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Rachmaninoff at the Ampico Recording Piano, New York, early 1920s.

Background
Like most musical Russians at the outset of the twentieth century, Rachmaninoff must have been aware of the Pianola's existence. Pianolas were first introduced into Russia by the Leipzig businessman, Julius Heinrich Zimmermann, who had large retail establishments in St Petersburg, Moscow and Riga, as this 1913 Cyrillic advertisement for the Steinway Pianola Piano confirms. By 1903, Czar Nicholas had an Aeolian, puchased for him by his wife, the Empress Alexandra, and most members of the Imperial Family followed suit. One can imagine that roll-operated instruments were not initially important for a pianist of Rachmaninoff's stature, although as a composer he may have had some passing interest, since his music began to appear on perforated piano rolls as early as 1900.

The Pianola Piano in Russia - Julius Heinrich Zimmermann in 1913.

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Early Rachmaninoff Rolls from the Aeolian Company in the USA - 1900 to 1906
The first of Rachmaninoff's compositions to appear in an Aeolian Company Pianola catalogue were the Prelude and Polichinelle from Opus 3, and the Waltz and Mélodie from Opus 10. These were all published in the nineteenth century, given that the new century technically began in 1901. By the time of the July 1901 roll catalogue, several hundred more classical titles with roll numbers higher than the pieces by Rachmaninoff had been prepared, so, working backwards, the four were almost certainly in existence by 1900, within two years of the launch of the Pianola in the autumn of 1898. In particular the Prelude in C sharp minor was performed publicly on the Pianola on June 6th, 1900, during the very first Pianola recital in Brooklyn, at the Aeolian Company's recital rooms at 500 Fulton Street. The Elegy and Serenade from Opus 3 were added towards the end of 1901, and all six titles were re-published between late 1904 and early 1906 in the Aeolian Company's Metrostyle series, with undulating red lines to indicate the use of the tempo lever.

Many composers were more closely involved with the Pianola than we might imagine nowadays, but much of the evidence was transitory, and especially so in Rachmaninoff's case. In 1917 a revolutionary mob burnt the composer's country estate and its contents, while he and his family hid in the woods and looked on in dismay. In order to arrive at the probable truth, therefore, we need to consider both circumstantial evidence and the recorded memories of his relatives. In particular, Rachmaninoff's sister-in-law, Sophia Satina, recalled his playing through rolls of his own Second Piano Concerto on a Pianola at Ivanovka, the estate several hundred miles south-east of Moscow that was so catastrophically destroyed. To find out why and when this early association with piano rolls might have occurred, it will be useful to follow the composer's footsteps in the years preceding the First World War. How and why is he likely to have acquired the Pianola, for example?

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Rachmaninoff and the Pianola in Dresden - 1906 to 1909
The answers to such questions most probably lie on the banks of the river Elbe, in eastern Germany. Rachmaninoff's early sojourns in Dresden have not always been recorded with as much care as they deserve, so it is worth taking a little time to set the record straight, and also to document the early history of the Pianola in the Saxon capital. In October 1906 the Rachmaninoff family travelled from Ivanovka, some five hundred miles south-east of Moscow, to Dresden in Germany, making similar extended visits during the autumn and winter months of each year until early April 1909, and living in a rented house at Sidonienstrasse 6. This was a street just off the main shopping thoroughfare of Prager Strasse, and not far from the Hauptbahnhof, the central station. One may find references on the web to another Dresden mansion where the Rachmaninoffs stayed in the 1920s, the Villa Fliederhof, and it is important to realise that these were not at all the same location, nor indeed the same area of the city.

Rachmaninoff's entry in the Dresden Street Directory for 1908.

From the Dresden street directory of 1908, which is available online, it is clear that the main building at Sidonienstrasse 6 was split into many apartments, but there were also a Garden Villa (GG), and a rear building (HG) that served as an artist's studio in the leafy plot of land hidden away behind the scenes. It was to one of these, the Garden Villa, that the Rachmaninoffs moved, and it must have provided a real oasis of calm, but nevertheless in an area of Europe that allowed the composer to keep up with the very latest musical developments. After all, both Dresden and nearby Leipzig were world-class centres for classical music and opera. So far no photographs of the Garden Villa have come to light, but immediately behind it lay the gardens of the Hotel Terminus, with what must have been a reasonably similar "Gartengebäude" at the side, and so this photograph is as near as we are likely to get to an image of the Rachmaninoff's home from home in those early years of the twentieth century.

