Nikolai Medtner

Admired by Rachmaninov and outstanding as a pianist, Medtner had a subtle yet hauntingly distinct compositional style, says Francis Pott

- Francis Pott

‘Infinitely modest, delicate, shy … a sensitive, lofty soul, he was in truth “a man not of this world”, being in no way adapted to practical life.’ Thus Nikolai Medtner was recalled by his colleague Alexander Ossovsky. Like his older friend Rachmaninov, Medtner had a privileged upbringing and later suffered exile from Revolutionary Russia. But there the similarities mostly end.

Medtner’s ancestry was part-German on both sides. The passion his father Karl had for Germanic culture resulted in his artistic education being shaped as much by Goethe and Beethoven as by Pushkin and Tchaikovsky. And then there was Nikolai’s older brother, Emil. The eldest of Karl’s five sons, Emil may have possessed the most powerful intellect of the Medtner brothers, and it was he who most strongly inherited their father’s devotion to Germanic culture. Passionately immersed in Nietzschean philosophy, in Goethe and, later, in Jungian psychology, Emil championed Wagner and was a leading figure within the poetic Symbolist movement.

Magnus Ljunggren’s biography of Emil, The Russian Mephisto, casts a darker shadow over this picture: ‘Living through his younger brother [Nikolai], he [Emil] gave free rein to secret dreams of grandeur to compensate for a growing sense of frustration. [Emil] later contended that he sacrificed… his plans to become a conductor so that Nikolai could afford to study at the [Moscow] Conservatory… Henceforth …he regarded it as his mission to “conduct” Nikolai’s musical career, controlling his professional development at the same time as he magnanimously abandoned his own artistic ambitions.’