Rachmaninoff + Fast Cars

Question: do you remember your last speeding ticket?

I sure do. (Fortunately, it was almost a decade ago.) I was driving westbound on Highway 46 towards Paso Robles. The speed limit drops while you're headed down the hill into town. I get it; I agree with it. It’s not geography’s fault that the downslope coincides with the entrance to a city where the speed limit must drop. But, on this particular afternoon, I didn’t slow down enough to maintain legality. I got caught.

Mine was an honest mistake. Then there’s composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. He was a bit of a speed demon. He loved driving fast cars fast.

He owned some pretty great rides over the years too. One of the very first sports cars: a 19-teens; German-made; convertible known as a Lorelei. It was bright red, a gift from his wife and two daughters, and he nicknamed it Laura.

Later, Rachmaninoff owned an early model Mercedes, a Packard, a Rolls-Royce, and, when he settled in Los Angeles, one of his most prized possessions: a high-performance Cadillac with a giant engine. Not a V-6…or a V-8…or even a V-12. This was the highly exclusive Cadillac V-16 Sport Phaeton. Only 4,000 were ever built.

And, as I mentioned, Rachmaninoff liked driving these fast cars fast. Every time he bought a new car--and subsequently got a speeding ticket driving it--he would take that first speeding ticket in the new car, frame it, and hang it on the wall in his office. Like a badge of honor.

I can’t imagine what his insurance premiums must’ve been.

All this got me thinking about the tempos in Rachmaninoff’s music. Did his love of physical speed translate to a love for musical speed? We’ll never know. But two of his four piano concertos have finales that are marked “allegro vivace,” which basically means very fast. Another is marked “alla breve,” which is a tempo marking meaning double time. And, for the other, Rachmaninoff says “allegro scherzando,” meaning fast and playful.

Again, there’s no evidence of a correlation between Rachmaninoff’s fast cars and his fast music, but when I listen to these moments of music he created for us, I like to imagine old Sergei zipping up and down PCH in his Cadillac, music playing in his head, just waiting to be written down.