Music and Psychoanalysis. Rachmaninoff

Music and Psychoanalysis. Rachmaninoff

Introduction: SHINE, THE TRAGIC LIFE OF DAVID HELFGOTT

Biographical films often exemplify how reality surpasses fiction, with plots so incredible and unconventional that they might never have crossed an artist’s mind. But if we think about it, cinema will always draw on elements from real-life contexts, whether to inspire, critique, or transform life as we know it.

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In this vein, Ugandan director Scott Hicks, with his film Shine (1996), adheres to this paradigm, portraying the life of the renowned Australian pianist David Helfgott; famous for his virtuosity, but also known for his tragic existence. Hicks, on this occasion, had in his hands one of those stories of real misfortunes that border on the imaginative, almost like a work of cinematic fiction; however, unfortunately for our protagonist, this was his biography.

David Helfgott is a child prodigy, a piano virtuoso, born in Australia to a Polish Jewish family. On his instrument, he is a Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a being who has transcended his art; he is as much a part of Franz Liszt or Frédéric Chopin, and even a Niccolò Paganini at the keyboard.

However, his fortune and life were never directly proportional to his talent. Sadly, we’re talking about a young David, played by Alex Rafalowicz, who has suffered the consequences of his father Peter Helfgott’s (Armin Mueller-Stahl) twisted demands. Helfgott was obsessed with creating an extraordinary and virtuosic pianist; an objective he, for better or worse, achieved.

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Shine, presented in a non-linear fashion, shows us a young David Helfgott (Noah Taylor), whose father’s abuse had instilled fear and resentment in his heart. Skilled at the piano, with the help of his teacher Ben Rusen (Nicholas Bell), he wins competitions and accolades that attract the attention of several prestigious institutions, including the Royal Conservatoire in London.

At one point, David, driven by the impetuousness and energy of youth, decided to defy his father and leave for London, where his dreams lay, thus ensuring a lifelong enmity between them. But it was too late; irreversible damage had been done. Peter’s mental abuse, while it had forged a genius in him, had stunted him forever.

The film also shows us the adult David, played by a moving Geoffrey Bush, with a mental illness that, despite its severity, doesn’t limit him as a performer, although it does keep him away from the stage for many years and prevents him from being an active member of society. However, not everything is bleak for the genius, and the understanding love of a woman will be able to bring some normalcy back to his life and return him to society as the great musician he is.

In addition to delighting us with Geoffrey Bush’s wonderful and emotional performance, the film seduces us with the exquisite selection of musical pieces, such as F. Chopin’s energetic Heroic Polonaise , F. Liszt’s dynamic Hungarian Rhapsody , and S. Rachmaninoff’s unbeatable Piano Concerto No. 3.

A film brimming with contrasting stories, showcasing triumphs, losses, love, and heartbreak. Scott Hicks masterfully captures the life of the celebrated Australian pianist on screen with all the charm and character that life deserves. An engaging, vibrant, and touching film that, beyond the tragedy, leaves you captivated by the extraordinary circumstances of reality.

Preface:

The presentation of this paper has allowed the SML Team to elaborate some reflections on music as a language and as a text in relation to psychosis. A language that as such is at the origin of the symbolic capacity, the dimension that structures the subject by providing it with psychic continuity. For this communication, we have chosen as a text the Concerto No. 3 for Piano and Orchestra by Rachmaninoff, a Russian composer of the twentieth century who was distinguished by the technical virtuosity of his works and his great capacity for expression.

We choose this 3rd Rachmaninoff concert in the first place because of how shocking it was to meet him, and because it is moving. Another reason for choosing it is the key significance it had in the musical career of a great current piano player who fell into psychosis, and of which we will see a few minutes of the performance of this concerto. This pianist is David Helfgott, an Australian performer who was very close to the 3rd concert because it was the one chosen by his father to achieve success as a musician, “the most difficult piece that exists” as they both said.

