Nicolas Medtner

His Life and Music

Barrie Martyn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138248953
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351556354
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Nicholas Medtner (1880-1951) has always been a neglected figure in the history of Russian music, and yet his friend Rachmaninoff considered him the greatest of contemporary composers. He wrote three fine piano concertos, more than one hundred solo piano compositions, including a cycle of fourteen sonatas fully worthy to be set alongside those of Scriabin and Prokofiev, and many beautiful songs. He was also a great pianist. Leaving Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, Medtner lived for a time in Germany and France before finally settling in London, where he passed the final sixteen years of his life. The present work is the first to tell the full story of his eventful life and to consider in turn each of his compositions. The author has drawn on Medtner's own correspondence and writings and collected the reminiscences of those who knew him personally to build a comprehensive picture of a great, if still largely unrecognised, musician.

1 1880−1900 Childhood and conservatoire

In 1721, towards the end of the reign of Peter the Great, the Baltic provinces were incorporated into the Russian Empire. Since the Middle Ages the area had been under the rule of a German landowning aristocracy, and henceforth the Baltic became Russia’s cultural and economic link with the West, its citizens in the course of time becoming bicultural and bilingual. Among the businessmen from northern Europe attracted there by the expansion of trade was the founding father of the Russian Medtner family.

According to tradition,¹ the Medtners had originated in Denmark but later settled in Schleswig-Holstein, from where they emigrated to Livonia (present-day Estonia) at the end of the 18th or the beginning of the 19th century, acquiring citizenship and establishing themselves at Pärnu, a seaport on the Baltic coast. Two generations later the composer’s grand-father moved to Moscow, where he married the daughter of a German Lutheran immigrant of Spanish descent. Their son, Nicolas’s father, despite his Moscow residency and membership of the Moscow guild of merchants, for official purposes remained a citizen of Pärnu and continued to pay taxes to the town authorities.

Musical talent, a love of literature and the cultivation of intellectual pursuits were the common inheritance of the composer’s mother’s side of the family. Medtner’s maternal great-grandfather, Friedrich Gebhard, was a particularly remarkable character. Born in Thuringia in 1769, he studied theology and music as a young man but then suddenly dropped everything to join a troupe of wandering actors. Making his way to Riga, he ran off with the daughter of a Baltic baron and then fled to St Petersburg, where he and his wife appeared as both actors and singers at the two court theatres. He wrote plays and poetry − two volumes of his works were published in Leipzig in 1826 − and, prophetically for the Medtner story, he worshipped Goethe, whom he may have met and with whom he almost certainly corresponded.

The Gebhard children seem to have inherited their parents’ artistic talent. Minna was a gifted miniature portrait painter and Fyodor a composer of German lieder, including settings of Goethe that were among the music collection in the Medtner household. Polina Gebhard, a coloratura soprano reputed to have performed Mozart especially well, became a well-known singing teacher in Moscow. A friend of the cellist and later Director of the St Petersburg Conservatoire, Karl Davydov, of Balakirev’s piano teacher, Alexandre Dubuque, and of the Old Lion himself, Anton Rubinstein, Polina became the wife of Karl Andreyevich Goedicke and subsequently Nicolas’s grandmother.

The Goedickes, emigrants from Pomerania in northern Germany but originally probably from Sweden, were yet another Lutheran immigrant family who followed the Baltic route to Russia at about the same time as the Medtners and Gebhards. They were scholars, teachers, musicians − particularly organists. Karl Andreyevich himself, a friend of the expatriate Irish inventor of Nocturnes, John Field, and well-known in Moscow as a teacher and conductor, was an occasional composer.² Despite his Protestantism he was organist at the French Catholic church in Moscow, as was his son Fyodor, who taught piano at the Conservatoire. Fyodor’s own son, Alexander, became the most famous of the musical Goedickes. Starting his career as an outstanding concert pianist, he followed the family tradition in becoming Russia’s most distinguished organist. Above all else, however, he was a composer, whose substantial oeuvre, written in a conservative and academic style, made no distinctive or lasting impression on the turbulent history of 20th-century Russian music, and which, apart from some delightful piano pieces for children, still awaits discovery.

The Medtner and Goedicke families were united through the marriage of Karl Petrovich Medtner and Alexandra Karlovna Goedicke. The cultural interests of the pair were complementary, on one side literary and intellectual, on the other musical. Karl was a widely-read man, since his youth devoted to poetry and philosophy. He loved German and Russian literature in equal measure, though, like his wife’s grandfather, harboured a particular passion for Goethe.³ The theatre was another of his enthusiasms; in the evenings after work he would read and translate plays and poetry. Alexandra, on the other hand, had inherited the Goedicke musical talent; she played the piano and in her youth had appeared as a singer.⁴

Karl Medtner’s success in business − he was the managing director of a Moscow lace factory − enabled him to bring up his family in comfortable bourgeois circumstances, in which his own and his wife’s enthusiasm for culture was passed on to their children. The consciously intellectual atmosphere in the home undoubtedly developed minds and tastes but, remote as it was from the stark realities of everyday life outside, it no doubt encouraged in the children a certain unworldliness. It was into this highly cultured environment that Nicolas Medtner was born on 24 December 1879 ‘old style’ or, according to the western calendar, 5 January 1880.

