In December I wrote about Charles-Valentin Alkan, in the first of a series of pieces exploring the legacies of forgotten composers. This month it's the turn of Nikolai Medtner, one of the greatest composers of twentieth century piano music. If we lived in a just world Medtner, like Rachmaninov, would be a household name. He was born in Moscow on January 5th 1880, into a musical family of German descent. His pianistic gifts were obvious to all from an early age and, creatively, he was without doubt the equal of his famous émigré compatriot. But being a younger contemporary, his work was overshadowed by Rachmaninov's popular appeal.
Superficially, Medtner's sound-world is close to Rachmaninov's. But the music itself is quite different, and Medtner is one of the most developmental composers you're likely to encounter. His playing was renowned for its singing quality and yet, in spite of the abundant melody in his music, the textures never stand still (even in accompaniment). They have their origins in Beethoven: the harmony, rhythm and counterpoint are all constantly active, evolving in polyphonic textures that keep the music restlessly moving. (Medtner was a celebrated interpreter of Beethoven but, with rare exceptions, played only his own works in public.)
The piano features in every composition Medtner wrote, a total of 91 opus numbers which include three concertos, a piano quintet, three violin sonatas, fourteen piano sonatas and numerous smaller pieces and songs. Rachmaninov called him "the greatest composer of our time", but in truth many people find his music inaccessible at first. He was a resolute tonalist, a poetic melodist of the old guard. His melodies are sometimes hard to remember, his rhythms not always immediately comprehendible and his harmonic language difficult to pigeonhole.Yet hear the same piece a few times, and it often becomes hugely rewarding.
Medtner was born the youngest of five children. He studied the piano first with his mother and then with his uncle, a professor at the Moscow Conservatoire, before being admitted there himself aged just twelve. He studied composition with Anton Arensky and Sergei Taneyev, another unfairly neglected Russian composer, and piano with Pavel Pabst (a pupil of Liszt). A story from this period perfectly illustrates Medtner's outlook. In Taneyev's composition class, he was having great difficulty integrating a passage into a movement he was writing. Taneyev's advice was simply to move it elsewhere, but Medtner was horrified by the suggestion.
From Prize Pupil to Wandering Minstrel
He could not conceive of writing a movement where the development was not logical and natural. Taneyev observed Medtner's fascination with complex polyphonic textures, and later said that he was "born with sonata form coursing through his veins". After Pabst's death Medtner joined the piano class of Vasili Safonov, where he sat alongside Rachmaninov and Scriabin. When he graduated with a Gold Medal in piano in 1900, Safonov remarked that he should have been awarded a diamond medal. But whilst Medtner might have seemed destined for a career as a concert pianist, it was composition which increasingly occupied his attention.
He played concerts all over Europe for the next nine years, before returning to the Conservatoire in 1909 to take up a teaching post. He resigned just a year later, to dedicate himself to composition, before returning with a professorship in 1914. Medtner remained at the Conservatoire until 1921 when, unable to live in Soviet Russia, he left again. Although he had always been aware of his German origins, he was now an exile and would never truly feel at home again. With his wife, Anna, he moved first to Berlin for two years and then (after a concert tour of the US in 1924-25) to Paris, where living costs were rather lower.
Rachmaninov stepped in to help out on several occasions when the unworldly Medtner found himself in financial difficulty. And that was relatively often: Medtner was not a man to whom compromise came easily, either personally or professionally! But despite Rachmaninov's help he was still unable to settle or to earn an adequate living, and in 1935 he made his final move, to London. There he composed, taught, broadcast and (thanks for the financial support of the Maharajah of Mysore, His Highness Jayachamaraja Wodeyar Bahadur) made a series of recordings of his compositions. He died on November 13th 1951, at his home in Golders Green.
It's often fascinating to see how an artist's style changes and develops throughout their lives, but with Medtner there is no metamorphosis. His belief in his ideals was held with an almost supernatural conviction and he would never diverge from them, from his first work to his last. Rachmaninov observed that "Medtner is too much of an individual to bear resemblance to anyone except Medtner". But this was not deliberate, according to Kaikhosru Sorabji: "Like Sibelius [he] does not flout current fashions, he does not even deliberately ignore them; so intent in going his own way is he that he is simply unconscious of their very existence".
