Morning or Mourning?

Solving the Mystery of Rachmaninoff’s G-minor Etude Tableau

The majority of Rachmaninoff’s Etudes Tableaux (‘study-pictures’) have an element of mystery. The composer based each of them on a painting, a poem, or a scene from life, but he usually kept his source material secret. So, any pianist learning them is kept guessing about what they depict.

However, the G minor Etude Tableau is different. Rachmaninoff exceptionally divulged its subject to a friend. According to Oskar von Riesemann, it is based on a painting by Arnold Böcklin entitled: Morning. The problem is that there is no such painting by the artist…

In early 2025 I was learning the piece with Graham Fitch, and decided to try to track down the painting that Rachmaninoff had referred to. The trail led across the world, but ended in an art gallery in Berlin – and a painting by Böcklin entitled ‘Mourning Under the Cross’ (see below). It turned out that the confusion in Riesemann’s clue was simple; somewhere mourning had been mistranslated as morning.

So, what exactly is the hauntingly beautiful G minor Etude Tableau meant to represent? Böcklin’s powerful painting depicts the scene when Christ’s body has just been lowered from the cross. However, the real focus is the very different expression of mourning by two people in the art work: an old woman dressed in black sits in silent introspective grief, while a younger woman appears distraught on the far left. It is these two expressions of grief that the Etude Tableaux depicts.

Armed with this information, the following program for the piece is suggested (click here for a recording on Spotify). The first 24 bars is an exploration of quiet, gentle grief – mourning – as shown by the old woman in black. This grieving rises and falls in shallow waves:

From bar 25 the music descends into a representation of distraught grief, unrelenting and unchanging in intensity. This reflects the emotion of the younger woman in the painting:

Following a bridging passage (bars 31-35), the music transitions back to the quiet grief of the start. However, as the work nears its conclusion, the dam holding back the emotion begins to fail, and a crescendo and accelerando plunge headlong into an outburst of despair (bars 41-43):

The piece ends with a fortissimo scale (lifted from the end of Chopin’s first Ballade), and the closing chords. The latter are reminiscent of a distant tolling bell, and perhaps signifying the emptiness that remains for the mourners:

When composing the Etude Tableau, Rachmaninoff seems to have drawn on material from the third movement of his earlier Op. 5 suite for two pianos. He had dedicated that opus to his close friend and mentor, Pyotr Tchaikovsky. But tragically, Tchaikovsky died unexpectedly just five weeks before its first performance in 1893. So, Op. 5, and by implication the Etude Tableau, would have been associated with deep personal grief for Rachmaninoff. This raises the emotional significance of the composition – something for pianists to consider when deciding how to interpret it.

Finally, this blog has outlined only some of the findings of the investigation. For the full story, the resulting research paper uncovers a link to a poem by Fyodor Tyutchev, references to Russian church bells and Rachmaninoff’s flight from turmoil in Russia. And there is a further layer of meaning. Recent research into the other pieces in Op. 33 has now revealed the subjects of five out of the original six. This has led to a surprising conclusion. Rachmaninoff had a powerful over-arching program that spanned all of the opus, but which he hid in plain sight. This adds an intriguing twist to the meaning of the G-minor Etude Tableau – but that will need to wait for another blog!

– Derek Flynn

References & Further Links

• Click here to read the author’s paper on the G-minor Etude Tableau or click here for a listing of all of the authors papers concerning the Etudes Tableaux
• Click here for the author’s blog post on the broader programme connecting Op. 33
• All of the musical quotations in the blog have been provided under Creative Commons 4.0 and open domain editions for Op. 33 are available here.
• Click here for video lessons on other works by Rachmaninoff or click here for more examples and ideas for creating narratives.