Off‐Tonic Culmination in Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini

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 orientation, 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 physically 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.