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28 First฀Published฀Songs,฀Opus฀4 (1893) Word of a new talent named Rachmaninoff spread quickly. The music publisher Karl Gutheil approached him with an offer to publish Aleko and pay him a fee of 500 rubles for it. He also bought two pieces for cello and piano, Op. 2, and the first set of songs, Op. 4. It was a large sum, but there were delays in getting the money to him, so he took a job giving piano lessons in the summer of 1892 after graduation. He received good fees and became friends with some of his pupils, like Yelena Kreutzer, but he did not like having to teach in order to support himself (VOR 1, 28). Among the works Rachmaninoff composed in 1892–3 were five pieces for piano, called “Morceaux de Fantaisie,” Op. 3, written in the autumn of 1892. The second of these, a Prelude in C-sharp Minor, made an immediate impression when he first played it in Moscow on 26 September 1892, and later that year in Kharkov. His cousin Alexander Siloti played it for the first time outside Russia in London in 1895 (Barber, 61), and first brought it to the U.S. in 1898, where it became a sensation. Rachmaninoff himself played it in England on his first tour there in 1899. It has an arresting beginning, dignified but menacing, with its three-note descending octave unison chords; there is drama in the middle section, and then a chordal climax, a “mournful tolling of bells,” and a final sequence of chords “each held in suspense as the music gradually vanishes into the distance” (Martyn, 69). In an interview published in The Delineator in February 1910, Rachmaninoff cautioned against playing it too loudly or yielding to the temptation to play the final chords as arpeggios. This three-and-a-half to four-minute Prelude in C-sharp Minor became one of the most famous piano works ever written. He sold Op. 3 to Gutheil for 200 rubles, or 40 rubles a piece (about 20 dollars, as he said in his interview for The Delineator during his North American debut in 1909–10); he regretted not publishing the work in Germany to protect his rights, as he did later with other sets of piano works. But since Russia was not a signatory to international copyright agreements, the twenty dollars he received for the Prelude was all he ever got for it. It has been estimated that, had it been protected by copyright , the composer might have made $100,000 on this work alone (Harrison, 50). At any rate, it passed into the public domain, and was played by everyone for free. Rachmaninoff’s recording of it on the Philips “Great Pianists of the 20th Century” set is played exactly as he calls for in the interview above, the melodic lines clearly articulated and the chords not pounded out showily but played with a stately restraint. The prelude became well known beyond the 1. 29 world of classical music. In 1918 George L. Cobb published a Tin Pan Alley instrumental version called “Russian Rag.” It was played by jazz musicians who arranged it, including Duke Ellington (“Cotton Club Nights,” 1938), Jack Teagarden (“It’s Time for T,” 1941), and Nat Cole in his early King Cole Trio period (1944); for many more curious offshoots of the prelude, see Harrison, 227-9. The piece hardly survives Teagarden’s band, but Nat Cole’s version for piano, guitar, and bass conveys a certain respect for the original. Whether Rachmaninoff would have liked it is hard to say, but it is known that he admired Art Tatum’s piano improvisations and Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, and was at Aeolian Hall in 1924 when Whiteman introduced Rhapsody in Blue with George Gershwin as soloist. During Rachmaninoff’s last year at the Conservatory, in late 1891 or early 1892, his friend Yury Sakhnovsky (see Song 11) introduced him to a married woman named Anna Lodyzhenskaya; she was in her mid-twenties, and of Gypsy blood. Her husband Piotr was a dilettante composer and carouser and a friend of Chaliapin’s. He wrote a song which he dedicated to Rachmaninoff, “Those fleeting dreams” (Пронеслись฀мимолетные฀грезы, 1896), which Lamm in 1947 mistakenly included in Rachmaninoff’s unpublished songs because a score of the song in Rachmaninoff’s hand was found among his papers (PSR, 326); there are several recordings of this song, including a good one by Nadezhda Obukhova. Anna’s sister Nadezhda...

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