Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (23 page)

But their mutual admiration proves jittery. Might it be that, when the dust has settled, each man suspects he has been rumbled by the other? At the end of the month, Tolstoy sends Tchaikovsky some Russian folk songs to arrange, but Tchaikovsky considers them bogus: how surprising that the man who sets himself up as an expert in folk music should be so easily taken in! On this occasion, he is only partly able to button his lip. ‘I must tell you frankly that they have been recorded in a very clumsy manner, and they display no more than a few traces of their primitive beauty,’ he writes to Tolstoy.

The two men never meet again, even though they have plenty of opportunities. Tchaikovsky’s brother Modest thinks Pyotr goes out of his way to avoid Tolstoy. ‘He himself told me that in spite of all the pride and joy which he felt on making this acquaintance, the beloved works of Tolstoy temporarily lost their charm for him.’ On a couple of occasions, Tchaikovsky is spotted ducking into a courtyard as he sees Tolstoy approaching along the street.

A year later, Tchaikovsky feels even less in awe of Tolstoy. ‘You ought to be ashamed of being so enthusiastic about this disgracefully banal nonsense, camouflaged with pretensions to depth of psychological analysis!’ he writes to Modest, who has been going on about Tolstoy’s new novel,
Anna Karenina
.
⁹⁴
As the years go by, he grows increasingly irritated by Tolstoy’s preachiness. In 1886, he writes in his diary: ‘I am inwardly angry at him; I almost hate him ... all this scribbling he is doing now exudes coldness; one can sense fear and one feels vaguely that he, too, is
human
... that is a being who, in the sphere of questions about the purpose and meaning of life, about God and religion, is as insanely arrogant and at the same time as insignificant as any ephemeral insect which appears at noon on a hot July day and has already terminated its existence by night fall.’

When Tolstoy hears of Tchaikovsky’s death in November 1893, he writes to his widow expressing his regret, and wondering why they never quite clicked. ‘It really is a pity, since there seems to have been some misunderstanding between us. I visited him once and invited him here but he seems to have been offended because I did not attend
Evgenii Onegin
.’

But a year later, Tolstoy has lost sympathy with the man whose music once made him cry. ‘What an obvious artistic falsehood Tchaikovsky is!’ he reflects.

EXAMINES

Moscow Conservatory, Bolshaya Nikitskaya

May 1888

Twelve years later, Pyotr Il’ich Tchaikovsky is the most renowned composer in Russia. Aged forty-eight, he has just returned from months abroad, and is settling down at his country retreat to begin work on his new symphony, the 5th. But he has a keen sense of obligation, so has agreed to spend two days sitting on the Conservatory’s examining board.

The examination begins smartly at 9 a.m. The pupils are set two tasks: to harmonise a theme by Haydn in four parts, and to write a prelude of sixteen to thirty bars, in a given key and with a specified modulation, to include pedal points on both the dominant and the tonic. They are not permitted the use of a piano. As examinations go, it is notoriously arduous, but this year it is made even more so by the presence of the great Tchaikovsky.

One by one, the candidates hand in their work. As their teacher Arensky surveys each paper, a frown forms on his face. He is clearly dissatisfied. The last candidate to hand in his work is the fifteen-year-old Sergei Rachmaninoff; over the course of the day, his prelude has become more and more complicated, defying any sort of speedy solution. Eventually, after eight hours, he manages to complete it, and hands in his two pages to Arensky. For the first time that day, he fails to frown. This gives Rachmaninoff hope.

The next day, the board hears the students play their own work. When Rachmaninoff finishes, Arensky turns to Tchaikovsky and says that this pupil has written some piano pieces in ternary song form for his class. Would he care to hear them?

Tchaikovsky nods his assent. Rachmaninoff remains at the piano, and starts to play; he knows them by heart.

When he comes to an end, the board holds a secret discussion, each writing his mark in the examination book. Afterwards, Rachmaninoff
watches as Tchaikovsky goes over to the examination book and writes something else in it. Rachmaninoff has no idea what he has written, good or bad. It is a full two weeks before Arensky tells him that the board has granted him a 5+, the highest rating, and that Tchaikovsky himself added three further plus signs to this mark, one above it, one below it, and one beside it.

