Off Tonic Culmination in Rachmaninoffs Rhapsody On A Theme of Paganini

DOI: 10.1111/musa.
12035
BLAIR JOHNSTON
OFF-TONIC CULMINATION IN RACHMANINOFF’S RHAPSODY ON A

THEME OF PAGANINI
The bases of Rachmaninoff’s emotional gamut are intonations of a tranquil and

lucid plaintiveness, on the one hand, and intonations of sedition and protest, on
the other ... as of a call, a summoning, an awakening ... a rushing into distance
toward the unknown, an impulse to move onward, to break loose and dart away
from quiescent life. (Boris Asafiev, 1930)1
Setting Up ‘the Point’

The climactic twenty-second variation in Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme
of Paganini, Op. 43 (1934), is unlike any variation that comes before it in the
work: here, for the first time, the binary plan of Paganini’s theme is abandoned,
as though the accumulated force of musical ideas generated in the previous
753 bars demands extensive treatment on Rachmaninoff’s terms rather than
Paganini’s. Variation XXII is a 66-bar crescendo – more than three times as long
as the preceding variation – with five distinct stages (Ex. 1) covering a wide
expressive and topical range: (1) a march (bars 754–775) on the headmotive
from Paganini’s theme; (2) chromatic treatment of the ‘Dies irae’ (776–786),
which is something of an alternate theme throughout the work; (3) a cantabile
passage (786–799) that suggests emergence into the major mode; (4) a textural
blossoming (799–810) where imitative treatment of the Paganini headmotive is
enveloped by piano arpeggios and bell-like chords in the harp; and (5) arrival
around bar 811, leading to a bravura cadenza in bar 819. In bars 811–819 the
full instrumental forces play together for the first time – the piano, all the strings
and every wind instrument, along with harp and percussion, which
Rachmaninoff has used sparingly up to this point.2 And the cadenza on the
dominant, long an apex in works for solo instrument and orchestra, is set up with
all the rhetorical power of a bona fide gateway to closure. This would seem to be
the pinnacle of the piece, to be followed by the promised major-mode tonic and
all that it has to offer.
But everything in Variation XXII after bar 786 is a semitone too low. It is the
key of A major that the second half of the variation seems to promise, not the
major mode of the Rhapsody’s global tonic, A.3 The juxtaposition of keys is plain.
There are really only two bass notes in the variation, a 32-bar pedal point on A
and a 34-bar pedal point on E, and the latter arrives in bar 786 with a sforzando
and a cymbal crash. Signals of arrival and signals of fresh departure are thus
Music Analysis, 33/iii (2014) 291

© 2014 The Author.
Music Analysis © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
292 BLAIR JOHNSTON
Ex. 1 Outline of Rachmaninoff, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43 (1934),

Variation XXII into Variation XXIII
mixed in the variation. Rachmaninoff has combined aspects of several different

generic-formal categories. The scope of the episode suggests the centuries-old
convention of composing a longer, freer variation to bring a set to its end. The
textural blossoming and projected major mode suggest the imminent arrival of
what James Hepokoski has called a telos – a ‘decisive climax or final goal’ that
reveals ‘a higher or fuller condition’ (1993, p. 26) where, as Warren Darcy
describes it, the ‘achievements’ of the work ‘converge and resonate sympatheti-
cally’ (1997, p. 277).4 At the same time, the change of local key suggests the
possibility of a nascent ‘breakthrough’ and maybe even the emergence of a
directional tonal plan.5
Fusion of the seemingly inevitable (anticipated telos) and the apparently
unexpected (potential breakthrough) is a remarkable compositional accomplish-
ment. Equally remarkable is that both turn out, as the Rhapsody continues, to be
false. Variation XXII does not usher in closure; two substantial variations follow.
A stable telos does not follow, and there is no redemptive apotheosis of compa-
rable magnitude later in the work.6 The tonal turn in Variation XXII seems not
so much an intrusive breakthrough as the awakening of an impulse to break away
into some uncharted new territory – to escape ‘quiescent life’, as Boris Asafiev
puts it – at this unlikely point in the work, and the impulse is not consummated
in the next variation. There is no new thematic material. A major never appears,
and a pianissimo feint into A minor is cut short when Paganini’s theme
reappears, fortissimo, in A minor (bar 832). From the hermeneutic standpoint of
the charged terms telos and breakthrough, then, the affair in Variation XXII is a
total failure.7 From a dramatic standpoint, it is perhaps even a bit tragic.8
If I were to leave my reading at that, however, something important would be
missing. The negative semantics and generic-formal categories in the foregoing
sketch of the Rhapsody’s main climax have been essential in setting up the longer
treatment to follow, and they inform my dialogic, inter-opus hearing of the piece
in rich ways.9 The passage is surely ‘deformational’: to borrow from Monahan,
© 2014 The Author. Music Analysis, 33/iii (2014)

Music Analysis © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
OFF-TONIC CULMINATION IN RACHMANINOFF’S RHAPSODY 293
it is ‘deliberately and meaningfully non-normative’ (2011, p. 41). But ‘failure’

puts the analytical focus squarely on what happens after Variation XXII (or
rather, what fails to happen after it), and this affords little room for my sense that
the variation, however formally byzantine and tonally unclosed, is itself the point
at which essential intra-opus premises behind Rachmaninoff’s post-Romantic
treatment of Paganini’s theme – premises quite independent of the semantics
and categories above – come together to find especially intense, positive expres-
sion. The passage is not just a promise unfulfilled or an omen of futility. In my
experience of the work, it is itself the main rhetorical-structural moment, accom-
panied after bar 799 by a powerful sense of release that resists description in
tonal-analytical or generic-formal terms. The climactic area is the kind of
moment in excelsis that Rachmaninoff himself would have called a ‘culminating
point’, a concept with its own structural and expressive entailments.
The present essay uses Rachmaninoff’s concept of the culminating point to
complement the preliminary reading offered above with one that is attuned to
Rachmaninoff’s stated aesthetic outlook. In the first part of the essay, I examine
his concept in relation to familiar music-theoretic perspectives on goal orienta-
tion and structural coherence. Drawing on metaphors used by Rachmaninoff
himself and on recent narrative theories, I then outline a framework for under-
standing a culminating point as a moment when contextually determined struc-
tural features map in striking ways onto physically oriented ‘image schemas’. I
demonstrate the framework in brief analyses of four Rachmaninoff works.
Finally I return to the Rhapsody, reframing the observations made here at the
outset to show how the image schemas involved at the culminating point them-
selves interact – in ways both positive and negative – with the work’s generic-
formal features and large-scale tonal plan.10
Locating the Point

Rachmaninoff’s taciturnity was well-known during his lifetime, and detailed
technical discussion of music was particularly anathema to him. But he did
occasionally make comments of a broader nature from which music theorists can
gather a grain or two. Most suggestive in this vein is his notion of a composition’s
‘culminating point’, which he himself never systematically developed and which
has hitherto received little attention in the literature on the composer, but which
can provide traction for analysing and interpreting his works. The pianist Mari-
etta Shaginyan, a friend of Rachmaninoff’s in the 1910s, recalled this concept as
follows:
[H]e explained that each piece he plays is shaped around its culminating point:
the whole mass of sounds must be so measured, the depth and power of each
sound must be given with such purity and gradation that this peak point is
achieved with an appearance of the greatest naturalness, though actually its
accomplishment is the highest art. This moment must arrive with the sound and
sparkle of a ribbon snapped at the end of a race – it must seem a liberation from
Music Analysis, 33/iii (2014) © 2014 The Author.

294 BLAIR JOHNSTON
the last material obstacle, the last barrier between truth and its expression. The
composition itself determines this culmination; the point may come at its end or
in the middle, it may be loud or soft, yet the musician must always be able to
approach it with sure calculation, absolute exactitude, for if it slips by the whole
structure crumbles, the work goes soft and fuzzy, and cannot convey to the
listener what must be conveyed.11
A performer’s words, to be sure, and primarily about performance; but some-

thing of a claim about musical structure is embedded in them. It is,
Rachmaninoff suggests, ‘the composition itself’ that determines the culminating
point around which the rest of the work is orientated. The point is an expressive
peak, but it is also somehow crucial to a work’s overall coherence. Rachmaninoff
thus combines a concern for the integrity of the whole with a keen interest in the
impact of the rhetorical moment. He means his words to apply to all music, or
at least to all the music he performed; but his own works are perhaps the best
exemplars, focused as they are on overpoweringly expressive moments to a
degree unusual even in an era of climax-centric music.12
Rachmaninoff characteristically leaves most of the details unclear. The loca-
tion and role of the point will vary (actual climax? denouement? epilogue?), its
dynamic level will vary, its affective state will vary (it will seem to provide access
to some truth, but truth has many faces), its length is uncertain and its relation-
ships to other aspects of musical form are not addressed. Rachmaninoff’s idea is
as much poetry as theory – and poetry that comes to us second hand, no less. But
even allowing for a certain licence on Shaginyan’s part, the key words and
concepts are sufficiently clear to contextualise them in the theoretical landscape.
Culminating point and Hepokoski’s telos are similarly inclined, and there is
something of Robert Hatten’s ‘crux’ here, too.13 But Rachmaninoff’s view is
partly rooted in nineteenth-century organicist thinking, and comparison with
more familiar organicist music theories developed by other thinkers from his
generation is a good first step. His care for the binding of each sound to the
complete structure resembles Schoenberg’s Grundgestalt.14 And his description
features collapsible dichotomies of naturalness and human art, of a work’s
holistic structure and the calculated, atomistic mechanics behind it, of material
barriers and some truth beyond them, all of which recall nineteenth-century
binary oppositions that have been discussed at length in writings about the
theories of Heinrich Schenker.15 For Rachmaninoff, as for Schenker,
Schoenberg and many later analysts, the structural coherence of a (tonal) com-
position is focused on a crucial moment that involves some kind of release: it is
an apparently liberating culminating point. In Schenkerian analysis, it is ulti-
mately closure of the Ursatz, whose relationship to tension Felix Salzer describes
as follows: ‘Thus the structural outline or framework represents the fundamental
motion to the goal; it shows the direct, the shortest way to the goal. The whole
interest and tension of the piece consists in the expansions, modifications,
detours and elaborations of this basic direction, and these we call prolongations’
(1952, p. 14). For Schoenberg, as Severine Neff (1993) and Patricia Carpenter

(1983) have discussed, the goal is the solution to a ‘tonal problem’ or restoration
of ‘balance’ at the end of a work.16 Similar thinking informs hermeneutically
oriented analyses that proceed along Hepokoski’s generic-formal lines. Darcy’s
account of Bruckner is particularly vivid: ‘It [is] clear why ... the final moments
of a Bruckner symphony create such an overwhelming sense of ecstatic release.
They mark the simultaneous realisation of all those tendencies that have been so
obstinately blocked throughout the work: the resolution to and revelation of the
tonic Klang, the unfurling of the thematic telos, the final rebirth and tonal
stabilisation of the primary theme, the redemption into the major mode’ (1997,
p. 277).
Yet there are clear gaps between Rachmaninoff’s idea and these better-
developed theories, and on continued examination it emerges that
Rachmaninoff’s crucial event is different in fundamental ways from Schenker’s
or Schoenberg’s. A sameness or parallelism of apparently different musical
structures is one essential condition for integration in both Schoenberg’s and
Schenker’s theories. Indeed, this view had wide appeal during the era; consider
Mahler’s claim that ‘a whole piece should be developed from a single motif, a
single theme, which contains the germ of all that is to follow’.17 Rachmaninoff,
by contrast, makes no comment here about the technical conditions for integra-
tion. Perhaps he took these conditions – including a need for some underlying
sameness – as self-evident, or perhaps he considered the details of musical
integration so ineffable that they defied verbal expression. But it is telling that his
description involves the so-called secondary parameters (e.g. dynamics, register,
timbre, texture) without making a single direct claim about primary ones.18 His
emphasis on the role played by the quality of sound itself (which is, more than
primary parameters, jointly the responsibility of composer and performer) recalls
Ernst Kurth’s work on Bruckner – in which ‘waves’ of musical force are tied as
much to secondary parameters as to primary ones – more than it does the
work of Schenker or Schoenberg.19 This says something about the stylistic
context in which Rachmaninoff’s musical sensibilities developed, and it antici-
pates observations made by Leonard Meyer and Kofi Agawu about the structural
capacities of secondary parameters in music composed during and after the
Romantic era.20
Shaginyan’s recounting of Rachmaninoff’s description suggests a flexible rela-
tionship between the point and large-scale tonal organisation in particular. In
Schenkerian analysis, there is no expectation that completion of the Ursatz will
necessarily correspond to a moment of great rhetorical emphasis on the musical
surface; rather, it is a very specific kind of tonal event: structural closure in the
home key. From a Schoenbergian view, restoration of balance or solution of a
problem will similarly involve some kind of clarification in relation to a
monotonal tonic at the end of a work, and this need not be a rhetorically
emphasised moment.21 Rachmaninoff’s event differs from these in two respects.
First, the location of the point will vary. Unlike closure or a tonal solution
(or, for that matter, a telos or a revelatory final Klang), culmination need not

