Sergei Rachmaninoff pursued multiple professional careers and juggled different personal identities, often out of joint with the realities of his time and place. He was a Russian who fled his country after the 1917 Revolution and who lived in America and Europe for the rest of his life. He was a great composer who, in order to support himself and his family, spent most of his time performing, both as a conductor and as one of the towering pianists of the 20th century. And he was a Romantic composer writing in the age of burgeoning Modernism, his music embraced by audiences but seemingly to many from a bygone world alien to the stylistic innovations of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and other contemporaries.
Rachmaninoff worried that his multiple professional profiles might cancel each other out: “I have chased three hares,” he said. “Can I be certain that I have captured one?” The remark alludes to a Russian proverb that warned against pursuing two hares, hence spreading oneself too thin. He was an unusually accomplished performer in two domains at a time when there was an ever-increasing separation between performer and composer. Rachmaninoff, in the great tradition of Mozart and Beethoven through Strauss and Mahler, was the principal performing advocate of his own music.
And yet even when he was out of sync with time and place, Rachmaninoff pressed on with a grueling performance schedule (sometimes 70 concerts in a year) and composed some of the most popular and enduring works of the first half of the 20th century. That during the latter half of his career he did most of this with The Philadelphia Orchestra makes those connections all the more personal and poignant.
Rachmaninoff acknowledged his temporal and geographical homelessness. In an interview from the late 1930s, he said:
I feel like a ghost in a world grown alien. I cannot cast out the old way of writing, and I cannot acquire the new. I have made intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me … I cannot cast out my musical gods in a moment and bend the knee to new ones. Even with the disaster of living through what has befallen the Russia where I spent my happiest years, yet I always feel that my own music, and my reactions to all music, remained spiritually the same, unendingly obedient in trying to create beauty.
It is exactly the personal, expressive, and spiritual that so often gives Rachmaninoff’s music its instantly recognizable sound, drawn from Russian folk song, Orthodox liturgical chant, church bells, and a quest for beauty. Two years before his death he declared: “A composer’s music should express the country of his birth, his love affairs, his religion, the books which have influenced him, the pictures he loves. It should be the product of the sum total of a composer’s experience.”
Rachmaninoff’s unusual position as a late Romantic was shrewdly assessed by musicologist Richard Taruskin in his monumental Oxford History of Western Music:
There were many, during the 1920s and 1930s, who regarded him as the greatest living composer, precisely because he was the only one who seemed capable of successfully maintaining the familiar and prestigious style of the 19th-century “classics” into the 20th century. The fact that he was in fact capable of doing so, moreover, and that his style was as distinctive as any contemporary’s, could be used to refute the modernist argument that traditional styles had been exhausted.
Taruskin puts his finger on the difference between a conservative composer like Rachmaninoff, who is genuinely popular with audiences, and challenging Modernist composers whose music is widely resisted, but whose stylistic innovations earn them a prominent place in history books. Rachmaninoff demonstrated that it was still possible to develop an individual, instantly recognizable, and captivating compositional voice. Samuel Barber, another composer with deep ties to The Philadelphia Orchestra, along with Aaron Copland, Benjamin Britten, and Dmitri Shostakovich, did something similar, but such figures became increasingly rare in the mid–20th century.
Rachmaninoff was born to a well-to-do family that cultivated his prodigious musical gifts. His mother was his first piano teacher, and at age nine he began studies at the St. Petersburg Conservatory but floundered. The family finances were declining, as was his parents’ marriage, and he transferred to the Moscow Conservatory, where he thrived. He met leading Russian musicians, studied with some of them, and won the support of his hero, Tchaikovsky.
Upon graduation in spring 1892, Rachmaninoff was awarded the Great Gold Medal, a rarely bestowed honor. His career as both pianist and composer was clearly on the rise with impressive works such as the Piano Concerto No. 1, the one-act opera Aleko (about which Tchaikovsky enthused), and pieces in a variety of other genres. One piano work written at age 18 received almost too much attention: the C-sharp–minor Prelude, the extraordinary popularity of which meant he found himself having to perform it for the rest of his life.
He seemed on track for a brilliant and charmed career, the true successor to Tchaikovsky. But then things went terribly wrong in March 1897 with the premiere of his Symphony No. 1 in D Minor, which proved to be one of the legendary fiascos in music history and a bitter shock to Rachmaninoff just days before his 24th birthday. Alexander Glazunov, an eminent composer and teacher but, according to various reports, a mediocre conductor, led the ill-fated concert. The event plunged Rachmaninoff into deep despair: “When the indescribable torture of this performance had at last come to an end, I was a different man.”
For some three years Rachmaninoff stopped composing, although he continued to perform as a pianist and began to establish a prominent new career as a conductor. He eventually found therapeutic relief and reemerged in 1901 with the Second Piano Concerto, an instant success. The following year, after surmounting religious obstacles, he married his cousin Natalia Satina, with whom he had two daughters. Rachmaninoff was a rare composer who enjoyed a happy family until the end.