The excitement runs both ways. Tchaikovsky’s sister-in-law, Anatol, remembers him arriving back from the Conservatory with a spring in his step. ‘For Rachmaninoff,’ he proclaims, ‘I predict a great future.’

Rachmaninoff’s success in the examination remains the talk of the Conservatory for some time. ‘We all heard of his success, we know what an extraordinary sight reader he is, what a perfect ear he has, and we are infected by his love for Tchaikovsky,’ writes a fellow student.

As Rachmaninoff prepares to graduate, Tchaikovsky further encourages him by commissioning an arrangement of
The Sleeping Beauty
for piano duet from him. Rachmaninoff is known as a diligent student with a sure sense of purpose, and it is apparent to everyone that he has the makings of a composer. Yet he shies away from this task. ‘I am burdened with work, but to tell you the truth, I do little, and scarcely practise the piano at all. I simply can’t get down to work. My laziness is
gigantic
,’ he writes to his sister Natalia in September 1890.

He eventually sends his transcription of
The Sleeping Beauty
to Tchaikovsky in June 1891, but it is no good. Tchaikovsky can scarcely believe its incompetence. ‘We made a great mistake in entrusting this work to a boy, no matter how talented,’ he writes to Rachmaninoff’s tutor, complaining of his pupil’s ‘lack of courage, skill and initiative’ and declaring that ‘in general, inexperience and lack of boldness can be sensed at every step ... these proofs have so upset me that I haven’t been able to sleep – I feel a sickness approaching ...’

Rachmaninoff recognises the truth of these criticisms. ‘Tchaikovsky swears terribly at me for the transcription. And quite reasonably and justly. Of all transcriptions mine is undoubtedly the worst.’

In fact, he has been diverted by his own compositions, among them the opera
Aleko
, his first piano concerto, and the Prelude in C-Sharp Minor. When he hears them, Tchaikovsky, always generous, brushes aside his earlier irritations and celebrates the advent of a new composer. Attending
the last rehearsals of
Aleko
, he timidly asks Rachmaninoff if he would object to having his work produced alongside one of his own. Rachmaninoff is overjoyed. ‘To be on the poster with Tchaikovsky was about the greatest honour that could be paid to a composer, and I would not have dared to suggest such a thing. Tchaikovsky knew this. He wanted to help me but was anxious not to offend or humiliate me ... He literally said – “Would you object?” – he was fifty-three, a famous composer – and I was only a twenty-year-old beginner!’

Tchaikovsky sits alongside Rachmaninoff during rehearsals. Rachmaninoff is upset by some of the conductor’s ideas, but is too frightened to say anything. Sensing this, Tchaikovsky leans over and says, ‘Do you like this tempo?’

‘No.’

‘Then why don’t you say so?’

‘I’m afraid.’

During a break, Tchaikovsky says to the conductor, ‘Sergei Vasilyevich and I think that the tempo in that part might be taken a little faster.’

Aleko
is premiered at the Imperial Theatre on April 27th 1893. Rachmaninoff’s father and grandmother are in the audience. As it draws to its close, Tchaikovsky leans far out, so that the audience can see him applauding the new work.

In October of that year, the two men set off in opposite directions. ‘You see, Seryozha, we’re famous composers now!’ jokes Tchaikovsky. ‘One goes to Kiev to conduct his opera and the other to Petersburg to conduct his symphony!’

On November 6th, Tchaikovsky dies of cholera. When he hears the news later the same day, Rachmaninoff immediately starts composing his
Trio Élégiaque
for piano, violin and cello. He dedicates it ‘to the memory of a great artist’.

IS DROWNED OUT BY

The Garden of Allah, Los Angeles

Summer 1931

Forty-three years later, Rachmaninoff’s youthful Prelude in C-Sharp Minor remains by far his most popular piece. ‘One day the Prelude simply came and I put it down,’ he recalls. ‘It came with such force that I could not shake it off even though I tried to do so. It had to be there – so it was.’

And so it remains, his albatross. Now devoting himself exclusively to his career as a concert pianist, it exasperates him that it is the only piece of his that audiences ever want to hear him play: they seem to think he has never composed anything else. Consequently, he has grown to detest it, and prefers all his other preludes. ‘I think them far better music than my first, but the public has shown no disposition to share my belief,’ he complains. The piece pursues him everywhere, an obligation he can never shake off. When he played it in London a few months ago, one critic detected a certain grudging quality about it, complaining that he ‘flung it at the audience like a bone to a dog’.

