22 RACHMANINOFF | PRELUDES What portrait of Rachmaninoff do these 24 Preludes paint? A portrait that remains incomplete, for one must also listen to his songs—his purely vocal and liturgical music. Traces of which can be perceived as an undercurrent in his Preludes, though its distinctive qualities, which reveal particular aspects of his personality, are not always fully explored. Yet the Preludes speak volumes about the man himself: elegant, at once discreet and reserved, yet warm and expansive in company. His music reflects this duality—at times intimate, at times impassioned. It embraces all the facets of the Russian soul, capable of exuberance and extroversion. Though Rachmaninoff sometimes felt the soul of a hermit in his rural solitude (“I believe there is something of the hermit in every Russian,” he wrote), he was never cut off from the human world around him, always surrounded by family and friends. A man of great emotional depth, Arthur Rubinstein said of him that he had “hands of bronze and a heart of gold.” That is so vividly perceptible in his Preludes.
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