Rachmaninoff All-Night Vigil (Vespers)

Tonight’s Vsenoshchnoye Bdeniye (Opus 37, 1915) by Sergei Vassilievich Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) is often referred to as his “Vespers” from a lack of familiarity with the Russian Orthodox liturgy. It is more proper to call it his “All-Night Vigil” as it is in fact a setting of the ordinary portions of that service. An all-night vigil is celebrated on the eve of great feasts of the church. The name of the service reflects the fact that in the traditional church it lasted all through the night, from vespers at dusk through midnight matins until prime at dawn.

Rachmaninoff’s other liturgical works are few, just several short pieces and the Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, a setting of the most widely used service in Orthodoxy.

In the mid-19th century, artists of the Russian nationalist movement attempted to restore the indigeous elements of Russian tradition. The composers studied ancient chants for their melodies, modal harmonies, and subordination of rhythm to textual accents. The Moscow Synodal School vigorously promoted liturgical music that combined modern techniques with the ancient chants, and in March of 1915, it was the Moscow Synodal Choir that gave Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil its premiere performance.

The work is a well-refined synthesis of the musical goals of the period and is a wonderfully strange blending of melodic and harmonic elements. Rachmaninoff has incorporated chant into polyphony in a highly sophisticated form, allowing the chant to wander from voice to voice, freely elaborating within a harmonic context, while respecting its modal, as well as its melodic qualities.

He has drawn from a wide range of ancient sources. Of the fifteen movements that comprise the work, two (numbers 4, and 5) are based on Kiev chant, two (numbers 2 and 15) on Greek chant, and six (numbers 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, and 14) on znamenny chant. The chants in the other five movements (numbers 1, 3, 6, 10, and 11) are of Rachmaninoff’s own composition.

Like Tchaikovsky before him, Rachmaninoff has struggled to stay within, or close to, the formidable demands of the liturgical tradition, for example, the ban on musical instruments of any kind and the rhythmic supremacy of the text. At the same time, one feels the presence of more modern techniques and styles in the deliberate doubling of certain registers for unusual effects (as in number 12), in the orchestral organization of the chorus, and in the large proportions of each movement. Like Bach’s B Minor Mass or Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, the whole piece seems clearly to have been written with more than liturgical use in mind.