The Music
Medtner has often been accused of choosing complexity over melody and beauty, yet he quite openly displayed his antipathy towards the modernist direction in which Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Prokofiev, for example, were taking music. All he could do, of course, was watch with horror and disbelief not only the changing shape of music, but changing public tastes. It was Rachmaninov who was largely responsible for introducing Medtner's music to audiences throughout Russia and abroad. He inscribed his fourth concerto to Medtner and Medtner, in return, dedicated both his second concerto and Night Wind sonata to Rachmaninov.
The concertos mark the principal way-stations of Medtner's life: the first was composed in Russia between 1916 and 1918, the second in France in 1927 and the third received its first performance in London in 1944. There are marked differences between them. The first (an extended sonata form of exposition, nine variations and a coda) is a rugged, energetic work of abrupt and decisive gestures. The culmination of Medtner's creative output so far, it is one of his most compelling and technically complex compositions. The emotional spectrum, from overwhelming tragedy to mournful beauty, is vast, and the ending suitably bittersweet.
The second concerto follows a conventional three movement pattern. If Rachmaninoff's third concerto is his most Medtner-like, Medtner's second feels most like Rachmaninoff. It taps into the same primeval power, creating a storm from the opening bars of the explosive first movement. Full of kinetic energy, the work sings heroically throughout. It physically excites, with rhythms that move the body. The thematic unity, while less concentrated than in the first concerto, remains tight thanks to the recycling of themes from previous movements in the final one. Many relate to one another, as they do in Beethoven's concertos.
Structurally, the third concerto follows the most unusual plan of the three. Subtitled 'Ballade', it's a subdued, wistful and nostalgic work, which takes time to develop. Medtner connects two huge movements with an interlude lasting about a minute-and-a-half. He explores and develops the relationship between three themes, with an abundance of invention. One of the variants becomes perhaps his most beautiful melody, very much like the lyrical moments of Rachmaninoff's second concerto. He makes it almost an emotional fulcrum, the main point of contrast. Its final apotheosis, in conjunction with the opening theme, lifts the piece to a grand conclusion.
European Mind, Russian Soul
Some of Medtner's compositions have a more direct appeal than others, and the sonatas are arguably his most successful contribution to the concert repertoire (though as with Alkan, this is a relatively recent phenomenon.) They range from monumental and epic (the early Op. 5 F minor, the Op. 22 G minor and the Op. 25 E minor, Night Wind, which Sorabji called "the greatest piano sonata of modern times.") to lyrically expansive (the Op. 53 No. 1 B flat minor, Sonata Romantica, and the Op. 56 Sonata-Idylle) and tempestuous (the Op. 30 A minor, which Medtner's friends called the 'War Sonata', and the Op. 53 No. 2 F minor, Sonata Minacciosa).
The sonatas display all the essential hallmarks of Medtner's style, including elaborate passagework, polyrhythms and dense chordal writing. Two of the most remarkable are hidden inside three collections of Vergessene Weisen (Forgotten Melodies), which are amongst his most popular works: the beautiful (and now most often performed) Sonata-Reminiscenza, and the demonic Sonata Tragica. In another piece from Vergessene Weisen, Primavera, he delves into whole-tone scales reminiscent of a DebussyArabesque. The vernal imagery is capped off with a lovely coda, evocative of Liszt's Au Bord d'une Source(Beside a Spring).
Medtner's large body of Skazki (Fairy Tales, or Folk Tales as he preferred to call them) span the better part of his composing career. They contain some of his most original writing, and are as characteristic of his style as the sonatas. By no means miniatures, some reach rare heights of passion and virtuosity, and within his oeuvre they occupy a similar position to Grieg's Lyric Pieces or Chopin's Mazurkas. Telling folk tales is a long-standing Russian tradition, which in Medtner's case led to some of his most appealing works. They tell of a magical, half-lit world inhabited by princes and princesses, gnomes, elves, soldiers and wondrous animals.
His compositions are notoriously difficult to play, which is no doubt one of the reasons they have not been more widely performed. One of the hallmarks of Medtner's style is an unassuming complexity: the performer is challenged to render his music clearly, and the listener to understand it. The strong sense of tonal direction arises from his insistence on the structural primacy of harmony: "Form is harmony. Every musician who wants to penetrate into the mystery of musical construction will find himself standing before the closed door of any construction if he does not have the necessary key: the fundamental sense of harmony."
The only current study to have been devoted to Medtner is Barrie Martyn's impressive Nicolas Medtner (Scolar Press, 1995). You may also enjoy Chris Crocker's excellent website, which includes a complete catalogue of the composer's works, a detailed discography (including LPs and 78s) and information about forthcoming performances and recordings. The site also has recordings of Medtner playing, which are not currently commercially available.
