Rachmaninoff: The Isle of the Dead

How do you orchestrate a painting? How do you take the detail and
the visual imagery of a painting and translate that into
something that is so vivid that even if you’ve never seen the
painting before in your life, you can picture it as clearly as if
it was right in front of you? Most people look at a painting for
no longer than a minute or two at a museum, so how do you sustain
that image over nearly 20 minutes of music? Well, to answer all
of these questions, all you need to do is look at Rachmaninoff’s
brilliant tone poem, The Isle of the Dead, which he wrote in
1908.  In 1907 Rachmaninoff saw a black and white
reproduction of a painting by the Swiss artist Arnold Bocklin
entitled The Isle fo the Dead. This painting had cause a storm of
interest all across Europe. Vladimir Nabokov said that prints of
the painting were found in every home of Berlin, Sigmund Freud
owned a copy, as did Lenin. Bocklin painted 5 different version
of the piece, but they all had the same theme - a desolate
haunting image of a large rocky island, with a solitary boat with
a coffin approaching it. It is said that the painting portrays
the mythological river Styx, and even reproduced on the computer,
it is a striking image. From that encounter, Rachmaninoff sat
down and created one of his most underrated and enduring
compositions, the masterful Isle of the Dead, which features a
gigantic orchestra that very rarely shows off its full power, a
rhythmic character that is both inevitable and unstable, and an
unsettling and haunting theme that followed Rachmaninoff
throughout his life, the Dies Irae. We’re going to talk all about
this brooding and mysterious piece on this Patreon sponsored
episode this week - join us!