Classical Music | Soprano

Recorded on 04/15/2009, uploaded on 05/25/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Rachmaninoff was still in his formative years as a composer when he composed his 12 Songs, op. 14. It was his third collection of songs. Throughout the set, one can observe the composer beginning to conquer the idiom of voice and piano, but must still overlook some passages that tend to strike the listener as ardent youthfulness than the tempered expression of a mature artist. Eleven of the twelve songs were composed in 1896, while Rachmaninoff was also at work on his First Symphony. However, the first song, “I wait for thee,” was composed two years earlier. Based on a text by Maria Davidova, this song intones the thoughts of a young woman anxiously awaiting her lover. Night has fallen in the poem’s scene, the rest of the world sleeps, but the narrator waits “tormented and in love,” impatiently counting each moment until he arrives. Rachmaninoff’s setting begins with an impassioned upward leap of a minor sixth, a gesture that certainly captures the anxiety of the impatient lover. The vocal melody moves with a certain stiffness, as if attempting to contain and control an anxiety that could very easily overtake it. Subverting this determination, however, is the syncopated chords of the piano accompaniment. Ultimately, the lover’s passion and anxiety conquers the strength of her will as the piano accompaniment becomes a rushing torrent of arpeggios at the beginning of the third stanza, building incessantly to her last declaration of “I wait for thee!” In parallel to the lover’s emotional state, Rachmaninoff, too, by this point seems overtaken by his own passion for Davidova’s text, allowing the piano to conclude the song with a powerful coda that rather tramples over the more sensitive and subtle emotions that can be felt in the poem’s final words.       Joseph DuBose

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.