296 BLAIR JOHNSTON
occur at or very near the end of a work. However, if we take Rachmaninoff

seriously, it will be an area of singular rhetorical emphasis in the work. In fact,
on at least one occasion, after what he considered an unsatisfactory perfor-
mance, Rachmaninoff was despondent over having ‘missed the point’ – and he
expected listeners to be well aware it.22 It is to this area in the work that the
culmination-minded analyst’s attention may usefully be first directed, proceed-
ing from it centrifugally, as it were, without any initial assumption that what
happens at the end necessarily expresses in an obvious way the procedures that
generated the point. Whatever is clarified, whatever potential comes to fruition
at a Rachmaninoffian culminating point, it need not be about resolution in the
usual music-theoretic sense, and analytical approaches that are overly con-
cerned with the attainment of archetypal tonal goals (and, with them, generic-
formal goals) will not always be suited to the exegesis of a culminating point.23
This is perhaps partly a matter of historical position. Scott Burnham (1995)
has argued that Schenker’s Ursatz is ultimately rooted in Beethoven’s
achievement-oriented heroic style.24 In analysing the music of Elgar, J. P. E.
Harper-Scott takes a ‘deliberately sceptical view of single-movement,
Beethovenian-Schenkerian goal-orientation’ (2005a, p. 351) and suggests that
an unmodified Schenkerian perspective will not necessarily be appropriate for
later tonal repertoires: ‘The Ursatz will always be there in the background, as
the guiding principle of the tonal language, but we cannot disregard its indebt-
edness to the Beethovenian heroic style, and its insufficiency for analysis of
much music of later periods’. Indeed, ‘a closed Ursatz is no longer important.
What is important is that the possibility of ending is available as an option to
be explored and worked with’ (p. 378).
The second difference is related to the first: the culminating point need not
occur in or on the home tonic. Following Rachmaninoff’s remarks, there are
many situations in which the point is rather likely to occur off-tonic. It may be
in the middle of a work; it may involve a turning point or breakthrough; it may
represent, to draw again from Asafiev, some powerful impulse to break away
and rush into the unknown; it may be an unexpected flourishing of second-
theme material in a different key late in a work.25 Although in a monotonal
work – and all of Rachmaninoff’s works are in some sense monotonal26 – such
an off-tonic event will somehow fold into a global tonic, the network of rela-
tionships defined around the point may suggest technical procedures and ana-
lytical descriptions quite different from those involved in the composing-out of
a background tonal plan or in a generic-formal plan focused on ‘successful’
tonic closure.
For all the apparent universalism in his claim, there is something empiricist
about Rachmaninoff’s idea. The compositional particulars and stylistic attributes
of a work uniquely determine where the culmination point is located and how it
is reached in a given work; its relationships to other moments in the work and to
the whole are not predetermined in any obvious theoretical way. The very idea
of a culminating point is rooted in nineteenth-century aesthetics, but

Rachmaninoff was ultimately a twentieth-century musician who performed

works from many historical periods, and it is not surprising that he affords the
point a certain freedom of behaviour. Tonal backgrounds and formal categories
are surely essential for hearing a culminating point, and this is true when dealing
with Rachmaninoff’s own music, too. He was a tonal composer, and was related
to the ‘German stem’ at a far less acute angle than was, say, Stravinsky.27 But he
was also, as Asafiev noted, deeply affected by the ‘pathos’ of pre-revolutionary
Russia, and when dealing with Rachmaninoff’s later music especially, in which
commentators have suggested influences from Orthodox chant to Prokofiev to
jazz, there is a danger of assuming too much at the outset about the precise ways
in which a given work’s actual structure interacts with the body of norms that
have been described in the music-theoretic literature.28 The Rhapsody, after all,
is a work composed in Switzerland in 1934 by an aging Russian post-Romantic
who had been living in America for sixteen years – a work composed, no less,
with copies of two Rimsky-Korsakov operas at hand and on a theme written by
an Italian composer some 125 years earlier.29
Theorising about the Point

Just what sort of ‘structure’ does Rachmaninoff really mean, and how does the
point relate to it? And if culmination is not necessarily tied directly to closure, to
the Ur-tension of tonality, or to generic-formal expectations, just what is released
at the culminating point? What sort of barrier is seemingly broken or elevated
state attained? And how can this be modelled for analysis?
The last sentence of Shaginyan’s recounting locates the culminating point at
a three-way crossroads of musical responsibilities: (1) if the peak moment is
missed (by the performer), (2) the music’s structure collapses (3) and the music
will not express (to the listener) what it is intended to express. Rachmaninoff
evidently does not mean a ‘structure’ exclusively of the performance itself or a
‘structure’ exclusively of expressive content, but something that fuses together
the quasi-physical structure qua structure with which music theory has tradi-
tionally been most occupied – the primary language of pitch and rhythmic
organisation and of form – and the traditionally secondary matter of rhetorical-
expressive shape. The culminating point in a sense mediates structural content
and rhetorical-expressive content.30 It is for Rachmaninoff a moment of espe-
cially direct contact between the two.
This perhaps calls for something like the narrative-analytical approach devel-
oped by Michael Klein (2004) in his work on Chopin’s ballades, where tonal and
formal features – he calls them ‘structural’ – and topical features combine in a
work’s story-like evocation of different ‘expressive states’ and temporalities.31
(There is certainly a similarity between Rachmaninoff’s culminating point and
passages that Klein [pp. 31–35 and n. 37], following Edward Cone, calls ‘apoth-
eosis’ in the ballades, such that I think apotheosis is a type of culminating point.)
But at a Rachmaninoffian culminating point, what is the nature of the apparent

298 BLAIR JOHNSTON
liberation or release? The language of Shaginyan’s recounting is largely one of

physical metaphors (mass, power, barriers, crumbling), suggesting concepts
from a more physically oriented sort of narrative music theory such as Candace
Brower’s cognitive theory of musical meaning (2000). Brower’s project deals
with mappings between ‘intra-opus patterns’ (essentially, what I have referred to
as contextually determined rhetorical-structural features), inter-opus ‘musical
schemas’ (including generic-formal expectations, stylistically preferred melodic
and harmonic structures and other patterns abstracted from musical convention)
and ‘image schemas’ that are grounded in real-world bodily experience (pp.
324–6). ‘Cross-domain’ mappings between musical patterns and image schemas
generate ‘the music-metaphorical concepts of musical space, musical time, musical
force, and musical motion’ (p. 327; emphasis Brower’s), allowing analysis and
narrative interpretation.32 Her theory as a whole is calibrated for pre-twentieth-
century tonality, and although she speculates on possible applications to later
music (pp. 370–1), it is not really set up for the kind of extended tonal (and
sometimes intensely dissonant) music written by composers of Rachmaninoff’s
generation. However, the core image schemas in her theory are related in clear
ways to the language used in Rachmaninoff’s description of the culminating
point. They are:
• container, associated most strongly with metaphors involving space (inside/

outside, boundaries, limits, etc.);
• cycle, associated most strongly with metaphors involving time and waves;
• balance/centre-periphery/verticality, associated most strongly with metaphors
involving force (stability, instability, gravity, magnetism, attraction, etc.);33
and
• source-path-goal, associated most strongly with metaphors of motion and
direction.
These schemas and metaphors are implicit in a great deal of music theory, and
they are part of the everyday language we use when we talk about music.34 Steve
Larson puts conceptual metaphor at the very heart of musical meaning:
The musical forces, operating on patterns of pitches and patterns of durations,

allow us to ‘tell a story’ about how those patterns add up to musical meanings ... .
[W]e speak of ‘musical meaning’ because, at some level and in some ways, we
map musical patterns onto the patterns of our lives – and when, as so often
happens, those life patterns are patterns of physical motion, then we import our
knowledge of physical forces into the musical meanings that our embodied minds
create. (2012, p. 189)35
Music theory relies in one way or another on all of the above schemas. But some
of the challenge in finding a theoretical perspective adequate to Rachmaninoff’s
open-ended culminating point is due to an understandable tendency in a great
deal of music analysis to rely more heavily on the source-path-goal schema than

on other schemas when considering how a single location in a work may be

related to the whole. (This has been especially the case when dealing with
monumental nineteenth- and twentieth-century works composed in what Carl
Dahlhaus calls the ‘sublime style’ [(1980) 1989, p. 336], which can indeed often
seem to be largely about achieving something mighty. The word telos, after all,
comes from the Greek word for ‘goal’.36) Consider again, for example, Salzer’s
words, quoted earlier in the article: ‘Thus the structural outline or framework
represents the fundamental motion to the goal: it shows the most direct, the
shortest way to the goal. The whole interest and tension of the piece consists in
the expansions, modifications, detours and elaborations of this basic direction,
and these we call prolongations’. Schenker himself makes it clear that music’s
primary concern is both the goal ‘and the course to the goal’ (1979, p. 5). Taking
these statements at face value, any point on the path other than Ursatz closure
can be only a pretender goal, similar in kind to the real goal but below it in
hierarchical significance; any tension it may release will be only a shadow of the
release that happens upon true closure, and it may in fact increase tension on
another level.37 To be sure, there are many musical situations in which such an
interpretation is eminently sensible; the peak point might well line up perfectly
with the true fundamental goal, reinforcing and confirming its accomplishment.
As Larson makes plain, the experienced listener expects ‘completions’, not mere
‘continuations’ (2012, p. 110). A culminating point will always interact in some
way with one or more source-path-goal schemas (and the point is on its own
terms a kind of arrival).
However, this does not mean that understanding the structural changes at and
around a point should be restricted to source-path-goal schemas, nor does it
mean that such a schema implicated in a particular point’s arrival need be
ordained by generic-formal norms or tonal plans.38 When other schemas are
metaphorically involved in the analytical fiction, there are many different ways in
which a rhetorically marked location in a work might attain great significance
and, in so doing, seem to release a different kind of tension, to break through a
different kind of barrier, or to lock into a satisfying new position. The boundaries
of a container might be overcome in a way that opens up a new area, as in
Asafiev’s breaking loose or away (Ex. 2a). Or, as in a ‘breakthrough’, some
element from the outside might intrude upon elements inside the container,
bringing with it new structural features that expand the realm of possibilities
(Ex. 2b). In a revelatory moment, the relationship between two elements might
be reversed, altering the apparent magnetism of elements and settling into a new,
hierarchy-altering centre-periphery arrangement (Ex. 2c). A cycle might come to
fruition and start to ‘groove’ as elements are brought together (Ex. 2d); or it
might be broken, releasing its energy to a new pattern or purpose (Ex. 2e). The
music might yield to some sustained metaphorical pressure and find a new
balance point or a new centre (Ex. 2f); or some initially peripheral musical
element might be developed to such a degree that it shifts the apparent centre of
gravity (Ex. 2g).

300 BLAIR JOHNSTON
Ex. 2 ‘Extraordinary’ behaviour in relation to image schemas: (a) Breaking loose/

away; (b) Breakthrough/intrusion; (c) Relationship between elements reversed, alter-
ing apparent magnetism and hierarchy (centre-periphery); (d) Cycle comes to
fruition; (e) Cycle broken; (f) Rebalancing; (g) Shift of gravity
(a) (b)
‘foreign’ container
barrier/wall broken q
barrier/wall broken
z
z q
old boundary
old boundary
enlarged new boundary enlarged new boundary
(c)
j (j unstable) k
(k unstable) j
x
(d)
(e)
(f) (g) development/enlargement
(pressure)
w
w
(old balance)
new balance (old centre of gravity) new centre of gravity

These hypothetical scenarios and many others can be imagined at a culmi-

nating point, and they might interact in interesting, potentially incongruent ways
with the source-path-goal plots suggested by familiar tonal and generic-formal
patterns. Some of the scenarios hypothesised above are similar to ones that
Brower describes (pp. 352–6) when she considers musical narrative and plot
structures in general. What I want to suggest here, however, is considerably more
limited: a way to use concepts from Brower’s theory to aid the analysis and
interpretation of special moments that, following Rachmaninoff, are of singular
rhetorical-structural significance in a work. Such a moment might in its own
way suggest a metaphorical release so powerful that it seems to dwarf by
comparison the basic tonal event at the end of the work, even if it is, in the end,
subordinate to that event on the highest level of monotonal organisation. This is,
I think, a matter as much of style as of theory in that it reflects the tendency for
musical works from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to coalesce
around what Dahlhaus called ‘abstract’, ‘structural’ treatment of intra-opus
materials as much as inter-opus patterns ([1980] 1989, p. 368).39 Moments of
prescribed tonal closure sometimes seem less expressively salient than the
accomplishments suggested by a work’s contextual processes in the course of its
Empfindunsgang.40
With these observations in mind, then, I outline an analytical framework that
rests on three postulates, tailored to suit Rachmaninoff’s own music but ulti-
mately perhaps adaptable for other purposes:
Postulate 1. A culminating point involves change. More specifically, it
involves a change of rhetorical-structural features, which suggests a correspond-
ing change in how contextually determined, intra-opus musical patterns map
onto inter-opus patterns. (That is to say, a change is understood in relation to
tonal patterns, formal expectations, etc. set up in the work and in relation to
patterns and expectations associated with familiar musical schemas.) This
postulate is basic. It does little more than position the culminating point in
relation to the kind of intra-domain mapping that happens all the time in music
analysis.
Postulate 2. A culminating point may be understood as a dramatically empha-
sised area where intra-opus rhetorical-structural features map in especially rich
ways (within the context of the work, potentially ‘extraordinary’ ways) to one or
more of the image schemas, each of which suggests in its own metaphorical way
potential releases, barriers, liberations, and so on.
Postulate 3. The change at a culminating point may be construed as suggesting
a powerful change of state involving one or more core image schemas, which can
be interpreted as a change of expressive condition.41 It might reaffirm or restore
some schema’s status in relation to established structural elements (affording
interpretative claims such as resolution and synthesis). Or it might substantially
alter the ways in which given structural elements relate to an established schema
(revealing and releasing unexpected potential, perhaps by way of reversal or in
response to some metaphorical pressure). More radically, it might represent the