This play represents the narcissistic and maddening bond that led David to psychotic bankruptcy. Our interest in music coincides with the interest that most psychotics have in it. We have had the opportunity to see how music is the art form most appreciated by all patients, from the most unstructured to the healthiest, and the ease with which they are linked to it almost immediately, while with the help of the musician we have been able to use other forms of art seem to have to make an effort of abstraction which depends more on the individual development of each one.

Rachmaninoff

Sergei Vasilevich Rachmaninoff was a Russian musician who lived between 1873 and 1943 and 1943, as a composer, piano player and conductor. He was “everything” as was typical of the authors of romanticism, the composer was the maximum divinized figure, he created very personal works for which the figure of the conductor of orchestra (born in romanticism) became essential and where he shares this divinity with a soloist who contributes his personal feeling in the interpretation (in the previous classical era everything was specified so that the interpretation was minimal). Like most works of art, Rachmaninoff”s compositions resist historical pigeonholing.

His work does not adhere to the historical period in which he lived, but unlike other artists the reason was not that he was opening the way, ahead, showing new dimensions , but quite the opposite; Rachmaninoff seemed to be a romantic outside of romanticism. While his contemporaries developed contemporary music, he followed the canons of the Romantic era, which was the time of his childhood and youth, in which he trained as a musician. He deliberately gave up integrating himself into the currents of contemporary music when, to give you an idea, authors such as Schoenberg or Stravinsky were already successful.

Regarding the structure of romantic music, it can told that composers were able to express a series of feelings that had no place in the previous classical era, such as the expression of conflict and of its resolution or not. Classical music tried to convey beauty and harmony, pleasure and taste, a round but risk-free impression. With romantic music, on a basis of harmony that was intended to be preserved, the authors were able to introduce new feelings, something to be resolved that has to do with unsatisfied desire and overflowing passion.

Romantics such as Rachmaninoff respected the previous harmonic structure but introduced ruptures that expressed much more human, more subjective feelings, less of the Self, less of the imaginary. However, although the author”s musical training was romantic, the majority of his life took place in the contemporary era, a time when composers risked breaking all the norms, renounced the previous structure, harmony, to create new dissonant structures much closer to anguish, to the disturbing and sometimes to boredom.

This anachronism of Rachmaninoff, his great capacity for expression and the level of technical difficulty of his works seem to be the most remarkable features of his work. However, he did not renounce his uniqueness and, while the others tried to classify him as romantic, Russian nationalist, conservative and virtuoso, he resisted as a subject with statements of this type:

I am not a composer who produces his works according to the formulas of preconceived theories. I have always felt that music should be the expression of the composer’s complex personality; it must not be made cerebrally, with the exact measurement made to fit certain pre-established molds. My music is the product of my nature and is therefore Russian music; I never consciously try to write Russian music, or any other kind of music. If the epoch does not lend itself to musical expression, composers should remain silent before making music that is thought and not felt.

Rachmaninoff composed to express what he felt in the simplest and clearest way, and the romantic structure seemed the most suitable for representing these feelings. His music revolves around an axis of melancholy, it develops passionately but always around that background of sadness. Biographers speak of his exile from 1918 until his death in 1943 as the reason for so much melancholy, but Rachmaninoff already went through a severe depressive crisis before leaving Russia, which lasted for years.

The truth is that his music remains through the years in his initial project , before leaving Russia, without being affected by the fashion of the time success, or criticism. Rachmaninoff was a serious, serious and familiar man who consciously avoided paying attention to the criticism and social relations that existed around his music.

The Concert

Now, we would like you to pay attention to some scenes from the film entitled Shine that many of you will know, and which are a sample of Rachmaninoff”s 3rd Concerto for Piano and Orchestra performed by David Helfgott.

With these images you will have an idea of what can this 3rd concerto for piano be about, and orchestra by Rachmaninoff or perhaps of the affective world that can awaken in an individual.

The question would be, what is at the origin of this concert? If we think that the object of art is that remnant that is not symbolized through the word, what, of what was not resolved by Rachmaninoff, led him to compose this work?, why did David Helfgott, his father and his teacher choose this work for his masterful interpretation? and, thirdly, that of the listener, why does it provoke so much emotion in a large part of those who listen to it? The concerto is divided into three movements, as the basic structure of every concerto, which comes from the Italian “concertare”, to agree, to converse.