Rachmaninoff’s first important tour abroad was in 1899 to London, where he conducted his orchestral fantasy The Rock and played small piano pieces. (He declined to perform the First Piano Concerto, which would have been the natural vehicle, because he considered it a student work until he revised it years later.) His conducting career flourished, mainly of operas at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. But political ferment in Russia after the Bloody Sunday massacre in January 1905 prompted him to spend more time abroad and concentrate on composition, including two more one-act operas. Beginning in late 1906, he and his family spent most of the year in Dresden, where he finished his Second Symphony, another compositional triumph. This was the piece he chose to conduct for his Philadelphia Orchestra debut in 1909, and it remains a signature work for the Philadelphians to this day. During this first American tour he premiered the Third Piano Concerto in New York, and by the end of his three-month stay turned down the offer to become music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. (He would decline again in 1918.)
These years turned out to be Rachmaninoff’s most prolific as a composer. He wrote primarily during summers at a pastoral estate called Ivanovka, some 300 miles south of Moscow. But this idyllic world came to an abrupt end with the Russian Revolution in 1917. He and his family left in late December, never to return. The Bolsheviks burned most of Ivanovka to the ground (it has since been reconstructed as a museum). Rachmaninoff sought to recapture his happiest Russian memories in faraway places.
Challenged with finding ways to support his family, Rachmaninoff decided to concentrate on his keyboard career and began to make recordings as well. In 1920, he signed a lucrative contract with the Victor Talking Machine Company (later RCA). His repertory, in comparison with other star pianists, was initially quite limited, and his technique needed honing in order to compete. These realities left him with far less time to compose, and his productivity declined considerably. He wrote some dazzling arrangements that served him well as encores on his extended American and European tours and that fit easily on 78-RPM recordings, but during his last quarter-century there were only six more pieces to which he assigned opus numbers. The Variations on a Theme of Corelli, Op. 42 (1931), was his final solo piano work. The five others are for, or with, orchestra, and all were premiered by The Philadelphia Orchestra. Three Russian Songs, Op. 41, scored for chorus and orchestra, and the Fourth Piano Concerto, Op. 40, premiered on the same concert in March 1927 with Leopold Stokowski conducting. The Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43, followed in 1934, premiered with Stokowski in Baltimore. His final two works were for orchestra alone: the Symphony No. 3, Op. 44, premiered in 1936 with Stokowski, and the magisterial Symphonic Dances, Op. 45, in 1941 with Eugene Ormandy.
In 1939, to mark the 30th anniversary of his first tour to America and his debut with the orchestra, the Philadelphians and Ormandy presented a “Rachmaninoff Festival” in Philadelphia and in New York. Rachmaninoff played his first three concertos and the Paganini Rhapsody and for the final program conducted his Third Symphony (which he recorded at the time) and earlier choral symphony The Bells (1913). In addition, Ormandy led the Second Symphony and The Isle of the Dead. After the first concert, The New York Times reported that when Rachmaninoff came on stage the audience stood in his honor: “Their admiration for him and their enjoyment of his music were more evident there than words can make them here. The occasion was a memorable tribute to a great artist.”
The festival’s success led to Rachmaninoff’s final Philadelphia world premiere: the Symphonic Dances. He made six more concerto appearances with the orchestra and recorded the Fourth Concerto before a last concert playing the Second Concerto in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in May 1942. He died less than a year later, at age 69, prompting Ormandy to dispatch a telegram to his widow: “Members of The Philadelphia Orchestra and I wish to extend to you and your family our deepest sympathy in your great loss. The world has lost one of the greatest musicians in the history of music making and our orchestra one of its greatest and most sincere friends.”
Although he composed a fair amount of juvenilia, Rachmaninoff decided that his First Piano Concerto should be presented as the official Op. 1. The 17-year-old started composing the work in the summer of 1890 and premiered the first movement in March 1892 at the Moscow Conservatory, from which he graduated a few months later. He dedicated the piece to his cousin, the pianist and conductor Alexander Siloti, who proceeded to perform it frequently. Although Rachmaninoff soon published the concerto in a two-piano version, he cooled on the work and declined to play it himself. A decade later he said that he needed to take it “in hand, look it over, and then decide how much time and work will be required for its new version, and whether it’s worth doing, anyway.”
