This document identifies elements of a stylistic change which occurred in several of the pieces Rachmaninoff wrote during the last years of his life. These elements reflect a progressive trend in his music, which certainly maintained in spite of the change, its characteristic sound. The Variations on a Theme of Corelli, Op. 42 illustrate these new developments in their lean, angular unison sonorities, stripped of chordal padding and virtuosic display, in their percussive, staccato and incisive ostinato rhythmic figures, astringent chromatic harmony and modern air of detachment. The Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43 confirms this stylistic development in its remarkable similarity to the Corelli Variations. In the last twenty-six years of his life in exile from his homeland, making his way around the world as a concert pianist, Rachmaninoff wrote only six major works. Perhaps his increasing age, separation from homeland, and the musical revolutions surrounding him in the Western world produced this stylistic development.

Born April 2, 1873, on the estate of Oneg in the province of Novgorod, Russia, Sergei Vassilyvitch Rachmaninoff was the fifth of the six children of Vassili and Lyoubov Boutakova Rachmaninoff. Rachmaninoff's aristocratic descent was traced to the Hospodars Dragosh, rulers of the realm of Molday from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. One of the daughters from this family had married a son of the Grand Duke Ivan III of Moscow. The son's nephew was named Rachmanin, and from this source the family name originated.1 Rachmaninoff's mother was the daughter of a general, head of Araktcheyev Military College in Novgorod and the owner of a number of estates in the district. It was with a dowry of five of these estates that Lyoubov Boutakova married Vassili Rachmaninoff, and on one of these estates, Oneg, the couple settled down to married life.

This study uses Bergson's concepts of duration and spontaneous (now termed episodic) memory to reveal how musical material in Rachmaninoff's Prelude Op. 32 No. 10 in B Minor (1910) turns back on itself in recurring remembrances of its own past, bringing the listener out of ordinary time; a process that mirrors themes both from Rachmaninoff's life, and Arnold Böcklin's Die Heimkehr, the painting that inspired this piece. Time perception slows or even suspends when one reflects on the past, either a personal past or the historical past. Musical material in the Prelude undergoes analogous time warps. In conversation with Bergson's ideas, this study illustrates the unique temporal qualities in the musical language of the Prelude, for which standard forms of analysis fail to completely capture the essence. The overall aim is to demonstrate Rachmaninoff's idiosyncratic approach to piano writing, which many have discredited as anachronistic. This study suggests a new methodology – Bergsonian musical analysis – with which to understand the concealed innovations in Rachmaninoff's piano idiom. This study of Rachmaninoff's B Minor Prelude builds on publications concerning other Bergsonian interpretations of music in pursuing a thorough investigation of one work and its relationship with broader issues in philosophy and visual art. The result is a theoretical engagement with the Prelude that establishes a new methodology to deal with Rachmaninoff's piano idiom in general. A Bergsonian analytical technique reveals the real artistry behind Rachmaninoff's compositions – not just remnants of some past romantic idiom, but an idiosyncratic musical grappling with the nature of time and memory.

Sergei Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto is one of the most frequently performed and beloved works. It is ironic that, however, despite its huge popularity, there are not many in-depth studies of this concerto, offering pianists few opportunities to examine the work from an analytical perspective. The detailed analysis presented in this study reveals that the main structure of this concerto is directly related to a motto comprising three-notes, designated the 6-5-1 motto. In his use of this motto in the Second Piano Concerto, Rachmaninoff was profoundly influenced by the German-born composer Adolf von Henselt. Indeed, while von Henselt's importance for Russian music has been generally recognized, his impact, especially upon Rachmaninoff, has received insufficient attention in the scholarly literature. This study also examines Henselt's Piano Concerto Op. 16 in depth in order to demonstrate how Rachmaninoff's masterwork relates to its precursor. Additional studies of the 6-5-1 motto in European compositions from the nineteenth century trace the motto's origins.