'In Medtner you find the whole complexity of life, he built his spiritual cathedrals out of chaos'

~ Dina Parakhina ~

Born to a cultured Muscovite family of predominantly German/Northern European descent, Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951) studied with Pabst, Sapelnikov and Safonov at the Moscow Conservatoire, graduating in 1900. A younger contemporary of Scriabin and lifelong friend of Rachmaninov, admired as a magisterial pianist of imperious tone, cantilena and structural sapience - from Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto and Appassionata through Chopin to Feux follets and Islamey - he held teaching appointments at the Conservatoire (1909/10, 1914/21) before leaving Russia for periods of domicile or touring in Germany, the USA, Canada and France (1921-35). His Moscow students included Abram Shatskes (Paperno’s ‘walking eternal Jewish sorrow’) and for six years, 1915-21, Leopold Lukomski (who taught Tamara Bobovich, Dina Parakhina’s teacher at the Central Music School). First visiting Britain in 1928, he settled in north London in October 1935, making his home in Golders Green. Supported by the Royal Philharmonic Society and an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music, it was here, at 69 Wentworth Road, that he died in November 1951 from heart failure - leaving the world, his devoted wife was to write later, 'in a serene and grateful spirit'. This man of 'clear blue and deep set [eyes] as penetrating as the mind which illuminated them' (Michael Salaman).

Opposed to labelling or bracketing - prioritising Baroque polyphony, Classical structure, and Romantic metamorphosis, poetic melodist of the old guard, a resolute tonalist, essentially self-taught as a composer (occasional lessons with Arensky and Taneyev notwithstanding) – Medtner was steeped in tradition. The critic Leonid Sabaneyev estimated him to be 'the first real, actual Beethoven in Russia, one who did not imitate but continued the master’s work'. Like Chopin, he expressed himself almost exclusively through the piano. Like Chopin, he knew how to invest a miniature, a song, with large-scale implication, how to generate grand designs. Among the cognoscenti of the day, Sorabji, in Around Music (1932), considered him 'by far the most interesting and striking personality in modern Russian music ... 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.'

Addressing the 'soil and roots' of music, The Muse and the Fashion, published in Paris in 1935 with Rachmaninov's help, elucidated Medtner's credo. '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 an intuition ... It is acquired, not invented … 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 … neglect of Rhythm makes musical form the prose, and not the poetry, of Sound … Song, Poetry and Dance are unthinkable without rhythm … Where Thought and Feeling confer with each other, you will find Artistic Conscience. Inspiration comes where thought is saturated in Emotion, and emotion is imbued with Sense.'

Metaphorically, like an Arthurian Knight impassioned by his Lady, Medtner was in love with the beauty of his Muse. He played for beauty’s sake. He composed for beauty’s sake. The Moscow nights, the Russian springs, the basilicas and bards of his youth: such was his heritage, a chalice of dreams and memories to hold for always. 'Defender of the sacred laws of eternal art' (Glazunov), Prince of Truth, he was one of Russia’s great sons.

'No one tells such tales as Kolya!'

~ Rachmaninov1 ~

Six Fairy Tales, Op 51

Villers-sur-Mer, Normandy 1928. ‘To Cinderella and Ivan the Fool’.

Mercurial, fantastical confessions of the soul, Medtner's Fairy Tales (Skazki) - thirty-eight tableaux or 'legends' - date from between 1904 and 1932, covering broadly, but not only, his Russian period. 'Little musical novellas' Heinrich Neuhaus called them. Shades of Gogol and Chekhov lurk within the complexity and simplicity of their pages. 

Dina Parakhina2: 'Medtner created his Fairy Tales out of legend and lore like Chopin created his Ballades out of literature. Jewels of the piano, they’re conceivably the best of his creations. Through them he expressed his most sincere, most personal thoughts and images. We all grow out of childhood. Medtner came from a very caring home. He had an incredible education, interested in all things, not just music and art. He was a native German speaker. He was deeply immersed in astronomy, he knew the stars and planets. Russian by virtue of cultural environment though otherwise of European mind, he knew his Russian literature intimately. His brother Emil [whose former wife, Anna, he married in 1919], was a Jungian philosopher. Another, Aleksandr, was a composer, conductor and violist, a fascinating personality. Medtner wanted him to score his Fairy Tales so as to have a means to promote his music more widely in Europe. Unquestionably the Fairy Tales are colourful ["every piece, every fragment, has its own spectrum of colours" (Daily Work of the Pianist and Composer, compiled Gurvich and Lukomski, Moscow 1963)] yet in the end, having tried, Aleksandr had to admit that (like Chopin, to a lesser degree Liszt) they sounded so natural on the piano, so intrinsically pianistic in physical conception, that it would be wrong to re-distribute them between the different instruments of the orchestra. Some people believe the Skazki are programme music. No. What these apparent elves and gnomes and forest spirits amount to is a secret code. It’s as if Medtner the arch-Romantic is hiding behind labels, cloaking the personal and spiritual incidents of his life, his drama and feelings. The essence of his music, the substance, the psychology, is evidently Schumannesque, occasionally Wagnerian.'