302 BLAIR JOHNSTON
abandonment of one structural-schematic situation in favour of a musical

context that evokes a very different situation (reconceptualising or recombining
elements to substantially new purpose, perhaps transcendently). A culminating
point can thus be congruent with large-scale, inter-opus tonal and/or generic-
formal goals (its release corresponding to one of theirs), or it can be incongruent
with them (its release not corresponding to theirs, as in the passage sketched in
the preface).
Postulates 2 and 3 provide the scaffolding for most of what follows in this
essay. They are, like Shaginyan’s account of the point itself, as much a stimu-
lus for interpretation as a theory. What they do is embrace the power of a
single moment to affect profoundly the ways in which the music seems to
relate to the schemas, using Rachmaninoff’s concept as a means of filtering
what is potentially an overwhelmingly large set of schematic and structural
variables. The framework outlined here does not replace the analytical and
interpretive methods that have been developed by Hepokoski and others for
describing the dialogic implications of structural features in relation to generic-
formal patterns in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music. Rather,
it supplements that kind of analysis by affording contextually determined fea-
tures more opportunity to interact with a variety of schemas and in so doing
to suggest different kinds of tensions and releases and accomplishments. Four
short analytical vignettes will demonstrate the framework before I return to the
Rhapsody.
‘Daisies’, Op. 38 No. 3 (1916)

Ex. 3a gives an overview of the song ‘Daisies’. The off-tonic culminating high
point in bar 18 – almost the exact midpoint of the piece – is marked in several
ways. The vocal part (marked forte) reaches high A, and the piano part (marked
piano) expands to both the lowest and the highest Ds on the keyboard. Starting
in bar 11, the bass changes every one or two bars; bars 18–21 are by contrast
harmonically still. At the pinnacle moment, there is a kind of reversal. At the
beginning of the work (bars 2–3), F major was established by the resolution of a
chromatic chord on D (enharmonically, a minor-minor seventh chord).42 This
same harmonic move (labelled k) is used again in bars 23–24 to regain F major
as the culminating point subsides, proceeding the second time around to
cadence in bar 28. As clarified in Ex. 3b, at the peak moment, the ‘polarity’ of
k is reversed (k′): a seventh chord on F resolves to a triad on D (the flat
submediant – to borrow from McClary, the ‘never-never land’ of nineteenth-
century music43). Despite obvious superficial differences between the opening
moment and the pinnacle, there are beautiful symmetries. Seventh chord
resolves to triad; D resolves to F, and then F to D. Each situation is marked by
colourful use of 6̂ (D in relation to F and A, enharmonically B, in relation to
D) and 4̂ (B in relation to F at the beginning and G in relation to D in bars
18–21). And the music in bars 3–12 features conspicuous use of the pitch class

Ex. 3a Analysis of Rachmaninoff, ‘Daisies’, Op. 38 No. 3
Ex. 3b Reversal of k in relation to centre-periphery schema and magnetism metaphor
E, setting up well in advance the seventh of the culminating F major-minor

seventh chord.
The centre-periphery schema and the metaphor of magnetic attraction offer a
way to construe the change in bars 17–21. As shown in Ex. 3b, the global tonic
F is central at the beginning of the song and D is attracted to it. At the midpoint
of the song, D is greatly enlarged (in length and in harmonic significance),
snapping the system into the new configuration shown in Ex. 3b and inverting
the apparent hierarchy of the tonal situation, as though momentarily freeing F
from its responsibility to be the tonic. By comparison with the four bars of
exquisite D major lucidity at the heart of the song, the cadence in bar 28 – the
song’s moment of tonal closure – is quite ordinary.
Piano Concerto No. 3, Op. 30 (1909), First Movement

In the first movement of the Third Piano Concerto, climax and culmination are
separate. The schema of balance offers a way to understand the events, sup-
plemented by a simple container schema that deals with only three locations in

304 BLAIR JOHNSTON
Ex. 4 Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto No. 3, Op. 30, first movement, culminating
shift of balance/gravity
Ex. 5 Piano Concerto No. 3, first movement, first theme
the work: the beginning, the climax and the culminating point. As shown in
Ex. 4, the first theme features the chromatic pitch class E in the context
(container) of D minor. Ex. 5 is an excerpt from the theme showing the first
appearance of E in bar 12 – a ‘promissory note’, as Cone would have called it
(1982, p. 236). Much later, at the dissonant climax in bar 235, as shown in
Ex. 6, E momentarily supersedes D; but the original balance of D and E is
restored in the cadenza at bar 303, which, initially over the 64 , doubles as the
recapitulation of the first theme and leads – through E in the bass – to D major,
fff. The real culmination is the quiet recapitulation of the second theme (Ex. 7),
in which E achieves the status of a key. This is a stunning moment of private
apotheosis (scored for piano solo) in the context of a work that is generally
extremely symphonic in character. At rehearsal number 19, which follows the
cadenza, E appears conspicuously as a chromatic neighbour to D, which
prompts the flute’s Phrygian transformation of the first theme one bar later.
Gravity impels a seven-bar descent that transfers the theme from the flute to the
horn. As the second theme arrives, the tonal balance between D and E is shifted,
as though releasing the lingering pressure of the climax (see again Ex. 4): D in
the horn is the neighbour of locally stable E, momentarily projecting a world in
which velvety E, not dire D minor, is the tonal container and the centre of

Ex. 6 Piano Concerto No. 3, first movement, central climax
attraction. There is a kind of release as E locks into this hierarchically elevated

state, even if that state is in the end artificial. The change is highlighted when the
orchestra re-enters on the local tonic E two bars before the coda (which also
behaves as a second recapitulation of the main theme). For a bar and a half it is
not at all clear whether D is the neighbour of E or vice versa. In reality, the
movement must close where it began, in D, but the antecedent E event leaves its
mark: E major returns in the finale for an extended episode of some 94 bars
(roughly rehearsal numbers 48–59) and again – briefly but fff – at the high point
in the finale’s coda (rehearsal number 77+4).
‘From the Gospel of St. John’ (1915)

The song ‘From the Gospel of St. John’, sketched in Ex. 8, suggests an inter-
action of cycle and source-path-goal schemas. It has no key signature, but it is
clearly centred on A major even though no root-position A major triad appears.
The pitch class D hints at the Lydian mode in the opening bars and, somewhat
more powerfully, at the end. The vocal part is essentially a large, decorated A
major arpeggio – a kind of tonic ‘frame’ that is on occasion quite dissonant in
relation to the piano part. The tonal progress of the song gets as far as V6 when
a decorated cycle of chords on OCT0,1 nodes, driven by an OCT0,1 scale in the
bass and by entangled diminished seventh chords, intrudes upon the proposed
tonal path.44 (Lydian D in a sense becomes the E of OCT0,1.) The cycle is
metrically regular, quite unlike the stop-and-go music that precedes it, creating
both a rhythmic ‘groove’ and an equal-interval ‘groove’ in the middle (which,

306 BLAIR JOHNSTON
Ex. 7 Piano Concerto No. 3, first movement, cadenza into culminating recapitula-
tion of second theme
however, goes nowhere, despite the descending scales and intense dynamics
inside it). There is no strong resolution of V to I after this (although G does
resolve to A in the vocal part, perhaps harking back to the dominant buried in bar
5). The definitive event – the culminating point – is the abandonment of
octatonic organisation and return to A-centric modal organisation as bar 8 gives
way to bar 9. G ‘breaks’ cyclic OCT0,1 before bar 9, ushering in the return of the
opening, quasi-Lydian material in the highest register (but retaining something
of the rhythmic impulse from the middle portion) and reasserting more than
earning the original source and goal.

Ex. 8a Analysis of Rachmaninoff, ‘From the Gospel of St. John’
Music Analysis, 33/iii (2014)

OFF-TONIC CULMINATION
IN
Ex. 8b Interaction of schemas

RACHMANINOFF’S RHAPSODY
cycle intrudes dissonantly upon source-path-goal
I6 V6 I6
307

© 2014 The Author.
308 BLAIR JOHNSTON
Ex. 9 Analysis of Rachmaninoff, Piano Sonata No. 2, Op. 36, first movement, climax
at recapitulation
Piano Sonata No. 2, Op. 36 (1913; rev. 1931), First Movement

In the previous three examples culmination was a relatively tranquil affair. The
culminating point in the first movement of the Piano Sonata No. 2, Op. 36, is by
contrast explosive. Ex. 9 sketches the recapitulation in the first movement of the
sonata. A three-stage climax at the start of the first theme area wrenches the music
away from the home tonic of B minor almost as soon as it has been found again
and maintains – even amplifies – the tension of development across the formal
boundary. The first and second stages of the climax correspond to events in the
exposition; but the third stage, which jumps to the sharp side, is new. Thus, the
tonal and formal container of the theme is exceeded in one vigorous move. In
Ex. 9 the staves labelled b show the basic harmonic framework; the stave labelled
a isolates three dissonant high-point chords in the three stages of climax. Stage 1
involves a diatonic minor-third relationship (B minor and D major triads); stages
2 and 3, on the other hand, are chromatic. By stage 3, the pitch classes B and D
( 1̂ and 3̂ ), enharmonically translated and emphasised in the highest register, have
become quite unstable. In stage 3 they are attracted to members of the D major
triad (their magnetic polarity has been reversed), and the local resolution to D
major in bar 104 happens only in the lower register, leaving some residual tension.
One way to hear the rest of the recapitulation is as a gradual absorption of 1̂ and

Ex. 10 Piano Sonata No. 2, first movement, excerpts from coda

(a) Bars 124–125
(b) Bars 136–138
3̂ back into the gamut of B minor at decreasing dynamic levels. The second theme
is recapitulated in the submediant, continuing an ascending cycle of major thirds
suggested by the emphasised bass notes (B–D–G). At the beginning of the coda,
as shown in Ex. 10a, chords from the climax are featured in reverse order,
returning the music to its proper tonal orientation. At the very end of the
movement (Ex. 10b) the diatonic chord pair from stage 1 of the climax is played
one last time, emphasising 1̂ and 3̂ on the downbeat of bar 138.45
Getting Back to the Point

The Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini is in some ways an ideal case study for the
culminating point, not only because of its off-tonic climax but because the basic
setup of the piece – a set of variations on a borrowed tune – is in itself
helpful. Special windows are opened when one composer reimagines an earlier
composer’s material, especially when a considerable historical gulf separates
the two.46 Achieving in variations form the kind of part-whole integration
that Rachmaninoff demanded of music is no simple task. Kevin Korsyn outlines
the problem of variations clearly: ‘How can one overcome the sectional divi-
sions of this form? A variation theme generally inscribes an independent circle
of meaning, resembling an autonomous composition with complete melodic

310 BLAIR JOHNSTON
and harmonic closure. Hence variation movements, as they reproduce the struc-
ture of the theme, may disintegrate into sections’ (1991, p. 21). One of
Rachmaninoff’s tasks was to imbue the 25-minute Rhapsody – a work that
approaches a fifth piano concerto in scope – with ‘discursive’, directed qualities
sufficient to compensate its built-in ‘recursive’ (cyclical) qualities: to find some
energising potential in Paganini’s theme, to reimagine that potential according to
the terms of Rachmaninoff’s own musical language and to write it large.47
I will draw upon a range of analytical approaches to describe Rachmaninoff’s
reimagining of Paganini’s theme, including Schoenberg’s and Schenker’s. I take
from Schoenberg’s Grundgestalt the ideas, as Gordon McQuere has put it, ‘[that]
characteristic traits of a work’s material are embedded in its opening statement,
and that hidden relationships between that statement and the rest of the piece
may be identified’ (1992, p. 29). Schenker’s own analysis of Paganini’s theme
serves as a reference. My comments deal largely with pitch structures (motivic
and harmonic) in relation to form and rhetorical design. I will use linear analysis
to make many of my points, and like Schenker I am concerned with relationships
between microscopic musical events and macroscopic design – with how a short
theme in simple binary form is turned into a work of nearly 1,000 bars. But I will
show how Rachmaninoff develops the chromatic potential of the theme along
lines quite foreign to Paganini’s era, describing other kinds of structures (disso-
nant, layered formations and equal-interval structures organised around trans-
formations of material from the theme) using alternative means. And, following
observations made earlier, I will propose no true Ursatz for the work, although
I will deal with large-scale tonal organisation. At the heart of my analysis is a kind
of associative network that connects appearances of those distinctive harmonic
and motivic elements in order to examine them in relation to the schematic-
metaphorical framework outlined above.
Goals, Cycles and Containers at the Point

The Rhapsody features, in addition to 24 numbered variations on the theme, an
introduction and an unnumbered statement of the theme itself, which, interest-
ingly, is presented after the first variation.48 The grouping of variations by key,
meter and tempo is one way in which Rachmaninoff creates a sense of
directedness in the work. As shown at the bottom of Ex. 11, the 24 variations
suggest a four-movement plan: a first movement in A minor; a minuet-scherzo
in D minor, then F major; a slow movement in B minor, then D major; and a
finale in A minor/major – with, however, the internal tonal departure in Variation
XXII. A coda is added to the last variation in each movement, clarifying the
four-movement form.49 The work climaxes twice in its second half: a high point
in the slow movement (around bar 660 in the famous D major Variation XVIII),
and the more substantial climax in the finale that I have already introduced.
As shown in Ex. 12, these features apply a large source-path-goal schema to
what might otherwise have been an unyielding cycle of thematic containers,