A typical House and Garden Villa in Dresden, adjacent to the Rachmaninoffs.

There was also a substantial Russian expatriate community in the city, including at least one "Satin" family - his wife's maiden name - though whether there was a family relationship is not known. A few minutes' walk away, on the other side of the railway station, lay the Russian (and Greek) Orthodox church, built in the early 1870s. The size and design of the building reflected the importance of the Orthodox community in Dresden, and it no doubt acted as a social hub, just as much as a religious centre. Although Ivanovka was some 2,500 kilometres away from Sidonienstrasse, the cultural traditions of Mother Russia were easily accessible.

The Russian Church in Dresden - Allgemeine Illustrirte Zeitung, 1874.

Until 1905 the previous inhabitant of the Garden Villa had been Franz Koppel-Ellfeld (1838-1920), former Intendanzrat of the Hoftheater (the Semperoper) at Dresden, and a well-known writer and opera librettist of the time, and when the Rachmaninoffs left in 1909, the Villa was taken over by Irene von Chavanne (1863-1938), one of the Semperoper's major stars, who sang the contralto part of Herodias in the premiere of Richard Strauss's "Salome." Since one of the very first musical events that Rachmaninoff attended in Dresden, on 30th October 1906, was a performance of "Salome" at the Semperoper, it is easy to see how his musical connections might have played a part in helping to find the ideal location.

Rachmaninoff's Successor and Predecessor at Sidonienstrasse, the Opera Singer,
Irene von Chavanne, and Franz Koppel-Ellfeld, Intendanzrat of the Semperoper.

The whole Sidonienstrasse property can be seen in the Dresden street map of 1911, and it is here coloured turquoise for clarity.

A detail of the Dresden Street Plan for 1911.

Also coloured turquoise is a building at Prager Strasse 49, for reasons which will become apparent in due course. This complete area was destroyed, like most of central Dresden, on the night of 13/14 February 1945, when the Allied bombing caused a firestorm to annihilate much of the city, but it still existed in 1944, when the following aerial photograph was taken. The photo points more or less due north, and two locations have been marked in sepia, the one on the left being the main Sidonienstrasse building, with the two garden properties behind it. It may be remarked that nos. 8 and 10, Sidonienstrasse, had by this time been replaced by further commercial development, so that Rachmaninoff's former Garden of Eden was by now rather less hidden away.

An aerial view of Dresden in 1944.

The other sepia-coloured building in the photograph (turquoise in the map) is also very important. It is at the southern end of Prager Strasse, where it used to join the Wiener Platz, diagonally opposite the main entrance to the Hauptbahnhof. Prager Strasse was Dresden's main shopping thoroughfare, and it is a testament to the thoroughness of the city's destruction that it no longer exists in that form. The highlighted building is Prager Strasse 49, and on Monday, 6th April 1908, the Choralion Company, the German subsidiary of the Aeolian Company, transferred its Dresden retail showroom there, as shown in this announcement in the local newspaper.

Choralion Removal Announcement, Dresdner Nachrichten, 31 March 1908.

Clearly it must have been a wonderful location, since everyone coming out of the station more or less had to walk past it. No doubt that included the Rachmaninoff family, who would also have passed by on their way to and from the Russian church. Here is a street view of the building, housing two or three individual shops, just to the left of the tower on the corner, which latter formed part of the Kaiser Café on the Wiener Platz.

The Choralion Showroom in Dresden, at Prager Strasse 49, c. 1911.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves, because it is important to establish exactly how Rachmaninoff is likely to have encountered the player piano in Dresden, and this probably happened a little earlier, towards the end of 1907. Luckily for us, the State Library of Saxony has been working hard to digitise its historic newspapers, and even some of the city's early concert programmes are available online, so that the local aspects of the Pianola's history are now (in 2020) a great deal clearer.

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Background to the Pianola in Dresden - 1903 to 1907
Although Edwin Votey's invention was generally known to the European public from the beginning of the 20th century onwards, the first major Pianola event in the city of Dresden took place on Saturday, 2nd May 1903, when the local piano firm of Franz Ries organised a recital at the Musenhaus, a medium-sized concert hall forming part of one of Dresden's major hotels.

The Musenhaus Concert Hall in Dresden, at the Palmengarten Hotel, c. 1914.

