Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini is one of those rare works that impresses even the snobbish types who customarily turn up their noses at the compositions of this Russian émigré who wrote such unabashedly Romantic, heart-on-sleeve music. Generally regarded as a reactionary in a world dominated by the ideas of Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism on the one hand and Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique on the other, Rachmaninoff has been largely written off by the musical intelligentsia until recent years.

The variation form was not one to which Rachmaninoff had shown any particular predilection, but the idea of variations was clearly churning in his mind when he arrived at his Swiss summer residence in 1934, because he began to compose with extraordinary energy and imagination the work that is surely his finest essay in the medium of piano and orchestra.

It was a bold step to choose a theme so thoroughly treated by earlier composers. Paganini himself had started the tradition by varying the theme of his twenty-fourth caprice for solo violin eleven times, and both Liszt and Brahms had a go at it later in the nineteenth century. And in the twentieth century, following Rachmaninoff, Witold Lutosławski and Boris Blacher continued the tradition. Yet Rachmaninoff came up with fresh treatments presented in a score that is dashing, brilliant, romantic, and witty by turns.

The first variation actually precedes the formal statement of the full theme; it is a kind of bare bones version, tense and bony, hushed but with a sardonic touch of wit. The theme itself is first given (appropriately) to the violins, immediately evoking echoes of Paganini’s original.

The title “Rhapsody” might lead us to expect great freedom in the treatment of the Paganini material, but ironically Rachmaninoff here gives us the most classically shaped of all his compositions. Each variation is complete in itself, each has a marked, evident connection to the Paganini theme. As a whole, the treatment becomes freer as the work progresses, but that is entirely normal in classical practice. The first six variations maintain strict tempo, stay in the same key (A minor) as Paganini’s caprice, and even hint at Paganini’s own variations. The first major change in character comes with the seventh variation, in which Rachmaninoff introduces one of his favorite musical ideas as a second thematic idea, the plainchant melody Dies irae from the Mass for the Dead. We hear it first in sustained chords in the piano against thematic segments in bassoon and cellos. It will play a large role in the score, possibly designed to suggest Paganini’s supposed bargain with the devil, just as it was used to suggest diabolical activities in the “Dream of the Witch’s Sabbath” in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. Rachmaninoff plans its several reappearances in his Rhapsody with a keen sense of telling effect. By the ninth variation, Rachmaninoff is no longer so much playing with the thematic outline or its harmonic pattern as he is exploiting the colors and the rhythms of its diabolic character with special coloristic effects in the orchestration. A grotesque march presents the Dies irae like a slow tolling of funeral bells.

The eleventh variation, a reflective solo cadenza with a mysterious accompaniment, leads off to a new key and the beginning of a middle part in which the tonality is freer. The modulations end in the lush, romantic key of D-flat major for the most famous variation in the set, the eighteenth. This sounds, at first hearing, as if Rachmaninoff had thrown Paganini to the winds for rich Russian melody. And yet this theme, in Rachmaninoff’s most popular style, is derived from Paganini by the simple device of turning the notes upside-down and playing them more slowly and lyrically. The result is an outpouring of lyric melody that soars climactically and then dies gently away.

The remaining five variations return to the home key to provide a finale of great brilliance à la Paganini, then turning to intimations of the satanic, with a dark march erupting in a piano cadenza and a variation (No. 23) in which the soloist begins in the unlikely key of A-flat; the orchestra promptly takes matters into its own hands by jerking the soloist up to A and continuing into the last variation, with a kaleidoscopic outburst of fireworks and a final reference in the brass to the Dies irae. Finally, just as Rachmaninoff seems to be building up to his mightiest peroration, the score ends with one last quiet reference to Paganini. —© Steven Ledbetter