A dialogue is established between several instruments chosen in the orchestra. This musical form comes from the Concerto Grosso of the Baroque period . In the Romantic era, the musical dialogue is established between the instrument soloist (introduced by the figure of the composer) and the orchestra; the soloist talks, discusses with the orchestra, and also has times in which he is going to shine as a performer outside of that dialogue. This pattern is repeated in turn within the orchestra between other instruments and between the two hands of the pianist. In fact, the piano appeared as a response to the need to compose with an instrument that could simulate the structure that occurred in an orchestra.

As David Helfgott”s teacher said, “they are two melodies fighting for supremacy”, sometimes between the orchestra and the soloist and other times between the two hands of the pianist. When the soloist shines, the orchestra accompanies the performer, and these are the virtuoso moments that can be heard in Rachmaninoff”s 3rd concerto, where the orchestra practically disappears to let the piano express itself with passion on the verge of overflowing, but also when the piano rests in its discourse accompanying the orchestra with virtuoso scales.

This virtuosity that is so much talked about in the compositions of Rachmaninoff is related to the deified, narcissistic figure of the composer and the performer who are not only capable of expressing the overflow of passions, but are also the most technically qualified. It is the exaggeration of the I, of an omnipotent self capable of dominating the passions, a figure that reaches the top in the Romantic era. In the concert you can hear how the author, from a melancholic main theme and other secondary themes also in a sad tone, develops a whole knot of tensions that he then undoes in the return to the depressive, but already calm.

With this music he provokes and overflows with emotions to the listener, and then returns him by reassuring him because it is unbearable to stay in that knot. Similar to the development of a wave that finally breaks on the beach. In the first movement, which is the one you have heard, it seems that more than a conversation, the piano gets excited until it ends up running wild, breaking again and again while the orchestra tries to follow it.

At a certain point in the development, a climax approaches, a third of the end, from which the piano becomes serene making cadence until it ends. Rachmaninoff did not accept a performance if he was not able to reach the climax of the work in its expression. During the whole concert, the main theme and the rest of the themes that are exposed go and return, and along the way is where they develop, giving way to the conflict they try to represent.

The loss of the object (the composer)

As a possible response to the analysis of this concert, we wanted to talk about the loss of that imaginary object that opens up an unapproachable void from the word to the author, and for the one who creates music as a way of giving an account of it. The need to create appears when there is something important that cannot be symbolized. In a psychotic there is everything to be done, he has to generate symbolic capacity to link the drive and construct himself as a subject by transforming it into desire. If it does not process the drive, then it remains as a death drive.

However, even as a subject there is always a remainder that cannot be symbolized and to which the word does not have access. This remnant of the unsymbolized real is the motor of the work of art, a void for which there is no object to fill its place. In fact, no object that covers a need of ours is sufficient for desire, so there is always a void, a hole. The work of art is created from this hole and becomes the object that represents the existence of this void. In the imaginary register in which we habitually move, there is an object that is capable of fulfilling our desire, and we rely on this ideal fantasy to move forward in our day-to-day lives.

Every time the experience of life shows us that once again we fail to maintain that ideal object, the fantasy is dismantled and then we encounter the anguish of the loss of this completeness, which we feel as the loss of the object. In relation to this concert, we could think of the representation of the loss of the object in three subjects under construction: the composer, the performer and the listener. The composer who opens the way by writing a text from a language in the semiotic, the musical, and opens a meaning in the symbolic, anchoring the language of rhythm and melody in the body, in the drive, in the passions.

The performer, who uses the written text, the furrow dug by another to try again to elaborate his own drive and transform it into a desire that has as its object an impossible (the interpreter writes his own text). And the listener, who approaches this written and interpreted text to collect representations that serve to put a symbol to that anguish caused by emptiness, a music that gives him a order that organizes his affective world around this fundamental loss that is not fully processed and that keeps us looking for all life.

