Nikolai Medtner

A Russian exile who built sonatas and tales like closed architecture

Related

ModernPianoSonata Form

Who he was

Nikolai Medtner (1880–1951) was born in Moscow and died in London. He trained in piano and strict counterpoint at the Moscow Conservatory and won the Rubinstein Prize in 1900. After the revolution he left Russia in 1921, lived first in Germany, then in Paris from 1925 to 1935, and finally settled in London. He was a friend of Rachmaninoff, who played and supported his music. He died in London in 1951.

His place

He belonged to the last Romantic generation of Russian composers and moved against it. Where Stravinsky and Prokofiev experimented outward, Medtner contracted inward, holding to sonata form, key and singable melody. He wrote fourteen piano sonatas, three concertos and ten sets of Tales, almost exclusively for the piano. In 1935 he published The Muse and the Fashion, a dialogue attacking modernism and arguing that music obeys fixed laws. The book made his name in the English-speaking world and fixed his reputation as a conservative.

What to hear

Listen first for the working of motifs. The one-movement Sonata Op.22 is driven by a few short motifs while the melody stays on the surface; hear the bass and inner voices repeat those cells. Then the telling of a Tale. The two pieces of Op.8 are brief, opening like speech, accelerating in the middle and returning to the pitch where they began. Then the endurance of sequence. In Op.26 one phrase is pushed upward many times, and the harmony finds a new support at each step while the tune refuses to break. Finally late density. The Sonata romantica Op.53 No.1 stacks counterpoint against octaves; hear how a long phrase keeps its direction inside a thick texture.

Key works

• Piano: fourteen sonatas, ten sets of Tales, three volumes of Forgotten Melodies
• Concertos: three for piano and orchestra
• Vocal: songs to Goethe and Pushkin
• Writings: The Muse and the Fashion

Influence

Few heard his music in his lifetime, and it reached English and American halls through Rachmaninoff's advocacy. He treated the sonata as a belief rather than a formal exercise, and that has mattered to the pianists who rediscovered him. Recordings have multiplied in recent decades, and his reputation has moved from shadow of Rachmaninoff to an independent contrapuntal mind. He left no school, but the Tales became a small self-contained genre that pianists keep adding to recitals.

Sources

• 梅特纳生平、莫斯科音乐学院训练与伦敦晚年，参 The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 的 Medtner 条目，本文为原创表述
• 《童话》与钢琴奏鸣曲的写作背景，参通行梅特纳研究，实例说明由本站撰写

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.