In the long history of art there are those, who, living before their time, have been mainly ignored or derided. Others, like Dussek, have all unknowing, anticipated something of the composers to come. Yet another, like Mozart (the least original Great Master), by adding to and enriching the music of his age, has brought it to a noble climax.

Conversely, there are others, who, fancying they can ignore the past, experiment with artificial formulae in a vain endeavour to by-pass evolution.

The music of Sergei Rachmaninoff has remained up to the present day a controversial matter over which there has been little actual controversy. I do not mean to suggest that his music is, or ever has been, subject-matter for the battle cry of advance-guard partisanship, but I do submit that the music has achieved an authentic, international popularity that has nothing to do with mere vogue; and that, from the critic's point-of-view, a consistently popular composer, good or bad, is automatically an important one. Actually, Rachmaninoff spent a good part of his life by-passing the pressing issues of this century's “modern” musical thought—not in terms of belligerent reaction but, as the music to 1917 suggests, simply by ignoring it. In a similar way the twentieth-century critical mind has ignored him. The works on which his popularity rests, although typical enough, are far from his most progressive; they tell, really, only a part of the story.

Alone almost of all instruments, the piano represents a kind of abstraction; it is an impersonal and veritable machine for producing sound, complaisant to all touches, seeming to require only a lever set in motion to create an effect. In other instruments, their function itself defines their nature. They have an intrinsic life of their own which even the merest beginner must somehow evoke. This fundamental nature of an instrument determines ultimately its aesthetic. The demands which the more comprehensive aesthetic of the composer impose on the instrument may force an extension of its capacities but can never nullify them. And so a composer learning to instrumentate can do no better than to acquire at the hands of a practising musician an exposition of the instrument's capacities. A masterful score will liven his imaginative use of them, just as a poet's mastery of diction will freshen one's sense of words. The vocabulary, however, is given.

Such was, in substance, one of the most typical replies of Rachmaninoff to his friends, acquaintances, casual visitors and press interviewers, who used to question him year after year about his attitude toward modern music. Naturally, the phraseology and the “tone” of his reply varied in each instance, but its essence remained, under all circumstances, the same.

Critical evaluation of Rachmaninoff's music has been considerable and varied, with both laymen and professional musicians often at swords'-points with regard to the work of the late Russian master. One unfortunate feature of this controversy is that by far the greater attention is paid to the composer's larger pieces, with little consideration given to his most representative and perhaps his finest output—his songs, a situation which extends also to the listening experience of the general public.

Rachmaninoff's popular fame as a composer was supported until the last few years of his life by a rough half dozen compositions comprising but a small fraction of his total output. A graceful compliment paid to Rachmaninoff the pianist by Arthur Rubinstein may partially account for this fact. In a recent radio interview Mr. Rubinstein explained the former infrequency of his performances of Rachmaninoff's music by confessing that while the composer lived he had felt somewhat reluctant to interpret music which Rachmaninoff himself presented with supreme authority. Other performers have been similarly affected by the sovereign authority of the composer as both pianist and conductor. When, in combination with this possibility, we recall Rachmaninoff's disinclination to charge his concert programmes too heavily with his own works, we have perhaps a partial explanation of why more of his compositions did not share the popularity of the few.