Rachmaninoff seemed to have located this feeling of radical loss in his beloved Russia, the motherland, perhaps evoking a first exile, that of the maternal relationship lost at the age of eleven; and many other later losses such as that of his omnipotent self when, after the composition of a first piano concerto, he experienced a traumatic failure. Those were the years in which he was already exiled and in his memoirs he said: There is a burden that age has perhaps placed on my shoulders heavier than any other, it was unknown to me in my youth. This burden is that I don’t have a homeland. I had to leave the land where I was born, where I spent my youthful years, where I struggled and where I suffered all the pains that come with having to make my way, and where I finally achieved success. The whole world is open to me and success awaits me everywhere. Only one place remains inaccessible and that place is my own country: Russia.

The Second World War accentuated this exile melancholy. He was very concerned about the news of the Germans ravaging Russian cities and thought of retiring from the activity of a pianist. Something was going to change in his motherland that would be irretrievable.

He said:

It”s hard for me to give concerts anymore, but what will my life be like without them, withoutmusic?

There could be a relationship between this feeling of loss and the characteristic fear of death that accompanied Rachmaninoff throughout his life.

In a letter to an admirer and friend in 1917 he wrote:

One cannot live when one is marked to die. How can you bear the thought that you have to die?

When Rachmaninoff fell ill, he asked for a Russian nurse and a radio receiver that would allow him to listen to music from Russia. Rachmaninoff knew without being aware of it the importance of music to deal with the experience of being on the verge of death and in a letter to a colleague in 1940 he said:

My health is bad. Day by day I’m falling apart. When I was healthy, I was exceptionally lazy. Now when I’m losing it, I don’t do anything but thinking about work.

Music might be Rachmaninoff’s and others’s particular way of sustaining themselves in the face of the inevitability of death. When reality reminds us that we live in an imaginary world, that life has an end, and that it is independent of us, of our path and of our desire. Death shatters our imaginary world, complete, without lack, in which we struggle every day not to encounter loss, emptiness, castration. It is castration without symbolizing, there is no way to represent it because no one can transmit it to us, we can only skirt and give representation to the affections that move us.

Each loss of the imaginary object brings us closer to death because it makes present to us this loneliness, that separation from the other that supposes the subjective, what differentiates each of us, what makes us unique and therefore lonely and empty, because once again we do not find the object that completes us.

Shine (the performer)

David Helfgott in the performance of the concerto could also be in touch with the loss of the fundamental bond that sustained him. David fell into psychosis, from this interpretation the disintegration of his ego was unstoppable. As the master told him: “He is a monster, take it or he will swallow you whole”, that is the drive. I interpret from your sentitments: “let it flow from the heart, that”s where it comes from”, said the master. He took a risk and without the protection of the Self his emotions were devastated, he played, as the master said: “as if there were no tomorrow”. Its lack of symbolic tissue to process the drive ended up breaking the fragile structure of the ego.

As a psychotic he could not build a desire of his own, his mission in life was to embody in his own body the desire of his father, a narcissistic man who fought against his failure and his old age using his only son son. He programmed him to be a virtuoso and be recognized as a musician with Rachmaninoff”s 3rd concerto, and then abandoned him when David tried to have a different self and stop living to cover the father”s lack.

This abandonment, this loss of the object (his father, his family) was unbearable for David, who had no symbolic anchor to sustain him as a subject in the face of the fall of the imaginary object. The mother had given this son to the father, he did not exist or mediate in the relationship between them, an accomplice of this devouring. The 3rd concert was the bond of union with the father, which sustained him in a symbiotic bond but without being able to introduce the symbolic dimension. His loss, that of the narcissistic bond with the father, led him to delirium, an alternative world with its own order that resists castration, where he can hallucinate the satisfaction of being completed by the object.

David Helfgott’s relationship with music makes us think of two paths: on the one hand, how it holds him by providing him with identity, the initial I; David is because he plays the piano, his identity as an individual consists in this function that he fulfills for the father and then for himself. But, on the other hand, playing the piano means getting in touch with his passions, with his drive that, not being symbolically woven with language, overflows disintegrating that fragile “me”.

