How Radical Was Rachmaninoff?

Only the anachronism has a chance to outlast the epoch,” the Austrian author Franz Werfel wrote, in the early nineteen-forties. At a time of dizzying cultural change, Werfel saw a hidden advantage in the art work that lags behind, its gaze averted to the past. Like many good aphorisms, Werfel’s saying is a dubious assertion that points to a complex truth. Perceptions of aesthetic currency—what is modern, what is outmoded—grow blurry as time passes and priorities shift. Heroes of the vanguard lose lustre, background figures begin to shine. To be anachronistic is to be outside one’s time; it does not rule out belonging to the future.