The Medtners had six children in all, five sons and a daughter. Nicolas was the fifth child, but because his younger brother, Vladimir, died in early childhood, during the impressionable years of adolescence he was the youngest in the family. Playmate of his sister, Sofiya, just two years his senior, he was indulged by his parents and influenced by his elder brothers, all of whom had exceptional minds and strong personalities. Karl, who was singled out to carry on his father’s business, had a passion for the theatre and was also active in Moscow literary and philosophic circles; Alexander loved music, which led to a professional musical career as a violin and viola player and as a teacher and conductor; and Emil, who possessed perhaps the most remarkable intellect of all the brothers, interested himself in every aspect of art and thought. He was particularly devoted to German culture, Goethe above all, to philosophy in which he was greatly influenced by Nietzsche, and later to psychology; he became both leader of the cult of Wagner in Russia and guiding spirit of the Moscow symbolist poets. As eldest brother, he exercised a profound influence on the formation of Nicolas’s tastes and attitudes.

Nicolas showed an early aptitude for music and his mother began piano lessons with him at the age of six.⁵ Such was his fascination with the instrument that at meal times he had physically to be torn away from it. His brother Alexander was at this time learning to play the violin and in due course, simply by observing him practise, Nicolas too picked up the rudiments of the instrument. Eventually he became sufficiently competent not only to make music at home in an ensemble with his brother, his cousin Alexander Goedicke and other childhood friends, but to take his place with them in a 60-piece children’s orchestra, founded in 1888 by a Moscow music teacher, Anatoly Erarsky, which played arrangements of Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Liadov, Arensky and Schumann, and whose performances were impressive enough to be attended at different times by Tchaikovsky, Taneyev and Rimsky-Korsakov.⁶ Meanwhile his musical horizons were further widened by attending orchestral concerts of the Russian Musical Society, to which his mother subscribed and to which she invariably took her children.

Nicolas had already begun to improvise and compose. According to the composer’s wife, reporting the family tradition more than 60 years later, ‘the boy covered with music every bit of paper he could lay hold of. It was, however, to the piano that he turned to express the music that was in him.’⁷ His progress at the keyboard was rapid, and when he was nine or ten⁸ his mother asked her brother, Fyodor Goedicke, to take charge of this aspect of his education. With a precocious but characteristic assertion of individuality, Nicolas would have nothing to do with ‘Children’s music’ but demanded instead Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Scarlatti,⁹ a profound love of whose work remained with him throughout his life.

At the same time he began his general education as a pupil at a gymnasium, but his attendance there lasted no more than two years. One day in 1892 he returned home from school, threw down his books and, declaring that from that time on he intended to devote himself exclusively to music, demanded to be enrolled at the Moscow Conservatoire. His parents reacted angrily, never dreaming that their son might wish to become a professional musician, but at the ensuing family conference his brother Emil, then preparing to go up to Moscow University to read law, took Nicolas’s side, urging forcefully that the proper development of his obvious musical gifts required special training. His case was doubtless helped by the fact that Alexander Goedicke, two years Nicolas’s senior, was making a similar move from gymnasium to conservatoire that same year. Emil won the argument and the Medtners gave in. Expertly prepared by his uncle, himself on the staff of the Conservatoire for more than a decade, the boy passed the entry test and so began his studies in the very year in which two other composer-pianists whose careers were to overshadow his own left the Conservatoire as graduates - Rachmaninoff and Scriabin.

By the time the 12-year-old Medtner ente...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of plates
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 1880–1900 Childhood and conservatoire
• 2 1900–1903 Start of a career
• 3 1903–1906 Personal turmoil
• 4 1906–1909 German sojourn
• 5 1909–1911 Conservatoire professor
• 6 1911–1914 Friends and critics
• 7 1914–1917 War
• 8 1917–1921 Revolution
• 9 1921–1925 A life abroad
• 10 1925–1927 Return to Russia
• 11 1927–1930 Britain and America
• 12 1930–1935 The Muse and the Fashion
• 13 1935–1939 Move to England
• 14 1939–1945 Second World War
• 15 1945–1951 Indian fairy tale
• Notes
• Index of Medtner’s works
• Index of persons and of works referred to in the text