The language of music can bring him a narcissistic restructuring and give him a place, but if he does not become mediated by a third party who transmits the symbolic dimension, then it can lead him to madness, because his drive overwhelms him. The text, the interpretation of the text of the composer should provide him with that inscription of his experience as a subject, but without a minimum symbolic support it leads him to destructuring instead of generating structure, symbolic capacity.

Conclusion: Music where language does not reach

A final idea that we would like to point out is music as a structured language that organizes the affective world of an individual before the arrival of verbal language, and where verbal language cannot reach because there is an area of the real that it cannot represent. Music can sustain where verbal language no longer reaches.

What we propose is rhythm and melody as the most primitive form of bond, phylogenetically the first to develop together with the smell, even before the gestalt that the sight of the mother”s face can offer. It is found from the beginning of life, in the most primal of us. The rhythm of the body tends to synchronize with that of others from the sound of the heart in the womb.

On the other hand, the melody is the tone of the mother’s voice that is learned to differentiate before her face and of course it is the musicality before her words. It is a form of bond in which there is not yet distance as there will be later with the gaze. Music can sustain where the word can no longer hold it, as when what is near is death. Returning to Rachmaninoff, who was deathly ill, seemed to hear music in the house, and when he asked and his daughter told him that no one was playing, he murmured: “Ah, then it”s my head.”

Many of you will know the film entitled Dancing in the Dark, it would be a good example for what we are trying to explain to you: the protagonist is a woman who is going blind and who spends her time inventing melodies and lyrics that accompany the rhythm of the noises of the factory in which she works. Later, in the face of her own death, convicted of murder, she sustained herself in the time of waiting with her melodies and the rhythmic movement of her body, like that of cradling an anguished baby whom she wants to soothe. Finally, we would like to point out that we have only extracted two of the ideas, briefly developed, that could be spoken of in the analysis of a work as complex as this concerto. Thank you for your attention, hoping that this communication encourages you to continue thinking about music as art in the construction of the subject.

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Rachmaninoff – Piano Concerto No 3, 3rd Mov. arr. for 2 pianos (Noten, sheet music, partitura)

David Hirschfelder – ‘Shine’ Original Soundtrack (1996)

[00:00] 01. With The Help Of God, Shine [03:20] 02. Polonaise In A Flat Major, Opus 53, The [04:41] 03. Did He Win? [05:27] 04. Will You Teach Me? [07:58] 05. Scales To America [10:28] 06. Scenes From Childhood – [12:00] 07. These People Are A Disgrace [13:16] 08. Raindrop Prelude (Chopin’s Prelude No. 15, Opus 28) [13:59] 09. Your Father Your Family (Feat. Noah Taylor) [16:33] 10. Tell Me A Story, Katherine [18:37] 11. Back Stage [19:54] 12. Punished For The Rest Of Your Life

[20:57] 13. Moments Of Genius [21:46] 14. La Campalesson [22:36] 15. Letters To Katherine [24:04] 16. 1st Movement Cadenza From The Rach. 3 [26:42] 17. Night Practice / Parcel From Katherine [28:01] 18. As If There Was No Tomorrow [29:47] 19. The Rach. 3 [34:06] 20. Complicato In Israel [36:03] 21. Raindrop Reprise [37:48] 22. Bath To Daisy Beryl [39:19] 23. Gloria, [41:45] 24. Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 [45:25] 25. Prelude In C# Minor [47:43] 26. Flight Of The Bumble Bee

[48:52] 27. Rach. 3 Reborn [50:06] 28. Goodnight Daddy [52:10] 29. A Loud Bit Of Ludwig’s 9th [52:53] 30. Sospiro [55:39] 31. What’s The Matter, David / Appassionata [56:52] 32. La Campanella (Liszt) [57:54] 33. Familiar Faces / Rach. 3 Encore [59:30] 34. Nulla In Mundo Pax Sincera