For what it's
worth, and it's probably worth nothing, having listened to a lot of Rachmaninoff
recently it occurred to me that an interesting parallel can be drawn between Somerset
Maugham and the great Russian composer. This may at first seem very strange. I
can’t think of a single reference to Rachmaninoff in any of Maugham’s works and
it remains a matter of pure speculation whether he knew his music at all. He
probably did, and he might even have attended some of Rachmaninoff’s concerts
during his spectacularly successful career as a concert pianist during the
1920s and 1930s. Nor have I ever run across any reference to Rachmaninoff's
literary tastes. If he had any, and if he read any Maugham at all, they have remained a secret. Nevertheless, there are several suggestive parallels.
The most
striking similarity between Rachmaninoff and Maugham is that both of them, all
of their lives, were accused of being anachronisms. While Maugham continued to
write stories very much in the way Maupassant had done in the nineteenth
century, so Rachmaninoff continued to write symphonies in the manner of
Tchaikovsky. Of course, in both cases there is no question of slavish
imitation, nor can we talk of any great similarity of styles indeed; it’s much
broader and more fundamental than that. While Schoenberg and the New Viennese
School
I find it a
remarkable similarity, indeed, that both Rachmaninoff and Maugham, until
comparatively recently, were not at all taken seriously by professional
critics, musical and literary respectively, yet their works have never been out
of print or the standard repertoire. This makes me wonder, yet again, what
sense artistic criticism really makes, if any. Here it flatly contradicts both
the popular taste and the test of time, and aren’t these factors more important
than the opinion of a miniscule minority, no matter how erudite these fellows could
be? After all, lasting popularity suggests a wide human appeal. Critical praise
suggests nothing of the kind. Both could be – indeed, have been – wrong in the
past, but I think few enthusiasts would argue in favour of criticism being the
more infallible one. The most brutal attacks – of Edmund Wilson on Maugham in The New Yorker (June, 1946) and in the New Grove on Rachmaninoff (1954) –
are unfortunately too well-known; no need to quote them yet again.
Other, and
smaller, similarities between Maugham and Rachmaninoff include, for instance,
spending half of their lives away from their native land: the former in France,
the latter in America Russia , or the Soviet Union as it was then
called, and, reportedly, until the end of his life suffered from severe
nostalgia, trying to make himself at home in America
(and Switzerland England France ,
or simply stronger links with the country where he spent a happy childhood than
with England England
Interestingly,
both visited America America
I find it
fascinating that Rachmaninoff and Maugham were almost exact contemporaries, the
Russian composer being but a year older (born in 1873), and both experienced a
great shift in their creative lives during middle age. Strangely enough, the
directions were totally the opposite.
In 1918, aged
45 and for purely pecuniary reasons, Rachmaninoff had to turn himself from,
primarily, a composer and a conductor into a virtuoso pianist giving 40 to 50
recitals per season. The amazing thing is that until then, though he had
appeared many times as a pianist, he had no working repertoire because he had
played almost exclusively his own works. How Rachmaninoff could, for just a few
years, build an enormous repertoire of Liszt, Chopin, Schumann, Beethoven and what
not and turn himself into one of the hottest tickets on the American concert
stage is one of the major miracles in music history. But the price was steep.
He lived for quarter of a century after 1917, made quite a few recordings which
today prove beyond any doubt his unique place among the greatest pianists, but
he composed very few original works; only six actually, though almost all of
them are among his finest.
Maugham’s
life-changing event was, of course, his first travel to the South Seas in the
end of World War I; during the 1920s it stimulated several other, usually quite
extensive, Far Eastern sojourns the consequences of which for his life
and work were incalculable. They renewed his interest into the genre of the
short story which resulted in three of his finest short story collections, The Trembling of a Leaf (1921), The Casuarina Tree (1926), and Ah King (1933). Three novels and two
travel books more share exotic settings, the former because they deal with extremes of
human nature that could hardly happen in more civilized parts of the world.
Most important of all, as eloquently demonstrated by The Summing Up, these travels profoundly changed Maugham’s outlook: he lost any trace of
intellectual snobbishness, that awful side effect of culture, which he might
have had in his youth. Last and least, the constant
globetrotting, ever since his student years and by no means in the Far
East only, gave his works the cosmopolitan character
that is Maugham’s trademark.
Though only
one year younger, Maugham outlived Rachmaninoff by 22 years. There is something
poignant, it seems to me, about the fact that while in the beginning of 1943
Rachmaninoff was dying of cancer under the blazing Californian sun, somewhere
among the marshes of South Carolina Maugham, a war refugee and a temporary
American citizen, was writing The Razor’s
Edge…
