The Church-Singing Canon and its Author's Embodiment in Sergey Rachmaninov's Church Compositions
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Abstract
The article is devoted to the style of church compositions by Sergey Rachmaninov, from the early spiritual concert “The Feast of the Dormition of the Most Holy Theotokos” to large-scale choral cycles a cappella: “The Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom” (Op. 31) and “All-Night Vigil” (Op. 37). It is considered the main elements of the Orthodox church-singing canon and the criteria for the canonicity of church compositions during the composer’s lifetime. The article touches upon the issues of the canonical and the authorial in Rachmaninov’s liturgical opuses correlation, the permissibility of performing certain compositions on the liturgical text in the church. The starting point in the arguments is the Christian system of ideas about knowledge, which includes church singing. The Church-singing canon, as a system of creativity, not only clearly delineates the boundaries of the author’s free will, but also assumes creativity within these boundaries, welcomes diversity and variation – both in time and space. It is noted that S.V. Rachmaninov’s spiritual works appeared under the influence of the “New Direction” ideas, on the one hand, under the sign of the Russian Spiritual Renaissance (N.A. Berdyaev) on the turn of the XIX–XX centuries, on the other one. Concrete examples show how the composer managed to find a balance between the unshakable postulates of the Orthodox church-singing canon and the absolute creative freedom of the author – an Orthodox Christian.
Keywords: Rachmaninov, Style, Church Compositions, Church-singing Canon, Religiosity, Liturgy, The All-Night Vigil, Sacred Concert.
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