Cigarette in hand, Saville-Row-black-and-white-suited, laughing and joking, he strides through home-made-black-and-white-film and his adored and adoring family. This was the man who said that artists' work should express the country of their birth, their religion, their love affairs. In short, their work should be the sum total of their experiences, the harvest of their lives.
O my beloved harvest field
Who could reap you at a single sweep,
Or bind you in a single sheaf ?
Oh my visions, oh my dreams,
Could you be gathered in a single sheaf,
Could your meaning be told in a single word ?
Harsh winds have swept over my harvest,
The flattened corn lies on the ground.
All the ripened grain is scattered !
Scattered too, are my cherished dreams !
Where they flew, and fell again to earth,
Springs a wild crop of ugly weeds –
Springs the bitter harvest of my sorrow !
This, at least, emerged from Tony Palmer's film of the Russian composer Rachmaninov. Essentially, it was a yearning for his beloved homeland that inspired Rachmaninov during his years in exile. In particular, he yearned for his youth, his cousins' estate in Ivanovka, an idyll in the countryside with beauty, love and roots. I should not be surprised a jot if Ivanovka was a space of valleys, of fields and sunlight, of love and fun and music. You can hear these things in his work and, after leaving the source of his inspiration, there is barely a sound. Rachmaninov wrote only five more pieces of music.
Comments