Ex. 11 Paganini, Caprice, Op. 1 No. 24, as outline of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody: (a)
Schenker’s analysis of the theme; (b) overview of the Rhapsody
Ex. 12 Cycle, container and source-path-goal schemas in the Rhapsody’s large-scale

form
suggesting several obvious ways in which Variation XXII is special. As explained

earlier, Variation XXII is the first in which the binary-form plan of the theme is
completely abandoned and the formal container of the theme thereby broken.
This prompts a triptych of longer, interconnected variations – a 150-bar utter-
ance that uses elements of the theme but is not constrained by its twelve-bar
blueprint – and it suggests an emergence, at this late point, into the realm of
‘symphonic’ thematic-developmental thinking.50 The headmotive from
Paganini’s theme appears in the finale for the first time in Variation XXII, as
does the ‘Dies irae’; thus, the main thematic materials in the work are resusci-
tated to initiate the triptych, but they are subjected to new treatments. Many

312 BLAIR JOHNSTON
Classical and Romantic variation sets become more obviously developmental as

they approach their ends; but the opening up in the Rhapsody’s Variations
XXII–XXIV surpasses that generic-formal convention. The wide range of expres-
sive states and modes in Variation XXII breaks out of the theme’s topical and
affective container. (All previous variations dealt with only a single main affect.)
And Variation XXII is the first since the transitional Variation XI to modulate
internally, breaking the closed harmonic cycle of the oft-repeated theme as if to
affirm, as Brower puts it, ‘the human need for movement, activity, and challenge’
(2000, p. 331). There have been changes of local tonic in the Rhapsody before
this, but only between variations; never has any of those changes affected the
internal structure of the theme – its limited tonal-formal world – in any significant
way. The moment in Variation XXII when A breaks and E arrives (bar 786),
indeed, has the ‘sparkle of a ribbon snapped’, and in the textural blossoming
passage that follows (bars 799–810) four-bar hypermeasures are divided and
subdivided with great regularity down to the level of the crotchet (the harp’s
bell-like chords), suggesting a satisfying (if temporary) new cycle and generating
momentum into bar 811. In this area of the piece, rhetorical signals of arrival and
tonal signals of fresh departure are mixed, leading to the apparent paradox
described at the outset of the essay: music that is, from the standpoint of the global
A tonicity, greatly unstable and doomed to ‘fail’, yet which is, in the world of the
piece, the point at which the potential of the theme is liberated to new, higher
purpose. Paganini recedes, and Rachmaninoff advances.
Gravity and Magnetism at the Point

The above observations address only relatively large-scale features. Closer
examination of the Rhapsody’s harmonic organisation suggests additional ways in
which Variation XXII behaves in relation to the schematic scaffolding outlined
above – specifically, ways that I will characterise as changes involving tonal
gravity (by which I mean the matter of what harmony serves as the centre of
gravity in a passage, around which other harmonies are oriented and balanced)
and tonal magnetism (a term I use to describe ways in which unstable melodic
pitches are attracted to stable ones). Ex. 11 shows another way to hear the work:
as a 941-bar expression of the theme itself, which suggests a somewhat different
source-path-goal schema from the multi-movement one. The example shows (a)
Schenker’s analysis of the theme above (b) my own outline of the Rhapsody.51
The two dozen individual arcs of the Rhapsody’s variations coalesce into a single
large arc whose stages resemble those in the theme:
• statement of material and initial activity within a contained harmonic area:

bars 1–4 of the theme; in the Rhapsody, the first movement, which is entirely
in A minor;
• digression beginning with V7 of D minor, involving flats, and proceeding
sequentially;

• provisional return of the tonic: see Schenker’s analysis of bar 10, where A
minor appears inside the span of II; in the Rhapsody, A minor is reintro-
duced in bar 680 by a chromatic sleight of hand and only later solidified
tonally;
• further activity leading to peak chromaticism and dissonance: the aug-
mented sixth in bar 11 of the theme (highly energised, as Schenker indicates
with an ascending arrow); in the Rhapsody, the energised events described
above and the last two cadenzas; and
• conclusion.
Particularly striking correspondences between the theme and the Rhapsody are
suggested by the dotted lines in Ex. 11 (along with one important non-
correspondence, to be discussed later). Of special interest are the three cadenzas
(indicated by fermatas in Ex. 11b), which are built from notes involved at the
two chromatic moments in the theme itself. The cadenza in Variation XI
involves B in the context of the dominant of D minor, as does bar 5 of Paganini’s
theme. The pair of cadenzas in the finale – in bar 819 on E (Variation XXII) and
in bars 864–72 beginning on and ending on F (Variation XXIII) – are built on
the two tones (enharmonically) of the augmented sixth near the end of
Paganini’s theme.
This large-scale variation of the theme has implications for Variation XXII in
particular. Ex. 13 labels three neighbour-note ‘impulses’ at the two chromatic
moments in the theme: x, y and z. Ex. 14 suggests how Rachmaninoff synthe-
sises – but also climactically reverses – impulses x and y on a large scale in
Variation XXII. In Ex. 14a a version of x extended to include G provides an
upper-voice framework that carries over into the following variation. The
unusual entanglement of E (as A: V) and A minor at the start of Variation XXIII
(bars 822–831) realises at once the potential of E to resolve to E (as y) and also,
Ex. 13 Motivic impulses at chromatic moments in the theme

314 BLAIR JOHNSTON
Ex. 14a Analysis of Variation XXII into Variation XXIII
Ex. 14b Combination of impulses x and y in Variation XXII and reversal of

magnetism
now climactically charged, as V of A. The arrows in Ex. 14b suggest how
impulses x and y behave – their magnetic polarity – in the theme and how that
behaviour is reversed when they are enlarged and combined in Variation XXII.
Ex. 14c represents the effect schematically. In the first half of the variation,
tension increases (corresponding, perhaps, to the arrow between A and D in
Schenker’s analysis), which applies a kind of pressure to the tonic A minor. The
pressure is released when the pedal point snaps at bar 786 and E (with partner
B) becomes the new centre of gravity for the rest of the variation, bringing to
fruition a latent potential in the theme’s chromatic impulses. At the same time,
the container schema is reversed: A, which figures prominently in the E music,
is inside the container defined by enlarged E. The first stage in this process is
shown in more detail in Ex. 15. The quiet beginning of the variation features
descending Phrygian scales in the solo piano part which reintroduce the chro-
matic tones of impulses x (B) and y (E) one at a time. As the passage continues,
it rises dramatically in register, outlining A and E in multiple octaves and
replicating in a free way the basic shape of Paganini’s theme, and it also increases
in dynamic level. At bar 768 a fragment of the ‘Dies irae’ (marked * in Ex. 15)
is introduced on A and treated as a kind of ostinato against which the descending

Ex. 14c Schematic representation of Variation XXII
Ex. 15 Analysis of Variation XXII, bars 754–786

(a)
(b)
scales continue with increasing dissonance. The ‘Dies irae’ is treated chromati-
cally from bar 776, and the whole thing comes to a head when one last scale
arrives, noisily, on the E chord in bar 786. This last scale, like the first one,
begins on A, and, like the second one, it contains both B and E; but in bar 784
the relatively calm Phrygian mode is transformed into tenser OCT2,3.
The rebalancing shown in Ex. 14c is partly a matter of scope and thus
hierarchical level; enlarged to such an extent, E takes on a life of its own. But it
is also partly a matter of Rachmaninoff’s explicit emphasis, at the episode’s
boundaries (formal and registral), on pitch classes involved in x and y. Nowhere
is this clearer than at bar 807 (* in Ex. 14a), where the headmotive of Paganini’s
theme appears – at its original pitch level (A/E) – above the E pedal point,
reaching high A in the violins and flutes. This passage is shown in more detail in
Ex. 16. It is the last part of the ‘textural blossoming’ stage in Variation XXII (see

316 BLAIR JOHNSTON
Ex. 16 Analysis of Variation XXII, bars 799–819
again Ex. 1). In the theme itself, the headmotive’s oscillation between A and E
in bars 1–4 is temporally separated from the D in bar 11. In bars 807–810 of the
Rhapsody, however, the A/E frame (bracketed in Ex. 16) and E are synthesised
in a registrally layered structure, and the gap between them is filled by an
additional layer of material – including a statement of the headmotive – centred
on F. The textural blossoming passage has emphasised diatonicism to this point:
the four-flats collection in bars 799–802 and the five-flats collection centred on
D (which weakly tonicises F) in bars 803–806. The upper layers in bars
807–810 are entirely diatonic, too (three sharps, co-centred on A and F), but the
pedal point changes everything. Here, at the pinnacle moment of the piece, the
background tonic is projected – with motivic, registral and harmonic reinforce-
ment – through the complex, foreign middleground of E onto a dissonant
foreground; for a moment or two, the relationships between background,
middleground and foreground seem quite complicated. It is not just that
impulses x and y are reversed at the climax: it is that the essential tonal container
of the theme is turned inside out.
Some of these features are foretold at the very beginning of the work, as shown
in Ex. 17a. In the introduction, an insistent frame of tonic material is created by
ascending statements of the headmotive (here incorporating the neighbour-note
impulse z from the theme). Changing chords push against the frame with
increasing dissonance, reaching the point of highest tension in bar 7 above a
chord that is enharmonically the same E major-minor seventh chord featured in
Variation XXII.52 The very first chord of the work combines the tonic triad (here
A minor) and the pitch class F, in a way not unlike the layering of A major and
F minor at the climax. In a sense, the tonic frame, the first chord and the peak
chord in bar 7 outline a provisional version of bars 807–810, presenting as
individual components the A–F–E group that will figure in that later passage.
But the introduction is, unlike the climax, resolutely chromatic – not at all
diatonic – and as a result the equal-interval potential of the A–F–E group is
more apparent than it is in Ex. 16: an OCT0,1 scale in the bass connects the

Ex. 17a Analysis of the Rhapsody, introduction
Ex. 17b Schematic representation of the introduction in relation to Variations XXII–

XXIV
chords in bars 1–8, and the metrically accented chords on F, A, C and E are
built on the nodes of OCT0,1, composing out the underlying diminished seventh
chord in Lisztian fashion.53 (The metrically unaccented chords harmonise
impulse z.)
Ex. 17b plots the events of the introduction in relation to Variations XXII–
XXIV. In the introduction an ascending OCT0,1 scale decorates viio7 of V. At bar
784 in Variation XXII the same diminished seventh chord is decorated by a
descending OCT2,3 scale; but now E, enlarged and released from the context of
Paganini’s theme, is the harmonic goal, not a step along the way. The new local
centre of gravity around E in bars 786–821 is artificial and is itself unstable on
a larger level. It cannot and does not last. As shown in Ex. 17b, the initial state,
in which A is the centre of gravity and of magnetic attraction, is restored by the
end of the work. But with the extraordinary events of bars 807–810 (see again

318 BLAIR JOHNSTON
Ex. 16), the very idea of tonal hierarchy comes to the fore in a dramatic way.
Whereas the succession of keys in the interior of the work might be construed as
‘links in a chain’ (an ‘order of succession’, with changes occurring between links
– never inside links, which are contained by the plan of the theme), E and its
proposed tonic, A, are set up in a way which ensures that they will be heard in
relation to the global tonic A.54 Textural blossoming and climax celebrate, as it
were, an emergence into a larger tonal and schematic universe, in which it turns
out that the initial limited tonal and schematic system is only one possible state.
Before the Culminating Point

There are, of course, difficulties in understanding the Rhapsody as a huge
expansion of the theme on which it is based. Some structural features of the
Rhapsody plainly differ from structural features of the theme. One difference
involves the keys in the Rhapsody’s middle movements. D minor corresponds to
bar 5 of the theme, but the other key areas (F major, B minor and D major) do
not correspond to the theme in any clear way. As suggested in Ex. 11b, the
circle-of-fifths sequence in bars 5–8 of the theme has become a cycle of keys
related by major third (tonics of A, F and D) to which relative minor keys (D
and B) are attached. There is still a kind of sequential structure – links on a chain
– to the interior key areas, but Rachmaninoff has amplified the tonal departure
to such a degree that the last internal key (D major) is the hexatonic pole
of A minor – ‘uncannily’ proximate to, yet somehow irreconcilable with,
the global tonic.55 And the next step in the cycle, back to A, is accomplished in
bars 680–686 by a rhythmically broken series of chromatic twists, not by a
conventional modulation.
As suggested in Ex. 11, D major is the point of greatest tonal difference
between the work as a whole and the theme (marked ≠). Yet the high point in
Variation XVIII (around bar 660) is closely associated with the family of rela-
tionships I described in connection with the culminating point in Variation
XXII. As shown in Ex. 18, bar 660 features a dissonant, A minor–oriented chord
(marked *) that is nearly identical to the one that appears on the first beat of the
work (also marked *); in both locations, the chord is set up by a version of the
theme’s headmotive. At the high point in Variation XVIII, as shown in Ex. 18,
that dissonant chord is incorporated into a layered harmonic structure that
combines a tonal progression in D and a small chromatic-thirds cycle (A, F and
D, summarising the tonal progress of the work). In this variation, as Charles
Fisk has pointed out (2008, p. 250), Rachmaninoff retains the basic thematic
plan but re-forms it as a two-phrase period (plus a post-cadential coda). Bars
640–650 cadence on A (D: V), while bars 651–661 cadence on the local tonic
D. The theme is famously inverted in the variation; the sequential portion
ascends rather than descends, so that the phrase leads quite naturally to a
climax.56 The underlying tonal progression at the high point is plain enough:
IV–V–I. But register and the voicing of the chords – especially in the solo piano

Ex. 18 Analysis of high point in the Rhapsody, Variation XVIII
Ex. 19 Reversal of impulse z and hexatonic substitution in the Rhapsody, Variations

XIII and XIV
part, which is shown verbatim on the example – bring out the HEX0,1 triads
identified at the top of the example. Bar 660 features the same melodic motion
between E and F (impulse z) as bar 1, but the magnetism of impulse z is reversed
at the high point. (As shown in Ex. 19, this reversal and HEX0,1 are prefigured
in Variation XIV, which also features a first hint of melodic inversion. Ex. 20
shows an earlier instance of hexatonic-type inflection in Variation VIII, where a
chromatic major-third relationship replaces the theme’s circle-of-fifths sequence
and also momentarily reverses basic impulse x.)
The treatment of impulse z at the climax of Variation XVIII is one in a more
complete set of such magnetic reversals – a tonal involution, so to speak,
complementing the melodic inversion of the theme – that characterise the B and
especially the D variations at the heart of the Rhapsody (Variations XVI–XVIII).