Hermann Schaad, later to become one of Aeolian's senior managers in New York, but in 1903 on secondment to Choralion in Berlin, gave the Pianola recital with the aid of the soprano, Doris Walde, and the cellist, Johannes Fleischer, and the programme included Schumann lieder, a Bach air on the cello, and piano solos by Moszkowski, Grieg, Chopin and Beethoven. The review in the Dresdner Nachrichten was good humoured and genuinely enthusiastic for the new instrument, while recognising its limitations, especially with the style of Pianola that was available at such an early date. But in view of the modern fable that the Pianola is incapable of being played with other musicians, it is worth remarking that, as ever, the synchronism of the soloists and the accompaniment - "bei dem besten Zusammengeben von Pianola und Solist" - was not in doubt.

Hermann Schaad (1876-1936) at the Pianola, from a painting by Hubert von Herkomer.

On the following morning, the Choralion Company took out an advertisement in the local press, announcing that the Franz Ries company had been appointed sole agents for the Pianola in Dresden and Chemnitz, with a plentiful supply of music rolls in stock.

The Pianola Goes on Sale in Dresden, 3 May 1903.

This arrangement continued successfully for a few years, as can be seen from the advertisement below, but by the autumn of 1905, Ries had also taken on the representation of the Welte-Mignon, which must surely have led to a conflict of interest, albeit a fairly amicable one. By early 1907 Choralion had set up its own branch in Dresden, at Ringstrasse 17, in the same building as Ries, but with an entrance just around the corner, and this close proximity underlines the continuing cordial relationship between the two companies.

Franz Ries Advertises Bechstein Pianos and Aeolian Pianolas, Dresden, August 1905.

On his arriving in Dresden, it is inconceivable that Rachmaninoff would have chosen to live without a piano, and the one piano known to have been at Ivanovka was a Bechstein grand, so the strong probability is that he would have rented a Bechstein from the local agency, and in choosing such a piano in late 1906, he would therefore have encountered the Pianola at first hand, since Franz Ries was the agent for both types of instrument, and daily Pianola recitals were given at the premises between 11 am and noon, and between 5 and 6 pm. As it happens, it is also highly likely that Rachmaninoff would have encountered the Welte-Mignon at the same time, which in a way makes his absence from Welte's 1910 recording sessions in Moscow (he was on tour in America at the time) all the more poignant.

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Rachmaninoff and the Gewerbehaus-Orchester - 1907 to 1909
In addition, towards the beginning of Rachmaninoff's second year in Dresden, from the autumn of 1907 onwards, there was an important musical event that he could not possibly have failed to notice. On Saturday, 2nd November 1907, the Gewerbehaus Orchestra (the predecessor of today's Dresden Philharmonic) accompanied the Pianola in the Mendelssohn Piano Concerto no. 1 in G minor. The soloist was Georg Pretzsch, a Pianola demonstrator from Choralion in Berlin, whose brother, Karl Pretzsch, just happened to be the resident piano accompanist for the same orchestra.

Willy Olsen, Conductor of the Gewerbhaus Orchestra, 1903-1915.

The conductor of the concert was Willy Olsen, a native of Schleswig-Holstein, who directed the Gewerbehaus Orchestra between 1903 and 1915. Olsen was certainly no tin-pot stick wagger, and under his direction the orchestra toured the US and Canada in the spring of 1909, including a performance at Carnegie Hall, a voyage that Rachmaninoff was to emulate exactly six months later. Olsen went on to become musical director of the Turku Philharmonic in Finland, and he died there in the 1930s. So, to recapitulate, we are dealing here with an orchestral concert with Pianola in November 1907 by the Gewerbehaus-Orchester, conducted by Willy Olsen, at the Gewerbehaus in Dresden, with concert promotion provided by the firm of Franz Ries, which also supplied the concert grand Bechstein Piano. And the solo Pianolist, Georg Pretzsch, was the brother of Dresden's favourite piano accompanist.

Pianola Concerto with the Gewerbehaus-Orchester, Dresden, 2 November 1907.

If we now travel forward fifteen months, to February 1909, we again find the Gewerbehaus Orchestra playing in the same hall, with the same conductor, this time giving the final concert of its 1908-9 International Season. We also find the same firm promoting the concert and supplying a Bechstein concert grand, on which Karl Pretzsch, the brother of the 1907 solo Pianolist, was to accompany a talented young opera singer from Berlin in the second half of the concert.

The Gewerbehaus Concert Hall in Dresden, c.1907.

