Sergei Rachmaninov

The text for this song, written by the great Alexander Pushkin in 1828, has also been set by many other composers including Yury Arnolda, Balakirev, Alexande Goedicke, Glinka, Ippolitov-Ivanov, Artur Lourié, Anatol Lyadov, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Nikolai Titov.

Composed when Rachmaninov was 19, this song generates a compelling, gripping mood through its use of a folk melody-like line, and marvelous harmonic tensions created through the meshing of modal chords with stepwise chromatic inner voices and steadily pulsing pedal points. This approach is present at the beginning in the extended piano introduction and its brooding Russian soul.

A simple harp-like arpeggiation on an A minor chord invites the vocal declaration of the first line in recitative style. "Do not sing, my beauty, your sad Georgian songs to me."

The piano begins its pulsing chords again under the passionately melismatic vocal line "they remind me of that other life on a distant shore." The rich chromatic harmonies over the insistent pedal point on a C note express a swell of deep interior emotion felt but by the singer but not especially present in the simple modal melody (C major, C augmented, A minor/C, C sharp diminished seventh/C , D major/C, D diminished/C, C major).

Two beautiful piano measures, built around a folk scale (descending: E, D, B flat, A, G sharp, F, E), serve as a simple interlude. The voice enters softly but immediately builds to impassioned declarations: " Alas, I am reminded by your cruel melodies of the steppe, the night, the countenance of a poor, distant maiden lit by the moon!"

The second interlude, built upon the unusual descending folk scale transposed down a perfect fifth, again grows out of the agitation of the previous passage. The singer is still not calmed, however, and the next line builds to a fortissimo apex on a high sustained A underscored with concerto-like sweeping scales and reiterated rising chromatic figures in the piano: "When you appear, I forget that cherished and fateful apparition, but then you sing, and I picture that image anew."

A third brief two-measure interlude introduces a new melodic figure in the bass built on a Phrygian mode similar to the folk scale. The simple rolled A minor chord of the first verse evokes its recapitulation. Then a very beautiful effect is achieved when the piano introduction is combined with simple sustained notes in the vocal melody line.

An extended eight-measure coda provides a symmetrical complement to the piano introduction, and also mixes loving and brooding emotions in a satisfying closing.