If it is a bone, it doubles as a boomerang. ‘The big annoyance of my concert life is my C-Sharp Minor Prelude. I’m not sorry I wrote it. It has helped me. But people ALWAYS make me play it. By now I play it without feeling – like a machine!’

Between concerts in Texas and Chicago, the elderly Rachmaninoff is taking a break in a bungalow at The Garden of Allah. Sometimes known as ‘the Uterus of Flickerland’, the Garden of Allah consists of twenty-five bungalows set around a main hotel, in lush grounds full of orange, grapefruit, banana and palm trees. Built in 1927 by Alla Nazimova, a star of the silent movies, its vast swimming pool is shaped like the Black Sea, to remind Nazimova of her childhood in Yalta.

It is, in a way, the Los Angeles precursor of New York’s Chelsea Hotel, a refuge for transients from the East Coast like Scott Fitzgerald and
Dorothy Parker.
⁹⁵
Alexander Woollcott describes it as ‘the kind of village you might look for down the rabbit-hole’. Over the years, it has certainly been populated by some outlandish figures. The switchboard was once taken over by an operator who believed he could read character from voices, and refused to put through calls from anyone whose voice he disliked. Many residents drink to excess, regularly losing their footing and tumbling headlong into the pool. ‘I used to wait for them to come home and fall in,’ says the playwright Arthur Kober. ‘It was like waiting for a shoe to drop. I’d hear the splashes and then I’d go to sleep.’ Tallulah Bankhead used to like strolling naked around the pool by moonlight. Less seductively, while filming
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
, Charles Laughton loved to swim in it with his hump still on.

Perhaps Sergei Rachmaninoff should have guessed from its reputation that the Garden of Allah would not offer the necessary respite from his busy concert schedule. But, then again, how was he to know who his next-door neighbour would turn out to be?

For three years, the Marx Brothers have been on the road, performing their stage show
Animal Crackers
across America. But in 1931 they are offered a film contract by Paramount, and move to Los Angeles. Harpo, the brother who never speaks, chooses to rent a bungalow at the Garden of Allah. He thinks that his bungalow – a little distance from the main hubbub – will let him exercise both sides of his character, extrovert comedian and introvert harpist.
⁹⁶
He takes to the Garden of Allah like a duck to water. It is, he says, ‘the best place to practise I ever had’.

But one day while he is practising his harp, the sound of a piano shatters the peace.

‘I was looking forward to a solid weekend of practice, without interruptions, when my new neighbor started to bang away. I couldn’t hear anything below a
forte
on the harp. There were no signs the piano banging was going to stop. It only got more overpowering. This character was warming up for a solid weekend of practice too.’

He storms over to the office to register a complaint. ‘One of us has to go,’ he says, ‘and it’s not going to be me because I was here first.’

But the management prevaricates. When he discovers that the neighbour ‘whose playing was driving me nuts’ is none other than Sergei Rachmaninoff, it occurs to him that they will never ask such an illustrious guest to move. He has only one weapon left in his armoury: his harp. ‘I was flattered to have such a distinguished neighbor, but I still had to practise. So I got rid of him my own way. I opened the door and all the windows in my place and began to play the first four bars of Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C-Sharp Minor, over and over,
fortissimo
. He wished he’d never written it. After playing it for two hours I knew exactly how he felt ... My fingers were getting numb. But I didn’t let up, not until I heard a thunderous crash of notes from across the way, like the keyboard had been attacked with a pair of sledgehammers. Then there was silence. This time it was Rachmaninoff who went to complain. He asked to be moved to another bungalow immediately, the farthest possible from that dreadful harpist. Peace returned to the Garden.’

Six years later, Harpo exacts further revenge. In
A Day at the Races
, he appears in a battered top hat playing the piano with increasing ferocity. The more he plays the piano, the more he wrecks it; by the end, he has reduced it to smithereens, leaving only the plate, which he then picks up and plays as a harp.

Is it really a coincidence that the piece he destroys in this memorable scene is the Prelude in C-Sharp Minor by Sergei Rachmaninoff?