20 RACHMANINOFF | PRELUDES You just mentioned bells, as you did earlier with country churches. Can you tell us more about their presence in Rachmaninoff's music, particularly in his Preludes? Chimes and bronze bells are omnipresent. They are everywhere in the Preludes, starting with Opus 3. As a child, Rachmaninoff heard the bells of St. Sophia in Nowgorod Cathedral when his grandmother took him there. For him, they were more than just religious symbols. They were part of his familiar landscape, as if integrated into nature, inseparable from it. The only human intrusion in the Russian countryside they were the sound of the landscape, along with the sound of the wind in the fields of wheat. They resonated on the horizon. He recreated this soundscape in his music, a space rich in harmonics.
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