They were classmates, but never friends. The relationship between the two celebrities appears strange from the outside. They are almost the same age, coming from the same stratum of intelligentsia – military nobility, students of the same professors of the Moscow Conservatory. Rachmaninoff and Scriabin were almost the same age, but they were dissimilar in everything else. One was six feet tall, with a chiselled profile and bobbed hair, modest and sullen. The other is small, rosy-cheeked, with a huge moustache, and arrogant. Both are ambitious, but Scriabin’s hands are feminine and graceful, unlike Rachmaninoff’s huge hands, which can control everything. True, Scriabin received a small medal of honour as a pianist, and because of conflicts with his teacher, he was left without a diploma as a composer, while Rachmaninoff received a large medal of honour as a composer and pianist.
The Almighty did everything to make these antipodes cross at the same coordinates and at the same time. Their competition began at Zverev’s school and continued at the Moscow Conservatoire. They would graduate as pianists with a gold medal and then fail as composers. One of them will fail with the First Symphony, and he will decide to write the Second Symphony ten years later, after treatment by a hypnotist and severe depression. Scriabin would fail with his piano concerto, the next one he would never write. After the Poem of Ecstasy, he discovers new principles of music organisation, feels himself the Messiah, and prepares for the sacred destruction of mankind. Rachmaninoff will cease to exist.
‘Here I thought that Scriabin was just a pig, but it turned out that he was a composer,’ said Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) after listening to his colleague’s First Symphony at a rehearsal. Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (1871-1915) was not in debt and said of Rachmaninoff’s music as follows: ‘It is all the same, all the same whining, dull lyricism, seagullishness. There is no impulse, no power, no light – music for suicides.’ Rachmaninoff is said to have grown out of Tchaikovsky’s music, while Scriabin could not stand it. Rachmaninoff was inspired by Schumann, while Scriabin was inspired by Chopin and Liszt.
1899.
Rachmaninoff said, ‘A new kind of music seems to be created not with the heart but with the head. Its composers think rather than feel the music. They are incapable of elevating their works – they ponder, protest, analyse, reason, calculate and reflect, but they do not elevate.’ This was a stone in the garden of Scriabin…… who did not agree to be considered a musician. Throughout his short life, he worked on a megaproject to combine music with physics and religion. At the same time, Rachmaninoff followed Scriabin’s work and liked much of it, while Scriabin was virtually ignorant of Rachmaninoff’s works.
At the age of twenty-six, Scriabin became a professor at the Moscow Conservatory. However, owing to his creative individuality, he broke out of the conventional musical framework and gravitated towards teaching. Scriabin left the conservatory as soon as he received an offer of an annual pension from Margarita Morozova, director of the Russian Musical Society, and embarked on a solo career. He left Russia for the USA, concertised extensively, later lived for the most part in France and Belgium, but died in Moscow of blood poisoning.
Rachmaninoff did not stay in Russia for long. As contemporaries said, at first, he did not understand the Russian Revolution and went to Switzerland, but then he understood and moved to the United States. For many years, Sergei Vasilyevich gave concerts all over the world, never ceasing to amaze audiences with his virtuoso technique, phenomenal stretching of his unusually long fingers, and compositional delights.
Rachmaninoff had a recipe for a happy life as a creative man: he must have a wife who constantly says, first, that he is a genius, second, that he is a genius, and third, that he is a genius. Rachmaninoff was lucky to have a wife, and in general she spoke the truth……a Scriabin’s ideas gradually began to take hold of minds when he was no longer alive.
Two geniuses of a bygone era, two eternal rivals – Alexander Scriabin and Sergei Rachmaninoff–who at the very beginning of the 20th century divided Russian music lovers into two warring camps. After the sudden death of one of the idols from an abscess on his lip, the other gives charity concerts in favour of his family. Fans of the two geniuses reconcile. Time will put an end to this confrontation. Rachmaninoff is one of the most frequently performed composers in the world, and hearing Scriabin on stage is a rarity.