320 BLAIR JOHNSTON
Ex. 20 Analysis of initial hexatonic-type inflection in the Rhapsody, Variation VIII
Ex. 21 Tonal ‘involution’ in the Rhapsody, Variations XVI–XVIII, shown in musical

notation and represented schematically
(a)
(b)
(c)
Ex. 21a shows the basic treatment of chromatic and tendency tones in Paganini’s
theme, while Ex. 21b indicates how these behaviours are changed in the flat-key
variations. (The diagram underneath attempts to represent the change in a
two-dimensional diagram of nested containers, where notes in the centre are
stable and notes on the periphery are unstable.) Given the reciprocal nature of
hexatonic poles (here, A minor and D major), the reversals shown in Ex. 21 are
no great surprise.57 But in the Rhapsody they provide an additional rationale for
Rachmaninoff’s choice of interior keys. The flat regions turn A minor into a

highly unstable harmony in relation to its pole, folding the tonal material of the
work in on itself in a way that ultimately feeds into the enlarged reversals at the
E event in Variation XXII. Throughout the slow movement, the global tonic
pitch class A functions as 7̂ in B and as 6̂ in D. The small chromatic cluster
that results from these behaviours (A/G–A–B, boxed in Ex. 21) is an extension
of impulse x/x′. This cluster is a significant motive throughout the middle of the
work, anticipating its use as an upper-voice framework in Variation XXII (see
again Ex. 14a).
As shown in Ex. 22, the chromatic motive revolving around A is introduced as
early as Variations VIII and XI by reharmonising bar 5 of the theme. At several
points in the flat regions, Rachmaninoff treats A as the root of major/minor
triads and related seventh chords, keeping the global tonic harmony in circula-
tion even in contexts where it is unlikely indeed. Variation XVII contains
particularly striking cases, for example in bars 614–619, where minor and major
triads on A resolve to the local tonic B minor (combining x′ and z′ in stark
parallel fifths). A few times in that variation, as shown in Ex. 23, A is treated
simultaneously in both fashions described above (as 7̂ in B and as 6̂ in D),
which has the effect of momentarily superimposing D major onto B minor.
Ex. 22 Introduction of the chromatic motive (G/A–A–B) in the Rhapsody
Ex. 23 Rhapsody, Variation XVI, bars 619–622

(a) Piano solo part
(b) Analysis

322 BLAIR JOHNSTON
Ex. 24 Analysis of the Rhapsody, Variation XVIII, consequent phrase
Local motion to D in bars 619–621 is accomplished by way of the chromatic

motive in the bass, circled in Ex. 23a; and this same bass motion establishes D
for Variation XVIII. The chromatic motive continues to be significant in the D
variation, figuring prominently at the high point (Ex. 24) and in the slow-
movement coda.
After the Culminating Point

Variation XXII thus brings to a climactic peak the chromatic transformations
and reversals laid out provisionally in the middle variations. But these are no
longer attached to the literal inversion of the theme or to chromatic major-third
relationships, and the expressive context at this late point in the work is no longer
one of turning inward. The situation in Variation XXII is, on the contrary, one
of emergence. The finale has pretended to return and achieve closure but has
taken a turn (see again Exs 12 and 18). It is as though the reversed impulses from
the interior regions had intruded upon the proper source-path-goal and into the
last variations, pushing the music to ‘extraordinary’ new purpose – away from its
‘quiescent life’. The result is a moment that is at once the acme of conventional
tension in the work (in terms of the global tonic A minor, and in terms of the
negative implications of the generic-formal sketch I offered at the outset) and a
moment of release where the constraints of the theme are broken and the
contextually determined, intra-opus structural features of Rachmaninoff’s
reimagining come to fruition (see again Exs 12 and 17b). To borrow from
Darcy, ‘This is nothing less than the moment the entire work has been con-
structed to produce’ (1997, p. 277). But it is not the kind of stable moment
Darcy uses those words to describe in Bruckner’s symphonies, for it does not
‘resonate sympathetically’ (p. 277) in conventional tonal, formal or hermeneutic
terms, only on its own terms. Viewed in this way, it does not matter all that much
that A major never materialises; the destiny of E was, after all, as much to be
itself in a hierarchically elevated state as to be the dominant of A. Perhaps the
textural blossoming passage is a sort of telos after all – but a telos once removed,
as it were, from the requirement of tonal stability.
What follows is not so much a resolution as a renormalisation that restores the
materials of the theme to their original behaviours and balance. Closure in the
Rhapsody results from a gradual easing back into the source-path-goal schema

Ex. 25 Analysis of the Rhapsody, end of Variation XXII and beginning of Variation
XXIII
shown in Ex. 12 and, with it, an acceptance of A as the inevitable centre of

gravity.58 The cadenza at the end of Variation XXII plays on E’s heightened
status. At the beginning of Variation XXIII (Ex. 25), E is treated simultaneously
as the dominant of A minor and as a chromatic pre-dominant harmony in A.
One way of characterising bar 824 would be to say that the piano simply ignores
the E in bar 822 and treats its cadenza as a cadenza ‘should be’ treated – that is
to say, as an elaborated dominant that prepares a return of thematic material.
But I think something more intricate is going on in this entanglement of keys. At
several points in the Rhapsody (and in aspects of its large-scale key structure),
chromatic major-third relationships substitute for perfect fifth relationships. The
A material in bar 824 fulfils both kinds of relationships, as shown on Ex. 25: a
conventional resolution of E and a hexatonic-type resolution of E.
This is one in a series of moments in Variations XXIII and XXIV that spin out
of the culminating point and that seem to summarise – in a sense, to reabsorb
into the gamut of A minor – structural details that developed over the course of
the work and that have been important in my analysis. At the end of Variation
XXIII (Ex. 26), leading up to the final cadenza, triads from HEX0,1 (on the roots
of the Rhapsody’s large-scale key plan) harmonise ff statements of both the
normal and the inverted forms of the Paganini motive, recalling the thematic
inversion featured in the interior of the work. The cadenza itself is built on the
nodes of OCT2,3 (and the quaver scale at the end of the cadenza is octatonic, too,
although there are a few non-octatonic notes above it), and it emerges from and
ends on F major, which is both an enlargement of F in bar 11 of the theme (the
partner of E; see again Ex. 11) and a node of HEX0,1. The appearance of OCT2,3
is telling: an OCT2,3 scale was used in bar 784 to open up the climactic,
culminating space, and its appearance here, attached to a cadenza representing
the enlargement of F natural in bar 11 of the theme, suggests a final egress from
the area of intense events into the final variation.
The coda to Variation XXIV and to the work as a whole begins in bar 899. As
shown in Ex. 27a, it features a final statement of the ‘Dies irae’. This statement
begins on tonic A in m. 911 and thus recalls the chant’s appearance in the coda

324 BLAIR JOHNSTON
Ex. 26 Analysis of the Rhapsody, end of Variation XXIII
Ex. 27a Analysis of the Rhapsody, final statement of the ‘Dies irae’ in Variation
XXIV, coda
Ex. 27b Relationship of the ‘Dies irae’ and sequence in the Paganini theme
of the first movement (Ex. 27b, which also suggests a way in which the ‘Dies
irae’ may be related to Paganini’s theme), but it is D Phrygian. Codas are of
course wont to feature the subdominant generally; bars 919–927 may be taken
as a large post-cadential plagal suffix to the resolution at bar 899. But it also
seems significant that D Phrygian contains pitch classes E and B, which have
been crucial throughout the work. The final statement of the ‘Dies irae’ unfolds

Ex. 28 Analysis of the Rhapsody, end
along the same polar axis (chords on A and on E) as the introduction and the
climax in Variation XXII, but in a quite settled harmonic and rhetorical situa-
tion. It is noisy and assuredly theatrical,59 yet it feels more like another step in the
process of conclusion than a moment of arrival (in part because it has been
preceded by four bars of tonic harmony). And it does not reveal, it only confirms,
as indeed does the playful gesture at the very end of the piece (Ex. 28), which
juxtaposes A and E one last time – wryly stuffing them back, as it were, into
Paganini’s original container.60
***
Perhaps I have over-theorised Rachmaninoff’s culminating point. (He would
certainly think so.) But I have not, I hope, swerved from the essential premise of
his idea: that, simply put, whatever is rhetorically critical is, ipso facto, structur-
ally vital in his music. I began this essay with a negatively orientated sketch of the
off-tonic climax in the Rhapsody’s twenty-second variation, and in developing an
analysis of the work around that moment I have filled gaps in the preliminary
reading with a complementary reading that is attuned to Rachmaninoff’s stated
aesthetic outlook, organising information about the work’s rhetorical-structural
features according to schemas that are related to metaphors Rachmaninoff
himself used. The result has revealed the Rhapsody to be a work of idiosyncratic
and occasionally startling imagination, and it has suggested avenues for the
analysis and interpretation of other works. Leonid Sabaneyeff wrote that
‘Rakhmaninoff is the extreme expression of turbulent Russian Bohemianism, a
passive and heroic soul. He is not a culminating phenomenon but one of the
great ones’ ([1927] 1975, p. 119). Perhaps Rachmaninoff was, ultimately, not a
culmination himself; but he knew how to compose one.
NOTES
1. Quoted in Yasser (1951–2), pp. 23–4.

326 BLAIR JOHNSTON
2. Two instruments are not played here, timpani and campanelli, leaving two
musicians inactive. The only passage in the work where every musician on
the stage plays at the same time is near the end (bars 911–919).
3. There is perhaps a similarity between the technique here and the semitonal
‘chromatic displacements’ that Bass (1988) points out in the music of
Prokofiev and Shostakovich, though, at over thirty bars, the Rachmaninoff
passage is considerably longer than anything Bass discusses. In the longer
analysis later in the present essay, I will describe the structural origins of the
passage in rather different terms.
4. Hepokoski suggests that a teleological view of musical organisation was
especially ‘characteristic of the modern composers’ (1993, p. 26), by which
he means the generation born around 1860 (e.g., Mahler, Strauss,
Sibelius) – that is to say, ten or fifteen years before Rachmaninoff.
5. ‘Breakthrough’, where an established musical plan is radically altered by
the intrusion of a new (and often tonally different) idea or course of action,
is originally Adorno’s term (Durchbruch). It has been treated by Hepokoski
(1992; see especially pp. 148–52), Buhler (1996) and Darcy (2001, pp.
63–4). It is for Hepokoski a kind of ‘deformation’, characteristically occur-
ring in developmental space or at the close of developmental space (1993,
p. 6).
6. See especially Darcy (2001, pp. 54–6) on tonal stability and closure in
relation to telos. The meaning of telos has varied somewhat in Hepokoski’s
and Darcy’s publications, as have the possibilities for a telos event’s location
and tonal orientation. In Hepokoski’s relatively early treatment of the idea
in his reading of Don Juan (1992), the telos or ‘true goal’ (p. 162) is not in
fact the initial tonic, E major, but the ‘transformed tonic’, (p. 158) C
major. In his analysis of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony (1993), the finale has
multiple telos events: a non-tonic ‘first telos’ (p. 80) and a bona fide ‘grand
telos’ (p. 83) in the tonic key. Discussing the music of Bruckner, Darcy
(1997) suggests that ‘teleological genesis’ may apply not just to a work’s
cumulative trajectory but within individual sections of a work, and that
some sonata-expositional themes are themselves organised teleologically
(pp. 259–62); however, he reserves the term ‘teleological genesis proper’
(p. 261) for an overwhelming final tonic goal. Hepokoski later remarks that
‘we may distinguish varieties of teleological genesis’, including a ‘subtype’
in which the telos is not a final goal but, rather, occurs ‘nearer the middle
or shortly thereafter’ (2001, p. 328). His example of this is the finale of
Sibelius’s Sixth Symphony, where a telos in the middle of the movement
acts as the goal moment for the entire four-movement work. But, despite
its location in the middle of the movement, this telos is a tonic-oriented
event. Hepokoski and Darcy (2006) retain Darcy’s earlier ideas (1997)
about teleological genesis at the level of the section and at the level of the