But who was the piano soloist in the first half, you might ask? And of course, you would already have guessed it to have been that expatriate inhabitant of Dresden, Sergei Rachmaninoff. Not only that, but by scouring the local newspapers, we find that Rachmaninoff was standing in for Ferruccio Busoni, who was meant to have played, but who was so exhausted after a concert tour in England that he decided to remain in Bordeaux, in southern France.

Rachmaninoff with the Gewerbehaus-Orchester, Dresden, 16 February 1909.

Rachmaninoff therefore had to stand in for Busoni at very short notice indeed, just less than a week, if the newspaper accounts are to be believed. The concerto was changed to Rachmaninoff 2, with the implication that the conductor had to learn it rather fast, and that in the days before international artist management companies existed, someone had to call round at Rachmaninoff's house to ask for his co-operation. The overwhelming conclusion of all this is that Rachmaninoff was on friendly terms with the professional musical circles of Dresden, all of whom had first-hand experience of public music-making with the Pianola. He simply could not have walked in to the Franz Ries showroom, to choose the piano for his hastily arranged concerto appearance, without passing, and probably hearing, some form of player piano.

Rachmaninoff and the Aeolian Company in Dresden, 1909.

Allied to this musical proximity is the very practical point of how physically close Rachmaninoff was to the Aeolian Company for the whole of the period between 1906 and 1909. By the time of his 1909 concert, the main Pianola showroom in Dresden was no more than five minutes' walk from his house, and even before that it had been less than half a mile away, next door to the main piano showroom in town. In the photograph above one can see the Central Station, with the approximate location of Rachmaninoff's hidden villa, and the Aeolian Dresden headquarters, as indicated. Given that the early Pianola has for many years been associated more with Scott Joplin than it has with Rachmaninoff, it should be noted that any special association with ragtime or dance music comes more from the tastes of late twentieth-century collectors than it does from the original period. Naturally, all musical styles were represented in the roll catalogues, but serious music was definitely at the very centre of the instrument's repertoire, as this advertisement from Dresden in November 1909 makes clear, quite possibly inspired by the 1907 Concerto at the Gewerbehaus - the visible leg of the grand piano is clearly that of a Bechstein!

Pianola Advertisement, Salonblatt, Dresden, November 1909.

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Rachmaninoff and the British Aeolian Company - 1909 to 1917 - Introduction
Until roughly 1906 all rolls for the Aeolian Pianola had been made in America, at the Company's factory in Meriden, Connecticut, but the market in Europe was expanding very fast, and somewhere between 1906 and 1908 a small roll workshop was opened in London, in the Covent Garden area of the city, though initially only producing copies from American master rolls. In 1909 a much larger facility was built at Hayes, not far from the present-day location of Heathrow Airport, and a musical staff was engaged to produce new music rolls from scratch. For this purpose, a subsidiary company was set up, known as the Universal Music Company Ltd., and its brand-new factory can be seen below, at the right-hand side of the Orchestrelle Company's Hayes establishment. Over the succeeding decades, it was London which provided the most interesting classical repertoire for the foot-pedalled Pianola, and several separately numbered series of rolls were introduced.

The new Orchestrelle Company Factories at Hayes. Middlesex, 1909.

An important technical development at this time was the agreement between player piano companies, at the Hotel Iroquois in Buffalo on the afternoon of Thursday, 10 December 1908, when an international standard for the newly devised 88-note rolls was agreed upon. Prior to that date, most rolls had covered only 65 notes of the piano keyboard, losing about an octave at each end. It was the development of smaller and more sophisticated pneumatic valves that allowed rolls with smaller perforation sizes to be used, thereby expanding the range available in rolls of normal width, which was roughly 11 1/4 inches. But it should not be imagined that all rolls were suddenly published at the new standard, and 65-note remained the main system for at least a couple of years thereafter.

Where the 88-note Standard was agreed - Hotel Iroquois, Buffalo - December 1908.

