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
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 well-
off, 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 aprescriptive 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 storyof 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.A masterclass in self-parody from
grande dame Catherine Deneuve
T
he truth hurts, so they say – and
in The Truth it’s like toothache;
an ambient nag that waits for
the worst possible moment to twinge.
The new film from Hirokazu Kore-eda- his first since last year’s tremendous
Shoplifters, which took the Palme
d’Or at Cannes – is a keenly observed,
wit-stippled drama of extended
family life. Opening this year’s turbo-
charged Venice Film Festival last
night (forthcoming highlights include
sci-fi epic Ad Astra and controversy-
baiting comic book, Joker), it felt like
business as usual for the great Japanese
director – although for the first time,
this business was being conducted in
English and French.
The first film Kore-eda has shot
outside his homeland, The Truth
unfolds in a pointedly autumnal Paris,
where Fabienne, a none-grander
dame of French cinema gamely and
self-satirisingly played by Catherine
Deneuve, is about to publish her tell-all
memoir. Her daughter Lumir (Juliette
Binoche), on a rare visit from the US
with her actor husband Hank (Ethan
Hawke) and their daughter Charlotte
(Clémentine Grenier), leafs through it
and is dismayed by what she reads – not
because it’s too candid, but nowhere
near candid enough.
Fabienne’s book is awash with
omissions and self-serving confections,
from made-up mother-daughter
bonding to killing off her ex-husband
and Lumir’s father, Pierre (he’s still
alive, and pops over). It also glosses
over a significant figure: Sarah, a now-
deceased actress she once cheated out
of a career-topping role by seducing
the director. But in her current gig –
an oddball sci-fi in which she plays
the elderly daughter of a woman whodoesn’t age – she appears alongside a
talented rising starlet (Manon Clavel),
who reminds almost everyone of Sarah
in her youth.
Fabienne disputes the likeness,
but it has her rattled. “I keep growing
older while she stays the same age,”
she says irritably – in reference to their
work, but also her yet-to-be-finalised
image, compared to that of her rival
and friend.
As ever with Kore-eda, The Truth is
a film of beautifully turned moments,
from the way Deneuve quietly steelsherself with a cigarette to glances
swapped by Binoche and Hawke. As for
the potentially troublesome language
barrier, Kore-eda twists it to his
characters’ advantage, whose differing
linguistic abilities allow them to mask
sentiments and confer privately in
public. (Hawke, the all-American
monoglot, is repeatedly left high and
dry in a nicely written and typically
mouth-watering dinner scene that
serves as a dramatic centrepiece.)
Yet the film defaults to gentle
comedy too often, and feels afraid to
dig deep into its underlying themes to
draw blood. Fabienne wisecracks about
old colleagues and reflects on mistakes,
but there’s little sense she is reckoning
with a legacy in the way Binoche did in
Clouds of Sils Maria. That superb 2014
film laced engrossing existential riddles
through its playful backstage drama –
and as such, couldn’t have been further
from The Truth.Ven ic e F i l m Fe st iva lThe Truth
Cert TBC, 106 min★★★★★
Dir Hirokazu Kore-eda
Starring Catherine Deneuve, Juliette
Binoche, Ethan Hawke, Clémentine
Grenier, Manon Clavel, Alain Libolt,
Christian Crahay, Roger van HoolBy Robbie CollinMother-daughter bonding: Juliette Binoche and Catherine DeneuveT
he 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 best-
loved 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 GETTY IMAGES; NYTNS/REDUX/EYEVINElater 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 operaPreludes opens at Southwark Playhouse,
London SE1, on Sept 6. Tickets: 020
7407 0234; southwarkplayhouse.co.ukThe Truth will be released in the UK
next yearMind over matter:
Rachmaninov used
hypnotherapy
to lift his artistic
impotence. Left,
the off-Broadway
production of
PreludesSchumann said that a
set of his piano variationswere dictated to him
in a dream by angelsArts
The film defaults to gentle
comedy too often and
feels afraid to draw blood24 ***^ Thursday 29 August 2019 The Daily Telegraph
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