theme, here in reference not to Bruckner but to earlier tonal music gener-
ally (Hepokoski and Darcy 2006, p. 92), and they make a number of new
claims related to telos that are both more explicit and more flexible: ‘the
recapitulation delivers the telos of the entire sonata – the point of essential
structural closure (ESC)’ (p. 232), unless the coda becomes ‘the capstone or
telos of the entire movement’ (p. 286) or unless, as in some cases, ‘the larger
recapitulation, as a whole, may be heard as the telos of the ongoing rota-
tional strivings’ (p. 552). Yet in the most powerful sense (the ‘proper’
sense, as Darcy calls it), telos refers specifically to a tonic-oriented end goal.
7. ‘Success’ and ‘failure’ have figured prominently in much recent analytic
and hermeneutic work on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
pieces, stemming in large part from publications by Hepokoski on Strauss,
Sibelius and Elgar in the 1990s (1992, 1993 and 1997) and further devel-
oped by Darcy (1997 and 2001), Harper-Scott (2005b), Monahan (2007
and 2011) and others. Success is generally reckoned according to the
work’s relationships to formal expectations and tonal goals normal for the
genre, associated ‘deformations’ and ‘defaults’ and thematic-rotational
designs. (Hepokoski and Darcy’s 2006 volume on ‘Sonata Theory’ codifies
some of these insights into a more general theory for earlier music.)
Particular emphasis is placed on the ‘effectiveness of [the work’s] closure
mechanisms’ (Monahan 2011, p. 39). In his work on Bruckner, Darcy
argues that ‘if the redemption from minor to major or the purging of minor
elements from the major mode is unsuccessful, the result is “sonata-
process failure” ’ (1997, p. 274). Although the Rhapsody is not a sonata,
one may read such a failure here.
8. When Rachmaninoff sent Fokine a ballet scenario for the Rhapsody in
1937, he wrote of the protagonist’s ‘defeat’ at the beginning of Variation
XXIII. The scenario involves Paganini selling his soul to the ‘Evil Spirit’
(represented by the ‘Dies irae’). The relevant passage from Rachmaninoff’s
letter: ‘Paganini appears (for the first time) in the “Theme” and, defeated,
appears for the last time in the 23rd variation – the first 12 bars – after
which, until the end, it is the triumph of his conquerors’ (Martyn 1990, pp.
327–8, quoting a letter from Rachmaninoff to Fokine).
9. In Hepokoski’s theory of sonata form (which amounts to the cornerstone
of a more comprehensive generic-formal theory), a work is heard
‘dialogically’: that is, ‘each work, at each of its moments, is understood to
imply a dialogue with a constellation of normative sonata options within
the genre at that time and place in history’ (2009, p. 181). Monahan
describes works after Beethoven as being composed in dialogue with a
‘daunting array of models: idiosyncratic masterworks of the past, “rule of
thumb” abstractions ... and increasingly diverse contemporary trends’
(2011, p. 41).

328 BLAIR JOHNSTON
10. In my recent study of Salome (Johnston 2014), I argue that some highly
dissonant extended tonal passages may be understood as involving a
higher-order negative engagement (‘hyperdissonance’) of different har-
monic frames of reference. More generally, I argue in that essay that
negative theses (including Hepokoski’s deformation theory) are sometimes
indispensable when dealing with works composed in the early twentieth
century. The present essay in a sense complements that one by considering
how Rachmaninoff’s idea of the culminating point can suggest a different
sort of higher-order engagement – one in which musical features involved
in a work’s culminating point may be variously congruent and incongruent
with background tonal goals and generic-formal expectations.
11. Quoted in Bertensson and Leyda (1956), p. 195.
12. Rachmaninoff would undoubtedly sympathise with Agawu’s remark that
even though ‘the phenomenon of climax is central to our musical experi-
ence’, many existing music-theoretic approaches tend to de-emphasise it in
the interest of greater ‘seriousness’ (1984, pp. 159–60). Agawu in fact uses
the phrase ‘point of culmination’ in his essay (p. 160).
13. Hatten defines ‘crux’ as ‘the point of expressive focus or greatest intensity
in a phrase or gesture’ (1994, p. 289).
14. Neff (1993) connects Schoenberg’s theory to Goethe’s botanical writings.
15. See Duerksen (2008) on organicist binary oppositions in relation to
Schoenberg’s theory, including commentary on previous scholarly work.
16. See Carpenter (1983), pp. 16 and 38; and Neff (1993), pp. 417–29. I do
not mean to simplify or to conflate Schenker’s and Schoenberg’s theories,
only to select limited elements from them that are germane for comparison
with Rachmaninoff’s culminating point. Many scholars have discussed
Schenker’s and Schoenberg’s theories in connection with one another.
17. Quoted by Agawu (1983), p. 86.
18. On primary and secondary parameters of music, see Meyer (1989), fol-
lowing ideas laid out in Meyer (1980).
19. On ‘symphonic waves’, see Kurth (1991), Chs 6 and 7.
20. See Meyer (1989), pp. 208–11 on the increase in the significance of
secondary parameters as the Romantic era matured, and pp. 340–2 on the
even greater increase in the importance of secondary parameters in the
twentieth century, to the point that secondary parameters become primary.
Gosden (2012), pp. 38–44 considers Meyer’s ideas in his study of
Rachmaninoff’s middle-period orchestral music. See Agawu (1984), pp.
162–6 for a discussion of the impossibility of maintaining a useful distinc-

tion between primary and secondary parameters in nineteenth-century

music (including comments on Meyer 1980) and a discussion of the
‘narrative curve’ as structural in Schumann’s songs.
21. In Carpenter’s analytical demonstration (the first movement of
Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’ Sonata), balance is restored in a gradual way as
a set of instability-inducing chromatic relationships ‘click into place at the
end of the movement’ (1983, p. 38). Similarly, in Neff’s demonstration
(Schubert’s ‘Der Wegweiser’), the solution of the tonal problem is not a
moment of dramatic impact but a dissolution in stages (1993, pp. 427–9).
22. In Rachmaninoff’s mind, successfully conveying the point appears to have
been the crucial feature of a good performance. Shaginyan reports the
pianist’s despair over having failed to do so on a particular occasion in
1915: ‘As we opened our mouths to congratulate him he exploded in
complaint – he must be losing his mind, he’s growing decrepit, better to
discard him altogether, prepare his obituary; once there was a musician,
but that’s all over now, he could never forgive himself, and so on. “Didn’t
you notice that I missed the point? Don’t you understand – I let the point
slip!” ’ (quoted in Bertensson and Leyda 1956, p. 195).
23. I am reminded of Chew’s ‘Kurthian’ analysis of the ‘Abschied’ from
Tristan, in which locations of great instability, not moments of consonance,
are taken as ‘basic pillars’ (1991; see especially p. 187).
24. See especially Burnham (1995), Chs 3 and 5, and discussion in
Harper-Scott (2005a), pp. 349–51.
25. The early nineteenth century again provides points of comparison.
Schmalfeldt (2011) describes an entire class of interior events in nineteenth-
century works – especially Schubert’s – using language that is strikingly
similar to the language Rachmaninoff uses for his culminating point.
Schmalfeldt’s Ch. 6 (pp. 133–57) ‘concentrate[s] upon the tendency within
early nineteenth-century instrumental works toward cyclic and processual
formal techniques that draw new kinds of attention to deeply felt, song-
inspired interior movements and secondary (as opposed to main) themes. In
such pieces, the music itself would seem to “turn inward”: an interior
moment, or movement, becomes the focal point of the complete work – the
centre of gravity toward which what comes before seems to pull, and from
which all that follows seems to radiate’ (p. 136). The kinship of ideas is clear
here, even if the events Schmalfeldt considers are of a larger order (entire
themes and even movements) than the ones Rachmaninoff seems to mean.
Indeed, Schmalfeldt analyses a tantalizing possible ancestor of the Rhaps-
ody’s off-tonic culminating point: Schubert’s Lebensstürme, Op. 144 (D.
947), an A minor work in sonata form whose second theme (bars 89–137) is
in the key of A major. The formal roles of the A theme in Schubert’s work

330 BLAIR JOHNSTON
(which appears in the exposition) and of the would-be A major passage in

the Rhapsody (which appears closer to the end of the work) are quite
different; and there is also the critical difference that Schubert’s theme
involves root-position A major in the larger A minor context, whereas the
Rhapsody passage only promises A major. Nonetheless, Schmalfeldt’s
characterisation of Schubert’s ‘inward theme’ resonates with the language I
used earlier in the present essay to introduce the ‘textural blossoming’
portion of Variation XXII: the theme ‘radiate[s] outward, as if to shed its
blessing over the entire rest of the exposition’ (p. 141).
26. Yasser described Rachmaninoff’s chromatic harmony as ‘intra-tonal’, char-
acterised by a ‘many-sided use of altered chords, progressions, and bold
digressions within the limits of a single or, at any rate, long-exploited key’ –
(1951–2, p. 21). His intention was to distinguish Rachmaninoff’s chromati-
cism from Wagner’s ‘inter-tonal’ chromaticism. There are some limited
cases where the claim of monotonality might be challenged. Two large works
by Rachmaninoff have first and last movements in different keys (The Bells,
Op. 35, and Symphonic Dances, Op. 45), though in neither case is it clear
that the movements are meant to relate as in a Classical cycle. Some of
Rachmaninoff’s works involve episodes of peremennost’, a Russian concept of
modal mutability involving diatonically related co-tonics or co-centres (see
Taruskin 1997, p. 133 and 138–9; Leikin 2002, pp. 36–7; and Zavlunov
2010). Cannata (1999), drawing from Bailey’s work, has suggested that
some Rachmaninoff works are organised around ‘double tonic complexes’.
(See Lewis 1984 and Bailey 1985.) However, some of the situations Cannata
discusses do not project the ‘irreducible balance’ of a true double tonic
complex (BaileyShea 2007, p. 193) and might better be understood as
modal – for example, the opening of the Third Symphony, which incorpo-
rates B into A minor. For Cannata this expresses a double-tonic complex of
A and D (1999, pp. 125–7), but the passage involves a standard Phrygian
neighbour idiom: the Phrygian mode is used prominently elsewhere in the
work, and there is scant material in D. In general Yasser is correct that tonic
gravity is powerful in Rachmaninoff’s music, and the seeming inability to
escape that gravity, even when the urge to break away is strong, can be a
factor in the music’s expressive vocabulary.
27. Stravinsky: ‘I know too that I relate only from an angle to the German
stem’ (Stravinsky and Craft 1982, p. 30).
28. Asafiev’s remarks are quoted in Yasser (1951–2), pp. 23–4.
29. The Rimsky-Korsakov operas were The Golden Cockerel and The Legend of
the Invisible City of Kitezh (Bertensson and Leyda 1956, p. 303).
30. This is in accordance with Agawu’s view that a division between ‘primary’
and ‘secondary’ parameters is ultimately untenable (see n. 20 above). We

have no clear term in music theory for the sort of fusion that this suggests,
so I will resort to the ungainly and quite imperfect compound ‘rhetorical-
structural’ when necessary. It seems impossible to divorce the word ‘struc-
ture’ from its historical associations in music theory, but it would not do to
continue using the terms ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’.
31. Rachmaninoff’s emphasis on the role of the performer as reader and
channel anticipates observations made by Monelle (2000, pp. 165–9), to
which Klein refers, though there is nothing in Rachmaninoff’s description
that relates explicitly to Monelle’s ‘persona’ or ‘time’ (both of which are
central in Klein’s project). In some ways Klein’s readings of ‘success’ and
‘failure’ are not so far from the hermeneutic readings prompted by the
deformations, rotations and cadences in Hepokoski and Darcy’s analyses,
but in the latter the basis for interpretation is convergence or divergence
from a constellation of inherited generic-formal patterns, not, as in Klein’s,
the location of topical features and structural features in relation to one
another.
32. Brower draws from work by the social scientist Howard Margolis and the
philosopher Mark Johnson, from George Lakoff and Mark Turner’s work
on poetry and from work by a large number of music theorists, including
Steve Larson, Janna Saslaw and Lawrence Zbikowski.
33. Balance, centre-periphery and verticality are treated by Brower as separate
but closely related schemas. When dealing with ‘force’, Brower draws from
Larson (1993 and 1997).
34. Brower, following Saslaw, discusses how these schemas inform the writings
of earlier theorists. Larson (2012) offers, in addition to his own theory,
information about previous music-theoretic work on ‘forces’. Schenker
figures strongly in Larson’s work: ‘Schenkerian analysis, when supported
by this theory of musical forces, offers a powerful tool for illuminating
motion, meaning, and metaphor in music’ (2012, p. 180).
35. Larson (2012), pp. 82–109. The whole of Larson’s project, which he
supports historically, cognitively, analytically and computationally, far
exceeds the limited scope of the present essay. It is, like Brower’s, aimed
mostly at ‘common-practice tonal music’ (p. 61). However, he develops,
among other things, a theory of melodic organisation in tonal music that
revolves around gravity (tendency to descend), magnetism (melodic attrac-
tion) and inertia (tendency to continue in the same fashion). These forces
relate in clear ways to metaphors I will use in what follows.
36. The cadential goals in ‘Sonata Theory’ also describe source-path-goal
schemas, although Hepokoski and Darcy’s (2006) diagrammatic represen-
tations apply a vertical schema (gravity metaphor) at the same time.
37. I do not mean to oversimplify (or to suggest that either Salzer or Schenker
has done so), only to comment on a tendency in music analysis. Brower

332 BLAIR JOHNSTON
(2000, pp. 340–1) shows how in Schenker’s Ursatz the verticality and cycle
schemas are implicated as well as the source-path-goal schema; and Larson
(2012, pp. 131–2) discusses connections between Schenker’s theories,
musical expectation and musical forces.
38. An observation made by Bribitzer-Stull in his 2006 essay on chromatic

major-third relationships (specifically those involving A, C and E) is instruc-
tive here: ‘While Schenkerian analysis effectively represents tonal-
prolongational structure, this structure is just one facet of musical
construction and of musical experience. Associativity, referentiality, and
salience are also important: even when A, C, and E are not adjacent on
the same tonal level they are often marked by tonal, formal, rhetorical,
referential, or associative processes ... . Stufen, significant cadential tonal
centers, unexpected or parenthetical tonal shifts, irregular formal units, and
extra-musical connections can all draw the listener to a phenomenological
awareness of A, C, and E connections’ (p. 183). Bribitzer-Stull’s words are
not just relevant in a general way; he also uses them to justify a hybrid
analytical approach – Schenkerian methods plus neo-Riemannian symbols,
the latter of which model ‘a transformational event-stream’ rather than a
structure in the more conventional sense (p. 183) – that anticipates in some
ways the hybrid analytical approach I will outline later in the article.
39. Dahlhaus presents this idea in an analysis of Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony.