Written by a wanderer homesick for Russia, the Op 51 cycle is steeped in Slavic atmosphere, the mood of the hearth, higher elevations of the soul tracing coma trails across the sky. 'So Russian, so Russian' he told his Birmingham disciple Edna Iles ('the bravest, ablest besieger of my musical fortresses'). Cinderella, 'a mysterious princess, full of naive charm, grace and beauty'. Ivan, 'a contemplative creature absorbed in the inner life of the heart' (Ivan Ilyin). Medtner, mindful of his ineptitudes in day-to-day life, often likened himself to Ivan: 'only fools in fairy tales live happily. In real life they’re mercilessly destined to be crushed [ruined]' (to the soprano Tatiana Makushina, 5 December 1928). Traditionally the youngest in a family, Ivan the Fool, simple and guileless, subject of a Tolstoy story, is a folk character all Russians knows. He doesn’t do much but in the end benefits come to him without asking (in Medtner’s case the ‘fairy tale’ Maharajah of Mysore in the late 1940s, benefactor of his Abbey Road HMV recordings with the Philharmonia, Dobroven, Slobodskaya, Schwarzkopf, Moiseiwitsch and others).

DP: 'No 2 (A minor Dorian - pensive, bells in the air, religious) is often referred to as "Ivan the Fool". In fact, Medtner confirmed, he is the object of the last of the set, the G major, ("most elastic and appropriate for orchestration", to his cousin Alexandr Gedike, 18/19 June 1932). No 3, recorded by Horowitz, is generally agreed to be "Cinderella". Assuredly it’s the most lyrical, elegant and feminine in style. "Cinderalla" was very personal symbol for Medtner, not a fairy fiction. That’s how he wrote about his wife. Typically, he keeps it to himself, her name isn’t spelt out. But she will surely have known. Her early story, their story, a forbidden love for so long, was a gloomy one. She suffered a lot.'

Fairy Tale Sonata in C minor

Op 25 No 1

Moscow 1910-11. Dedicated to Aleksandr Gedike. 

DP: 'First and foremost Medtner was a pianist and improviser, then composer, his training under Safonov influencing his style and general keyboard physiology. Logically, there’s only one way to play his music – even if the fingerings written in Iles’s copy of this Sonata-Skazka [British Library] arguably propose choices he gave her other than his own. His pianism, without borders or restrictions, is reflected in his textures and layerings. Rhythmically, he was often more complicated than Prokofiev or Bartók – a natural extension of Schumann only going further. His improvisatory manner will often look sideways, his recapitulations are different, varied, nonconformist. With one exception - the Sonata-Skazka: because it’s so short and transparent he doesn’t allow himself to depart. Unpredictable, experimental genres habitually fill his sonata moulds, qualifying the architecture. Fairy Tale, Ballade, Elegy, Reminiscence, Idyll, Concerto (the ur-scheme of the G minor Op 22).' 

Sonata, Fairy Tale and a 5/2 March comprise the Sonata-Skaza. ‘Whatever I create I always talk [confide, confess] to you in my thoughts’ (to Rachmaninov, Vichy 19 June 1927). Down the years Medtner and Rachmaninov shared ideas, nuances and figurations, common piano sonorities, gravelled dry-throated chords, borrowing from/paraphrasing each other. Playfully, profoundly. ‘Rachmaninov’s late pieces were written obviously under the influence of Medtner – no other Russian composer [shared so evidently] his intimate horizon’ (Sabaneyev), his contrapuntalism or chromaticism. When in 1934 Rachmaninov came to write the eighteenth variation of his Paganini Rhapsody, inverting Paganini’s theme thereby transmoding it into the major, it cannot have escaped him that he was concurrently memorialising the tune (and dynamic graph) of the E-flat Andantino from the Sonata-Skazka.

Sonata in E minor Op 25 No 2

Moscow 1910-11. Dedicated to Rachmaninov. Prefaced by Fyodor Tyutchev’s poem Night Wind3.

Night wind,

Whom do you mourn in such a panic?…

What does your strange voice mean; and how

Are you so dull and pleading, then volcanic?

In language that the heart knows well

You keep insisting on some mystic sorrow,

You wail and cry and drain the well,

Until your heart explodes, engulfed in horror! …

Sing not the fearful songs of old

About the ancient chaos, or the one before you!

