Rachmaninov, hypnosis and the birth of the unconscious
The composer’s crippling writer’s block – now the subject of a play – prompted a creative revolution, says Ivan Hewett
The most celebrated case of “writer’s block” in musical history has been turned into a musical. Dave Molloy, a writer and composer with a passion for Russian topics, is focusing on Sergei Rachmaninov. His musical Preludes (which premiered off Broadway in 2015) deals with a traumatic episode early in the composer-pianist’s career. As the publicity for the production says, “Rachmaninov had it all; worldwide fame from a single composition by the age of 19, commissioned to write his first symphony at 20 and engaged to the love of his life, Natalya. But at 21, he is crippled with a depressive paranoia and anxiety. His world has imploded, his work has stopped, he cannot even lift a pencil to compose a simple melody. Such is the power of the men who sought to destroy him, who haunt his waking nightmares and poison his dreams.”
The evil men were the critics who trashed the premiere of that
1st Symphony in 1897, which was Rachmaninov’s most ambitious piece to date, and it caused a crisis of confidence in the 20-year-old composer. Fortunately, the effects weren’t permanent, thanks to a course of treatment with a hypnotherapist, Dr Nikolai Dahl – surely the first occasion in history when a great creative artist was helped by unlocking the powers of the unconscious mind. Rachmaninov went on to become one of the bestloved composers and pianists in
history. The piece Rachmaninov dedicated to the hypnotherapist, the 2nd Piano Concerto, is perhaps the most popular in the repertoire.
In all it’s a rattling good yarn, which plays up to one of the great stock characters of romantic fiction; the misunderstood genius who’s laid low by small-minded envious people but claws his way back. It also has some basis in fact. The premiere of the 1st Symphony was certainly a disaster, partly because composer Alexander Glazunov conducted Rachmaninov’s extraordinarily passionate piece with somnolent indifference (Natalya thought he was drunk). And it’s true there were many damning comments, especially from the self-important but fifth-rate composer César Cui, who said it was like a portrayal of the Seven Plagues of Egypt. Rachmaninov in later life looked back on it as the worst day of his life. Of the performance, he said: “Sometimes I stuck my fingers in my ears to prevent myself from hearing my own music, the discords of which tortured me. No sooner had the last chords died away than I fled, horrified, into the street… All my hopes, all my belief in myself, had been destroyed.” Afterwards he sunk into a depression. “My confidence in myself had received a sudden blow… I did nothing at all and found no pleasure in anything. Half my days were spent lying on a couch and sighing over my ruined life… This condition which was tiresome for myself as for those about me, lasted more than a year. I did not live, I vegetated, idle and hopeless.”
But Rachmaninov did have a tendency to self-dramatisation. True, he had a depressive side. One of his schoolmates later remembered a boy who was “very pensive, even gloomy. He wanted to be alone, and would walk about with his head lowered…” But the facts don’t bear out the composer’s portrait of someone prostrate with grief. Shortly after the premiere he was invited to become assistant conductor of a new privately funded opera company in Moscow, and wrote letters home which showed he was clearly having a ball. It seems that periods of depression, hinted at in Rachmaninov’s letters of the period, alternated with periods of manic activity.
So his creative powers were not completely extinguished, but he certainly had trouble getting down to serious, large-scale composing. Eventually, one of the many high-born ladies who fussed over Rachmaninov decided he wasn’t living up to his genius, and urged him to get in touch with Dahl. Hypnotherapy was at that time the fashionable cure of the welloff, and Rachmaninov obediently went along, telling Dr Dahl he needed help with completing a piano concerto for London. “I heard the same hypnotic formula repeated day after day,” he tells us, “while I lay half asleep in Dahl’s study. ‘You will begin to write your concerto… you will work with great facility… the concerto will be of great quality…’ It was always the same, without interruption. Although it may sound incredible, this cure really helped me.”
This doesn’t quite ring true; hypnotherapists didn’t use such a prescriptive form of words. Geoffrey Norris, a Rachmaninov scholar (and one-time chief music critic of this newspaper) feels the hypnotherapy aspect has been overplayed. Not much is known about Dahl, apart from the fact that he was a surgeon who became fascinated with the hypnotism techniques then being pioneered in France by, among others, Hippolyte Bernheim, who had a profound influence on Sigmund Freud. Dahl then gave up medical practice to become a full-time hypnotherapist. He and Rachmaninov would go on country walks together, and the chance to talk to a sympathetic listener was probably just as helpful as Dahl’s therapeutic skills. But even if hypnotherapy only played a minor role, it was still significant in unlocking Rachmaninov’s creative gift. His story is important because it shows the first stirrings of the idea that creativity has its roots in the unconscious part of the mind.
The evidence for that in music was already around, in anecdotes about the mysterious promptings of the unconscious in dreams. There was the set of variations for piano composed by Robert Schumann in 1854, just before his final mental breakdown, which the composer said was dictated to him in a dream by angels and, most striking of all, there is the story
Schumann said that a set of his piano variations were dictated to him in a dream by angels
of Wagner’s long search for the right music to begin The Ring of the Nibelung. The long chord of E flat major, rising up as if from the depths of the Rhine, finally came to him when he fell asleep one afternoon.
These scattered hints about a hidden side of the mind would soon be given a proper intellectual grounding in Freud’s theories about the unconscious. These were being formulated even while Rachmaninov was undergoing his treatment – Freud’s epoch-making The Interpretation of Dreams was published two years later, in 1899. The story of Rachmaninov’s rescue from creative impotence is a moving one, but it’s also a symbolic moment in the emergence of a new approach to composition.
Ironically, Freud detested most music, writing that “I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure [from it]”, but his unleashing of the unconscious has had an effect on composers ever since. Rachmaninov’s work was still comfortingly romantic, but the nightmare expressionist world of Arnold Schoenberg was only just around the corner. Gustav Mahler, who once sought the help of the psychoanalyst, seemed to muster other-worldly forces for his (final) 9th Symphony, while later in the 20th century, Michael Tippett, a keen student of Karl Jung, realised his dreams had a powerful effect on his own composition. The controlling mind which dominated music for centuries has been bypassed – and artists are now freely in tune with that more mystical part of their minds.