It is one characteristic of what he calls ‘modernist’ music, by which (like
Hepokoski; see n. 4 above) he means music composed between roughly
1889 and 1914 ([1980] 1989, pp. 332–35).
40. The term ‘succession of feelings’ is borrowed from Mahler by way of

Dahlhaus ([1980] 1989, p. 366).
41. My use of the term ‘state’ recalls Cox’s in his ‘mimetic hypothesis’ (2011).
Cox proceeds from the premise that ‘part of how we comprehend music is
by way of a kind of physical empathy that involves imagining making the
sounds we are listening to’ (p. 3). A little later he states: ‘Each level of
cognition, from perception to explicit understanding, corresponds to a
representation in the perceiver. Such representations are embodiments, or
bodily states’ (p. 19). Although Cox means his hypothesis to be empirically
testable, whereas the ‘states’ I am describing in the present context are
meant to be analytic and hermeneutic conceits, Cox suggests that mimesis
can be almost compulsory – ‘for many if not most of us, and for most kinds
of music, music nearly demands mimetic participation (overt or covert)’ (p.
48; emphasis in original) – in a way that recalls the almost compulsory
character of Rachmaninoff’s metaphor-laden culminating point. Indeed, it
is interesting to read Rachmaninoff’s colourful physical metaphors against
the backdrop of his own famously stoic stage persona, which allowed only

those physical actions necessary for performance to be actualised; perhaps

the metaphors express something of a residual covert physicality.
42. Rachmaninoff’s spelling of the chord is a compromise between vertical and
voice-leading considerations. D and A create the frame of a perfect fifth.
On the other hand, E and B are spelled to suggest resolutions to F and C.
43. See McClary (2000), p. 123.
44. I identify the three distinct octatonic scales using Straus’s (2005, p. 144)
fixed-zero (0 = C) notational system: Oct0,1 is the octatonic scale that
contains C and D, Oct1,2 is the scale that contains C and D and Oct2,3 is
the scale that contains D and E. Elsewhere in the essay the four distinct
hexatonic scales are identified using a similar system: HEX0,1, HEX1,2,
HEX2,3 and HEX3,4. By ‘nodes’ I mean the four notes in an octatonic
collection upon which major and minor triads may be constructed, as
discussed by van den Toorn (1983, pp. 48–72), Taruskin (1996, Ch. 4)
and many others; e.g. the nodes of OCT0,1 are C, E, F and A, themselves
outlining a diminished seventh chord. There has recently been quite a bit
of debate (revolving largely around Taruskin and Tymoczko) about the
octatonic scale and how it has been used to justify historically a particular
analytical approach to Russian music. The debate has culminated in a
symposium in Music Theory Spectrum (33/ii [2011], pp. 169–229). In the
present essay I will sidestep the thornier parts of the debate and restrict my
application of the term ‘octatonic’ to cases where there is a clear scalar
presentation of an octatonic collection, a clear presentation of structurally
significant harmonies built on the nodes of an octatonic collection or both.
I find that ‘octatonic’ remains a useful way of describing certain types of
harmonic and melodic behaviour, and that these types of behaviour are
prominent in many passages from Rachmaninoff’s works.
45. Only the revised version of 1931 features the diatonic chord pair at the end.
In the original 1913 version the movement ends with two B minor triads.
46. Rachmaninoff was of course not the first to compose variations on the A
minor theme of Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 for solo violin (c. 1805).
Paganini did so himself in that work, and both Liszt (the last étude in S.
140/141) and Brahms (Op. 35) followed suit. Liszt’s étude is essentially a
transcription of Paganini’s Caprice. The two books of Brahms’s Op. 35 are
nominally independent of one another. Brahms’s title suggests their didac-
tic nature (‘Studies for the Piano’), and their constrained scope is indicated
by the fact that there is only one real change of tonic in the whole opus
(Book 2, Variation 12, in F major). The Rhapsody is, by contrast, a
continuous concert work with many internal changes of key, and
Rachmaninoff’s working title, ‘Symphonic Variations on a Theme of
Paganini’ (Martyn 1990, p. 326), makes clear its very different purpose and
generic affiliations.

334 BLAIR JOHNSTON
47. See Ivanovitch (2010, especially pp. 145–8) on ‘discursive’ (exemplified by

sonata form) and ‘recursive’ (exemplified by variations). I have conflated
‘recursive’ and ‘cyclical’ to suit my purposes, but it is worth noting that
Ivanovitch suggests that ‘circular’ is a less precise way to describe the
variation impulse than ‘recursive’ (p. 146).
48. The twelve-bar theme is binary in form, and in Paganini’s Caprice the first
four bars are repeated, resulting in a sixteen-bar form. Rachmaninoff
repeats the second half of the theme, too (resulting in a 24-bar form), and
he invariably writes out the repeats, allowing for double variations – that is
to say, further variation of repeated material within a single numbered
variation.
49. The codas argue against three-movement interpretations such as the one
Martyn offers (1990, p. 329). In Ex. 11 I have taken the keys in which the
two middle movements end, rather than the keys in which they begin, as
main keys. Although D minor might initially seem more structurally sig-
nificant than F because it relates so strongly to the D minor harmony in bar
6 of the theme, the extensive coda at the end of the scherzo solidifies F as
the goal of the movement. Similarly, the coda in Variation XVIII, which is
followed by a clear break before the next variation, clarifies D as the goal
of the slow movement.
50. See n. 46 above on Rachmaninoff’s working title for the piece.
51. See Schenker (1979), Fig. 40, 9.
52. In the full score the bass note in bar 7 is spelled using both D and E.
53. The terms I am using here – ‘dissonant’, ‘layered’, ‘ostinato’, ‘equal-
interval’ – are the kind one associates more with Stravinsky than with
Rachmaninoff. Taruskin (1996, especially Ch. 4) has traced equal-interval
structures in Russian music from Stravinsky back through Rimsky-
Korsakov to Glinka by way of Liszt and Schubert. It is worth noting
Rachmaninoff’s openly stated admiration of Rimsky-Korsakov in the 1930s
(see Bertensson and Leyda 1956, p. 303); and Rachmaninoff was himself
a legendary performer of Liszt’s music. To be sure, the kind of layering I
am suggesting in Exs 16 and 17 (as well as Ex. 8) is less blatant than the
stratifications in Stravinsky’s works. These passages are extraordinary
events, not representative of Rachmaninoff’s everyday way of doing
musical business, and the underlying tonal basis is never in doubt. Still,
they suggest in a limited way a kind of musical thinking that figures more
prominently in the music of Russian composers a generation or two
younger. Consider, for example, Kholopov’s comments on Shostakovich:
‘Shostakovich’s new solution as a twentieth-century composer consists
of finding new effective means of contrast, an even higher order of
dissonance. In the development section he now starts to place contrasted

sound-layers one on top of another. The unity of the harmony in the

vertical dimension is broken. The layers of polyharmony dissonantly contra-
dict one another, as if the voices somehow are not listening to one another;
in some places they even try to out-shout one another to see who can make
the most noise ... . This type of solution imparts new life to sonata form and
other symphonised forms’ (1995, p. 70). This clearly goes beyond anything
in the Rhapsody. And yet, at bar 807, there does seem to be a kind of
‘polyharmony’ as a layer of tonic-oriented material is dissonantly injected,
fortissimo, into a tonally diffuse situation at a point of formal and rhetorical
significance. There is a thread, however tenuous, between this passage and
something like the recapitulation in the first movement of Shostakovich’s
String Quartet No. 6, Op. 101, where the G major first theme is reprised
at the tonic pitch level but in a dissonant context that clings to the
Neapolitan. (The ancestor of such events in general is probably the famous
early entry of the third horn at bar 394 in Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony.)
54. I borrow ‘links in a chain’ and ‘order of succession’ from Dahlhaus (1980),
p. 66. He uses the terms to describe a non-hierarchical interpretation of
Wagnerian harmony.
55. On hexatonic poles, see Cohn (1996 and 2004). The hexatonic pole of a
triad is the triad whose root is related to the first triad by a major third and
which has no tones in common with the first triad (e.g. A major and F
minor). By the ‘nodes’ of a hexatonic collection I mean the three members
of the collection upon which major and minor triads may be constructed.
Cohn (1996) discusses hexatonic systems, cycles and poles from a theo-
retical perspective. Cohn (2004) discusses the ‘uncanny’ (unheimlich)
nature of hexatonic poles from a psychological and historical perspective. I
do not mean, however, to suggest anything unheimlich about the D major
music in the Rhapsody or its relationship to the A minor music; on the
contrary, I will describe the expressive orientation of the Rhapsody’s flat
regions in rather different terms.
56. Cannata’s study of Rachmaninoff’s sketches reveals that the inversion of
the theme was one of the first things Rachmaninoff worked out when
planning the Rhapsody and suggests that he had the key of D major in mind
at an early stage (1999, pp. 55–9).
57. Hexatonic poles have a ‘double leading-tone reciprocity’ (Cohn 2004, pp.
307–9).
58. If one were to insist on a single moment of tonal closure, the resolution at
bar 899, which initiates the coda, is the most likely candidate. An alterna-
tive reading of the work might consider the resolution at bar 832, which is
supported to some degree by Rachmaninoff’s comment in the ballet sce-
nario that everything after this point represents ‘the triumph of [Paganini’s]

336 BLAIR JOHNSTON
conquerors’ (see n. 8 above). However, it seems better to me to hear the

final cadenza (at the end of Variation XXIII) as antecedent to and neces-
sary for closure, and, moreover, to hear a series of staggered, gradual
happenings rather than a single event. The analytical perspective I have
outlined in this essay is, after all, not bound to moments of closure as
strongly as some of the approaches discussed earlier in the essay.
59. Here at last everyone onstage plays at the same time (see again n. 2 above).
60. The final A tonic in the piece (bar 941) has no third, making beautifully
unclear whether the major-mode flourish in bars 927–935 is structural or
decorative.
REFERENCES
Agawu, V. Kofi, 1983: ‘The Musical Language of Kindertotenlieder No. 2’,
Journal of Musicology, 2/i: 81–93.
______, 1984: ‘Highpoints in Schumann’s Dichterliebe’, Music Analysis, 3/ii, pp.
159–80.
Bailey, Robert, 1985: ‘An Analytical Study of the Sketches and Drafts’, in
Robert Bailey (ed.), Richard Wagner: Prelude and Transfiguration from ‘Tristan
und Isolde’ (New York: Norton), pp. 113–46.
BaileyShea, Matt, 2007: ‘The Hexatonic and the Double Tonic: Wolf’s “Christ-
mas Rose” ’, Journal of Music Theory, 51/ii, pp. 187–210.
Bass, Richard, 1988: ‘Prokofiev’s Technique of Chromatic Displacement’,
Music Analysis 7/ii, pp. 197–214.
Bertensson, Sergei and Leyda, Jay, 1956: Sergei Rachmaninoff: a Lifetime in Music
(New York: New York University Press).
Bribitzer-Stull, Matthew, 2006: ‘The A–C–E Complex: the Origin and Func-
tion of Chromatic Major Third Collections in Nineteenth-Century Music’,
Music Theory Spectrum, 28/ii, pp. 167–90.
Brower, Candace, 2000: ‘A Cognitive Theory of Musical Meaning’, Journal of
Music Theory, 44/ii, pp. 323–79.
Buhler, James, 1996: ‘ “Breakthrough” as Critique of Form: the Finale of
Mahler’s First Symphony’, 19th-Century Music, 20/ii, pp. 125–43.
Burnham, Scott, 1995: Beethoven Hero (Princeton: Princeton University
Press).
Cannata, David Butler, 1999: Rachmaninoff and the Symphony (Innsbruck and
Vienna: Studien Verlag).
Carpenter, Patricia, 1983: ‘Grundgestalt as Tonal Function’, Music Theory Spec-
trum, 5/i, pp. 15–38.
Chew, Geoffrey, 1991: ‘Ernst Kurth, Music as Psychic Motion and Tristan und
Isolde: Towards a Model for Analysing Musical Instability’, Music Analysis,
10/i–ii, pp. 171–93.