The soul at night is its own world;

The soul is hungry for its favourite stories!

It bursts like flames from mortal chests

And wants to join itself with what’s eternal!…

Don’t howl, don’t wake, just let them rest!—

Beneath them chaos waits its turn nocturnal!…

DP: 'Chaos seeds this pre-Revolution Sonata. A sense of melancholy and premonition too. Chaos, spiritual resistance, the attempt to find peace and harmony, all meet somewhere within. There is no victor. Central to the piano repertoire, of massive dimension and ferocious demand, we dare venture it’s greater conceptually than the Liszt B minor. Comparable with Beethoven’s Opp 106, 111, with Brahms’s Op 5. A single-movement 34-minute work, it’s subdivided into two "sonata" halves, demarcated by a double-barline/fermata lunga but without loss of continuity or momentum, the second half born motivically and transformed contrapuntally out of the first. Its phenomenal intricacies and sonata/fugue synthesis, one speculates, can only have been the consequence of sitting simultaneously at piano and desk. In attempting to grasp it imagine we are in the Sistine Chapel. We cannot see or understand everything. But we are aware of an ambience, we focus on the overview, we are enriched chancing upon a detail here, a symbol there ... landmarks. Medtner, like Michelangelo, was a master mason. He knew full well about proportion, harmony, discord, the emotions of sound. He never wasted a note. [Gratuitousness wasn’t in his vocabulary. If fugues, double fugues, canons, fugati, the whole rhythmic and pitch apparatus of baroque procedure, were needed to craft a statement then that was the law of the moment. Allowed each their say and personality – and babble will turn into conversation into speech into eloquence.] At the start, like a prophet to the crowd, he says "listen to me, I will show you the truth. I am going to reveal something so important you must listen". On her printed copy, Iles must have asked him, he wrote, in Russian, "the whole piece is in the epic spirit characterised with pathos": "keep the melodic line free of pedal [connect with the fingers, like an organist], every staccato, every rest, must be observed in order to refresh sonority. Breathe the pauses. Release [balance] the accompaniment to isolate the theme".

'All motifs have origins in earlier ones. Introduction, Andante, descending minor-thirds - fortissimo, all’improvisa, diminuendo, tranquillo, fateful, precisely fingered. First subject, E minor, Allegro, the longest 15/8 section in keyboard literature. Development I: auto-suggestive Dies irae references [more to do with contour than pitch], bells. Second subject, D major, tranquillo - like a ship surviving the storm, a calm sea, safe harbour, Scheherazadian aroma, reflecting on the past. Dance, giocodamente. Danger. Triumph. Flashbacks. Development II: più mosso - multiple voicings and devices. Varied reprise, enriched, more three-dimensional, more widely registered. Quasi cadenza - Medtner meeting Rachmaninov. Introduction recalled (F minor) - past/ending/improvisation/beginning/future, attaca. Second ‘movement’. Allegro, fuga, carillons, Medtner’s climax at the Golden Section, fff, quasi cadenza, B flat major.

'Everything Medtner does in this motivic/cyclic Double-Sonata is for a purpose. He advances through natural selection and cogent development. He pursues, remembers, focuses on different features of a thought or idea, at first distantly, then more closely with greater energy. The past becomes like yesterday. Drawing on Pushkins’s Tatiana archetype, his stance, counterpoint through streams of reminiscence, reminds of "Turgenev’s maidens". She waits. He does not come. She gazes out of the window. She sees a coach approaching. She is excited. She’s waited her whole life for this moment, yet dares hardly stay to see him.' Ásya. The Rhineland girl. ‘She kept rising, running into the house, and running back to us again. She would begin to hum in a low voice, frequently broke out laughing, and that in a very strange manner - it seemed as though she were laughing not at what she heard, but at various thoughts which came into her head. Her large eyes had a bright, direct, bold gaze, but sometimes her eyelids contracted slightly, and then her glance suddenly became deep and tender.’4

This recording, “faithfulness to text and message”, incorporates Edna Iles’s manuscript changes and corrections.

'It is a good thing for every man to have a conscience …

I have had the happiness of knowing and loving one … whose heart was pure as a child’s -

Nikolai Medtner, a true knight sans peur et sans reproche'

~ Issay Dobroven, London November 1951 ~

© Ateş Orga, Dina Parakhina

2023 

1 Hamish Milne, Medtner: the Complete Skazki (recording, 2007).

2 Interview, Royal College of Music, London 12 August 2022.

3 Published 1836. Translated Alex Gruzenberg.

4 Turgenev, Phantoms and Other Stories, translated Isabel F Hapgood (New York 1904).