, where thought is saturated in emotion, and emotion is imbued with sense …’
In Moscow Medtner studied piano at the Conservatoire. As a composer, though he had some lessons from Arensky and Taneyev, he was essentially self-taught: Taneyev used to like to say he was born with the knowledge of sonata-form within him—that was enough. In Richard Holt’s Medtner memorial symposium (1955), a book well-known in Russia, Ilyin (echoing the composer himself) suggests that he was in fact one who never actually invented anything: rather, he listened, he was the vessel through which music passed. His protagonist sonata themes, he argues, ‘stand in need of each other … they may intersect or destroy each other … they may comfort, purify, enlighten each other, and work together for common victory and reconciliation. They live in creative intercommunion …’ Discussing the elements of Medtner’s music, ‘all his modulations’, he says, ‘have the spiritual meaning of emotional ‘concession’, or of ‘stepping back in a dance’, or of comfort in sorrow, or of retreat into the shadow and darkness, into the world beyond; not one of his tonalities is accidental; his counterpoint expresses the spiritual consonance, dissonance and assimilation of themes … fugue is used by him to indicate that a given theme has been accepted on every plane of musical reality; all his ritardandos and syncopations … all his demands for legato or staccato, all his naturals are full of spiritual significance …’ Medtner’s own definition of the sonata principle was as a complex phenomenon ‘genetically tied to the simplicity of the song-form; the song-form is tied to the construction of a period; the period to a phrase; the phrase to the cadence; the cadence to the construction of the mode; the mode to the tonic.’
The Second Piano Concerto (1920/27) was first performed in Moscow, conducted by the composer’s brother. Medtner inscribed it to Rachmaninov—who returned the compliment by dedicating to him his own contemporaneous Fourth. Intriguingly, the two works are like an exchange of ‘musical letters’. Opening with a brilliant sonata-form Toccata (unusual for the substance of its reprise taking the guise of an ambitiously scaled solo cadenza), Medtner’s is overtly organized in the Rachmaninov manner: with similarly breathed and elaborated melodies; an A flat tripartite slow movement (Romance) enclosing a central agitato (à la the Rachmaninov C minor); and a final Divertimento-Rondo in the major that indulges, on the one hand, in the kind of architectural excesses found in Rachmaninov Three, and, on the other, in references to one of Rachmaninov’s songs. In his concerto (notably the finale), Rachmaninov pays homage specifically to Medtner’s peculiarly individual rhythmic style. Essentially, it must be stressed, however, that what these exchanges are about is tribute, not pastiche. Medtner is no more poor man’s Rachmaninov than Rachmaninov is rich man’s Medtner: each was possessed of a voice distinctively his own (in Medtner’s case especially so in the developmenal aspects of his Romance). During the thirties, following its first English performance (under Landon Ronald at a Queen’s Hall Philharmonic Society concert, All Saints Day, 1928), Sorabji placed a high value on the Second Concerto. Offering ‘splendid opportunities to first class pianists, musically and technically’, he thought its neglect ‘a scandal’. In 1948 Medtner recorded it with the Philharmonia under Dobroven.
Premiered by the composer and Sir Adrian Boult at the Royal Albert Hall, 19 February 1944, promoted by the PRS, the wartime Third Concerto, or ‘Concerto-Ballade’, is dedicated to the Maharajah of Mysore, ‘with deep gratitude for the appreciation and furtherance of my work’. Begun in London and completed in Warwickshire between circa 1940 and 1943, it is in three movements played without a break—the first flexible in tempo, the second an Interludium, ‘Allegro’ yet at the same time ‘molto sostenuto e misterioso’, the third an ‘Allegro molto’ climaxing in a coda more temporally fluid. Ending in E major but for much of the time oscillating unpredictably between E minor and G major, the Third is like a wonderfully free fantasia, a written-out improvisation with orchestra. Manifestly, the first movement, in its surges of imagination and turbulence is a person talking—at once considered yet free, determined yet yielding, long in sentence, short in sentence, elastic in phrasing and cadence. Calling it enchanted, it ‘moves in a kind of dream world’, Holt says, ‘with occasional intrusions of human passion and conflict’. Its structure defies ready explanation: concerned with sensations of ebb and flow, it is so remarkably veiled and aurally unapparent that to reveal it at all might only destroy it. Externally, its most obvious feature is the presence of a resolute motto theme, an idée fixe which, in best Berlioz-Tchaikovsky tradition, Medtner brings back in the Interludium and finale to impart to the whole a unity musically and psycho-dramatically important.
That Medtner’s music is unknown is unjustifiable. An alloy of the intensest of emotions and sounds, of the most subtly variegated rythmic life, it can, it’s true, often overcome one’s ability to perceive at first hearing, it can overload the circuitry of our mind. Medtner’s most complex work does not clarify easily. But this should not deter us. Creatively the equal of his two most famous emigré compatriots, Rachmaninov and Stravinsky, metaphorically like an Arthurian knight of old impassioned by his lady, Medtner was a man of righteous principle who lived for music: a quiet man, ‘a gentle lion’ large of head and blue of eye, a private man whose family was the hub of his existence. As a pianist, if asked, he would play in concert (to be adored by the cognoscenti), he would broadcast for the BBC; if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t (the competitive streak was foreign to his temperament). His ‘Appassionata’ was famous. His Beethoven Four, too, and his Rachmaninov and Schubert and Bach—paradoxically, music often directly in conflict with the quintessentially high Romantic melos of his own. At the piano, offering in his performances an overview crystallized out of the wisdom of age and the excitement of youth, his posture (very still, eyes shut) was Michelangeli-like. Reminiscing forty years ago, Arthur Alexander remembered how ‘… he possessed to an acute degree the rare power of colouring melodically passages that in the hands of others remained mere notes, and his subtleties of nuance and pedal were unforgettable. No one (except perhaps Josef Hofmann) produced so much effect with so little visible means …’ Medtner was an artist in love with the beauty of his muse. He played for beauty’s sake—and he composed for beauty’s sake.
Being a Russian is a duty. For Medtner, coming to England did nothing to change that. The Moscow nights, the Russian springs, the basilicas and bards of his young manhood: such was his heritage, a chalice of dreams and memories to hold for always. Prince of truth, he was one of Russia’s great sons. Hyperion
Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951)
Piano Concerto No 2 in C minor Op 50 [38'20]
Piano Concerto No 3 in E minor Op 60 [35'27]
Credits :
Conductor – Jerzy Maksymiuk
Leader – Geoffrey Trabichoff
Orchestra – BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Piano – Nikolai Demidenko