Cohn, Richard, 1996: ‘Maximally Smooth Cycles, Hexatonic Systems, and the
Analysis of Late Romantic Triadic Progressions’, Music Analysis, 15/i, pp.
9–40.
______, 2004: ‘Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freudian
Age’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 57/ii, pp. 285–323.
Cone, Edward T., 1982: ‘Schubert’s Promissory Note: an Exercise in Musical
Hermeneutics’, 19th-Century Music, 5/iii, pp. 233–41.
Cox, Arnie, 2011: ‘Embodying Music: Principles of the Mimetic Hypothesis’,
Music Theory Online, 17/ii.
Dahlhaus, Carl, 1980: Between Romanticism and Modernism, trans. Mary Whittall
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press).
______, [1980] 1989: Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson
Darcy, Warren, 1997: ‘Bruckner’s Sonata Deformations’, in Timothy L. Jackson
and Paul Hawkshaw (eds), Bruckner Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press), pp. 256–77.
______, 2001: ‘Rotational Form, Teleological Genesis, and Fantasy-Projection
in the Slow Movement of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony’, 19th-Century Music,
25/i, pp. 49–74.
Duerksen, Marva, 2008: ‘Schenker’s Organicism Revisited’, Intégral, 22, pp.
1–58.
Fisk, Charles, 2008: ‘Nineteenth-Century Music? That Case of Rachmaninov’,
19th-Century Music, 31/iii, pp. 245–65.
Gosden, Stephen, 2012: ‘Rachmaninoff’s Middle-Period Orchestral Music:
Style, Structure, Genre’ (PhD diss., Yale University).
Harper-Scott, J. P. E., 2005a: ‘ “A Nice Sub-Acid Feeling”: Schenker,
Heidegger and Elgar’s First Symphony’, Music Analysis, 24/iii, pp. 349–82.
______, 2005b: ‘Elgar’s Invention of the Human: Falstaff, Opus 68’, 19th-
Century Music, 28/iii, pp. 230–53.
Hatten, Robert, 1994: Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation,
and Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
Hepokoski, James, 1992: ‘Fiery-Pulsed Libertine or Domestic Hero? Strauss’s
Don Juan Reinvestigated’, in Bryan Gilliam (ed.), Richard Strauss: New
Perspectives on the Composer and His Work (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press), pp. 135–75.
______, 1993: Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press).
______, 1997: ‘Elgar’, in D. Kern Holoman (ed.), The Nineteenth-Century Sym-
phony (New York: Schirmer), pp. 327–44.
______, 2001: ‘Rotations, Sketches, and the Sixth Symphony’, in Timothy
Jackson and Veino Murtomäki (eds), Sibelius Studies (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press), pp. 323–51.
______, 2009: ‘Approaching the First Movement of Op. 31 No. 2 through
Sonata Theory’, in Pieter Bergé, Jeroen D’hoe, and William Caplin (eds),

338 BLAIR JOHNSTON
Beethoven’s ‘Tempest’ Sonata: Perspectives of Analysis and Performance

(Leuven: Leuven Studies in Musicology), pp. 181–212.
Hepokoski, James and Darcy, Warren, 2006: Elements of Sonata Theory (Oxford:
Oxford University Press).
Ivanovitch, Roman, 2010: ‘Recursive/Discursive: Variation and Sonata in the
Andante of Mozart’s String Quartet in F, K. 590’, Music Theory Spectrum,
32/ii, pp. 145–64.
Johnston, Blair, 2014: ‘Salome’s Grotesque Climax and Its Implications’, Music
Theory Spectrum 36/i, pp. 34–57.
Kholopov, Yuriy, 1995: ‘Form in Shostakovich’s Instrumental Works’, in David
Fanning (ed.), Shostakovich Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press), pp. 57–75.
Klein, Michael, 2004: ‘Chopin’s Fourth Ballade as Musical Narrative’, Music
Theory Spectrum, 26/i, pp. 23–56.
Korsyn, Kevin, 1991: ‘Towards a New Poetics of Musical Influence’, Music
Analysis, 10/i–ii, pp. 3–72.
Kurth, Ernst, 1991: Selected Writings, ed. Lee A. Rothfarb (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press).
Larson, Steve, 1993: ‘Scale-Degree Function: a Theory of Expressive Meaning
and Its Application to Aural-Skills Pedagogy’, Journal of Music Theory Peda-
gogy, 7, pp. 69–84.
______, 1997: ‘Musical Forces and Melodic Patterns’, Theory and Practice, 22–3,
pp. 55–72.
______, 2012: Musical Forces: Motion, Meaning, and Metaphor in Music (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press).
Leikin, Anatole, 2002: ‘From Paganism to Orthodoxy to Theosophy: Reflections
of Other Worlds in the Piano Music of Rachmaninov and Scriabin’, in
Siglind Bruhn (ed.), Voicing the Ineffable: Musical Representations of Religious
Experience (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press), pp. 25–44.
Lewis, Christopher, 1984: Tonal Coherence in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, Studies
in Musicology 79 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press).
Martyn, Barrie, 1990: Rachmaninoff: Composer, Pianist, Conductor (Aldershot:
Scolar Press).
McClary, Susan, 2000: Conventional Wisdom: the Content of Musical Form
McQuere, Gordon, 1992: ‘Analyzing Musorgsky’s “Gnomus” ’, Indiana Theory
Review, 13/i, pp. 21–40.
Meyer, Leonard B., 1980: ‘Exploiting Limits: Creation, Archetypes and
Change’, Daedalus (Spring), pp. 177–205.
______, 1989: Style and Music (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press).
Monahan, Seth, 2007: ‘ “Inescapable” Coherence and the Failure of the Novel-
Symphony in the Finale of Mahler’s Sixth’, 19th-Century Music, 31/i, pp.
53–95.

______, 2011: ‘Success and Failure in Mahler’s Sonata Recapitulations’, Music

Theory Spectrum, 33/i, pp. 37–58.
Monelle, Raymond, 2000: The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays (Princeton:
Princeton University Press).
Neff, Severine, 1993: ‘Schoenberg and Goethe: Organicism and Analysis’, in
Christopher Hatch and David W. Bernstein (eds), Music Theory and The
Exploration of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 409–33.
Sabaneyeff, Leonid, [1927] 1975: Modern Russian Composers, trans. Judah A.
Joffe (New York: Da Capo Press).
Salzer, Felix, 1952: Structural Hearing: Tonal Coherence in Music (New York: C.
Boni).
Schenker, Heinrich, 1979: Free Composition (Neue Musikalische Theorien und
Phantasien, III: der Freie Satz), ed. and trans. Ernst Oster (New York:
Longman).
Schmalfeldt, Janet, 2011: In the Process of Becoming: Analytic and Philosophical
Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press).
Straus, Joseph, 2005: Introduction to Post-Tonal Analysis, 3rd edn (Upper Saddle
River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall).
Stravinsky, Igor and Craft, Robert, 1982: Dialogues (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press).
Taruskin, Richard, 1996: Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: a Biography of the
Works through ‘Mavra’ (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press).
______, 1997: Defining Russia Musically (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
______, 2011: ‘Catching Up with Rimsky-Korsakov’, Music Theory Spectrum,
33/ii, pp. 169–85.
Tymoczko, Dmitri, 2002: ‘Stravinsky and the Octatonic: a Reconsideration’,
Music Theory Spectrum, 24/i, pp. 68–102.
Van den Toorn, Pieter C., 1983: The Music of Igor Stravinsky (New Haven: Yale
University Press).
Yasser, Joseph, 1951–2: ‘Progressive Tendencies in Rachmaninoff’s Music’,
Tempo, 22, pp. 11–25.
Zavlunov, Daniil, 2010: ‘M. I. Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar (1836): a Historical
and Analytic-Theoretical Study’ (PhD diss., Princeton University).
NOTE ON CONTRIBUTOR
BLAIR JOHNSTON is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Indiana University.
His research is currently focused on the structural and stylistic characteristics
of post-Romantic music, with special emphasis on the works of Sergei
Rachmaninoff.

340 BLAIR JOHNSTON
ABSTRACT
This article considers the implications that Sergei Rachmaninoff’s concept of the
‘culminating point’ has for the analysis of his music, using the off-tonic climax in
his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43, as exemplar and case study. In the
first part of the essay I position Rachmaninoff’s idea in relation to Schoenberg’s
and Schenker’s contemporaneous views of musical coherence and goal orienta-
tion, and in relation to recent hermeneutic approaches to music from
Rachmaninoff’s era (especially those derived from Hepokoski’s work), showing
how Rachmaninoff’s idea, although it shares a nineteenth-century heritage with
those theorists’ ideas, has its own analytical and hermeneutic entailments. In the
second part of the essay, drawing on metaphors used by Rachmaninoff and on
theoretical work by Candace Brower, I outline a model for understanding a
culminating point as a moment where contextually determined rhetorical-
structural features map in striking, potentially ‘extraordinary’ ways onto physi-
cally oriented ‘image schemas’. I demonstrate the model in brief analyses of four
Rachmaninoff works and then treat the Rhapsody at length, showing how image
schemas involved at the culminating point interact with the work’s generic-
formal features and large-scale tonal plan.


Off Tonic Culmination in Rachmaninoffs Rhapsody On A Theme of Paganini

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Off Tonic Culmination in Rachmaninoffs Rhapsody On A Theme of Paganini

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

DOI: 10.1111/musa.

OFF-TONIC CULMINATION IN RACHMANINOFF’S RHAPSODY ON A

The bases of Rachmaninoff’s emotional gamut are intonations of a tranquil and

Setting Up ‘the Point’

Music Analysis, 33/iii (2014) 291

Ex. 1 Outline of Rachmaninoff, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43 (1934),

mixed in the variation. Rachmaninoff has combined aspects of several different

© 2014 The Author. Music Analysis, 33/iii (2014)

it is ‘deliberately and meaningfully non-normative’ (2011, p. 41). But ‘failure’

Locating the Point

Music Analysis, 33/iii (2014) © 2014 The Author.

A performer’s words, to be sure, and primarily about performance; but some-

© 2014 The Author. Music Analysis, 33/iii (2014)

Music Analysis, 33/iii (2014) © 2014 The Author.

occur at or very near the end of a work. However, if we take Rachmaninoff

© 2014 The Author. Music Analysis, 33/iii (2014)

Rachmaninoff was ultimately a twentieth-century musician who performed

Theorising about the Point

Music Analysis, 33/iii (2014) © 2014 The Author.

liberation or release? The language of Shaginyan’s recounting is largely one of

• container, associated most strongly with metaphors involving space (inside/

The musical forces, operating on patterns of pitches and patterns of durations,

© 2014 The Author. Music Analysis, 33/iii (2014)

on other schemas when considering how a single location in a work may be

Music Analysis, 33/iii (2014) © 2014 The Author.

Ex. 2 ‘Extraordinary’ behaviour in relation to image schemas: (a) Breaking loose/

enlarged new boundary enlarged new boundary

(f) (g) development/enlargement

new balance (old centre of gravity) new centre of gravity

© 2014 The Author. Music Analysis, 33/iii (2014)

These hypothetical scenarios and many others can be imagined at a culmi-

Music Analysis, 33/iii (2014) © 2014 The Author.

abandonment of one structural-schematic situation in favour of a musical

‘Daisies’, Op. 38 No. 3 (1916)

© 2014 The Author. Music Analysis, 33/iii (2014)

Ex. 3a Analysis of Rachmaninoff, ‘Daisies’, Op. 38 No. 3

Ex. 3b Reversal of k in relation to centre-periphery schema and magnetism metaphor

E, setting up well in advance the seventh of the culminating F major-minor

Piano Concerto No. 3, Op. 30 (1909), First Movement

Music Analysis, 33/iii (2014) © 2014 The Author.

Ex. 5 Piano Concerto No. 3, first movement, first theme

© 2014 The Author. Music Analysis, 33/iii (2014)

Ex. 6 Piano Concerto No. 3, first movement, central climax

attraction. There is a kind of release as E locks into this hierarchically elevated

‘From the Gospel of St. John’ (1915)

Music Analysis, 33/iii (2014) © 2014 The Author.

© 2014 The Author. Music Analysis, 33/iii (2014)

Music Analysis, 33/iii (2014)

Ex. 8b Interaction of schemas

cycle intrudes dissonantly upon source-path-goal

Music Analysis © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Piano Sonata No. 2, Op. 36 (1913; rev. 1931), First Movement

© 2014 The Author. Music Analysis, 33/iii (2014)

Ex. 10 Piano Sonata No. 2, first movement, excerpts from coda

(b) Bars 136–138

Getting Back to the Point

Music Analysis, 33/iii (2014) © 2014 The Author.

Goals, Cycles and Containers at the Point

© 2014 The Author. Music Analysis, 33/iii (2014)

Ex. 12 Cycle, container and source-path-goal schemas in the Rhapsody’s large-scale

suggesting several obvious ways in which Variation XXII is special. As explained

Music Analysis, 33/iii (2014) © 2014 The Author.

Classical and Romantic variation sets become more obviously developmental as