The Orchestrelle Company was the Aeolian Company's subsidiary in London, and its June 1910 catalogue of 65-note rolls bears witness to a sudden flurry of new Rachmaninoff issues. The most important of these, published no more than a month before the catalogue was issued, was a three-roll set of the Second Concerto, available in both standard and Metrostyle rolls, but also around the same time there were the first six Preludes from Opus 23, plus an additional arrangement of no. 5 (G minor) by the composer's cousin, Alexander Siloti, and three of the Opus 16 Moments Musicaux, nos 2, 11 and 16. Here is a musical example of one of these issues from shortly after the Dresden period, a very simple 65-note roll of the Eb Prelude from Opus 23, taken from a concert given in London a few years ago. This roll has no accent perforations, making it more difficult to bring out melodic lines, but the general phrasing that can be achieved, both from dynamic variation by means of the foot-pedals, and the inflections of rubato from the tempo lever (and underneath it all this is a completely metronomic roll) show very clearly that such instruments can be as musical as the player wishes to make them

mp3 RACHMANINOFF: Prelude in Eb, Op. 23, no. 6,  [2.4 Mb]
Performed by Rex Lawson - October 2011, London.


This roll was played on an Aeolian Pianola, attached to a Steinway 'B' grand piano.
The audio recording is the copyright of the Pianola Institute, 2011.

Musical Prejudice towards the Pianola
Before continuing with a description of the other Rachmaninoff rolls made by Aeolian in London, it is worth setting them into the context of modern musicology by discussing the terrible prejudice that has existed towards the foot-pedalled Pianola, especially in the English-speaking countries, for well nigh on a hundred years. This is not a disdain that was universally shared by pianists and composers of the early twentieth-century, but it has regrettably infected the opinions of musical writers since the Second World War, as can be seen in the ways in which Rachmaninoff's rolls have often been treated. It is with a genuinely heavy heart that we feel compelled to quote from pages 223 and 224 of Max Harrison's otherwise sympathetic magnum opus, "Rachmaninoff - Life, Works, Recordings," published in 2005 by Continuum International.

"One doubts if Rachmaninoff had much considered any method of recording as a means of preserving his art until he went to America. He carefully thought about it later, however, and he may even have cut a set of rolls of a solo version of Concerto No. 2 in the earliest years of the twentieth century. These would have been for a German firm (not Welte-Mignon) and Sofia Satina claimed to have heard him running through these on an upright player-piano at Ivanovka. No copies have survived and it is most unlikely they were issued to the public. This surely is just as well because they would have been for the crude pianola, not for the greatly refined reproducing piano for which he recorded in America."

It would not have taken much effort for Max Harrison to have ascertained the details of the Rachmaninoff rolls published by the Aeolian Company in London. The respect that he pays towards the reproducing piano is a sure sign that he was in contact with at least some British collectors of such instruments, and even if the Aeolian (Orchestrelle) Company's 1914 roll catalogue was not available online when his book was being written (it most certainly is online now, at archive.org), then it would have been an easy matter for him to have asked for someone to check in an actual catalogue. The Second Concerto was published by the Orchestrelle Company in London from 1910 onwards, and to attribute it simply to "a German firm," without checking one's facts, is a clear sign that the Pianola did not merit any conscientious research, in the mind of the author.

Copies of the three rolls that make up the Aeolian set of the Second Concerto still exist in the 21st Century, in a good number of private collections, and indeed new copies could be obtained from Aeolian and its successors until well into the 1970s. They have indeed survived, therefore, they were published, not by a German firm, but by an English one with a branch only five minutes away from Rachmaninoff in Dresden, and they remained available for public purchase over a period of some seventy years. Max Harrison is wrong on every count, and regrettably prejudiced into the bargain.

The Second Piano Concerto on Aeolian Music Rolls
At any rate, it is better to provide positive evidence, rather than resorting solely to the criticism of others. The next three musical examples (in preparation) are mp3s of the whole of the Second Piano Concerto, in its 88-note edition, published by the Orchestrelle Company around 1916. Any divergence from the mechanically arranged tempi is entirely intentional, both by the editors who arranged the rolls, and by their present-day performer. There is also no doubt but that such an intention was shared by Rachmaninoff himself, because the Orchestrelle Company regularly called on contemporary composers to advise on the arrangement of their music on roll. So it was with Stravinsky and the Aeolian Rite of Spring, in which connection we are lucky that all of Stravinsky's correspondence has survived; so it was with Ravel and Daphnis and Chloé, since orchestral heterophony that is missing in the four-hand version is reinstated in the Pianola rolls, and only the composer would have been sufficiently aware of its omission in the first place, and so it undoubtedly was with Rachmaninoff, but unfortunately the October Revolution would seem to have destroyed both his Pianola and all his rolls, along with all the family's other possessions and correspondence. How lucky we are that Sophia Satina's memory was as sharp as the Prelude from Opus 3!

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