By his mid-30s, Rachmaninoff was a famous composer. The enormous success of the Second Piano Concerto (1901) had helped to secure that stature and people were understandably curious to hear what his first effort in the genre was like—hence the reassessment: “It is so terrible in its present form that I should like to work at it and, if possible, get it into decent shape.” But the Third Concerto (1909), which proved to be yet another triumph when he premiered it in New York, sidetracked him again. It was not until 1917, just before Rachmaninoff left Russia for good, that he returned to his youthful effort. The revisions involved a thinning out of the orchestration, some structural modifications, a new cadenza for the opening movement, and a considerable recasting of the finale. Rachmaninoff gave the first performance of the new version that year at Carnegie Hall with Modest Altschuler conducting the Russian Symphony Orchestra.
Despite the revisions, the First Concerto still sounds like the Rachmaninoff whose music audiences have so embraced for over a century, chronologically situated, as it is, both before and after its phenomenally famous concerto siblings and the brilliant Second Symphony (1907). The original version of the concerto survives, and so we know that the revision remains relatively close to what the teenage Rachmaninoff initially composed. Even at such a young age, many fingerprints of his mature style are already evident, beginning with the lushly expansive first theme of the first movement (Vivace) that follows a dramatic opening—a brass fanfare leading to massive double octaves loudly proclaimed by the piano soloist. This and other parts of the concerto seem to be modeled on Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor, which Siloti was diligently practicing while spending the summer of 1890 at Rachmaninoff’s country estate. The brief second-movement Andante offers a lyrical and nocturnal interlude before the vibrant finale (Allegro vivace).
The Second Concerto came at a crucial juncture in Rachmaninoff’s career, following the nearly three-year period of compositional paralysis in the wake of the failure of his First Symphony. In the hopes of getting him back on track as a composer, friends and family put him in touch with Dr. Nikolai Dahl, who was experimenting with hypnosis treatments pioneered in Paris around this time by Sigmund Freud’s teacher Jean-Martin Charcot. Dahl was a gifted amateur musician who took great interest in this case. According to various accounts (perhaps exaggerated), the two met almost daily, with the composer half asleep in the doctor’s armchair hearing the mantra: “You will begin to write your concerto … You will work with great facility … The concerto will be of excellent quality.”
The treatment worked—or at least complemented other factors that got the composer back on his creative track. A close friendship with the extraordinary Russian bass Fyodor Chaliapin was encouraging, especially when the two were approached after a performance by the great writer Anton Chekhov, who remarked: “Mr. Rachmaninoff, nobody knows you yet but you will be a great man one day.” By the summer he was composing the Second Piano Concerto, his first substantial work since the symphony fiasco, which he dedicated to Dahl. (This is no doubt the lone instance of a composer dedicating a masterpiece to his therapist.) The second and third of its three movements were completed by the fall, and Rachmaninoff premiered them in Moscow that December with Siloti conducting. He finished the first movement in May 1901 and performed the entire concerto in November. The work was greeted enthusiastically and opened the way to Rachmaninoff’s most intensive period of compositional activity.
To begin the first movement (Moderato), the solo piano inexorably intones imposing chords in a gradual crescendo, repeatedly returning to a low F. This evokes the peeling of bells, a preoccupation of many Russian composers and one that had roots in Rachmaninoff’s childhood experiences. The passage leads to the broad first theme played by the strings. The core of the concerto is an extended slow middle movement (Adagio sostenuto). The pianistic fireworks come to the fore in the finale (Allegro scherzando), which intersperses more lyrical themes—indeed the beloved tunes from all three movements were later adapted into popular songs championed by Frank Sinatra and others.
As early as 1914, Rachmaninoff thought of writing a new concerto to add to his performing repertory, but little came of the idea until the summer of 1924, when he began composing his Fourth Concerto in G Minor, which he finished in 1926. It was his first significant composition since he had left Russia nearly a decade earlier. He confided to his close friend Nikolai Medtner, himself a distinguished composer to whom he dedicated the piece, that he was worried some about its length: “Perhaps it will have to be given like Wagner’s Ring cycle, over the course of several consecutive evenings.” He also acknowledged that “the orchestra is almost never silent,” which made the work “less like a concerto for piano and more like a concerto for piano and orchestra.”
The concerto is in fact not as long as either his Second or Third, but unlike the great successes he enjoyed with those pieces, it was not well received when he premiered it with Leopold Stokowski and The Philadelphia Orchestra in March 1927. He soon revised the work, rewriting the opening, making cuts and other changes, before its first publication in 1928; he overhauled it again in 1941, less than two years before his death, his final compositional project. This last version he recorded with Eugene Ormandy, that year and it is the most often performed. (There are recordings available of the two earlier versions.)
The concerto displays many of Rachmaninoff’s distinctive musical fingerprints and gestures, but updated somewhat for the 1920s. There are fleeting influences, for example, of jazz. Rachmaninoff, along with many musical luminaries, attended the legendary February 1924 premiere of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in New York with the composer playing with Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, and the experience left its mark. Unlike the subdued beginnings of his two previous concertos, this one starts with a full-blown romantically Rachmaninoff theme (Allegro vivace).
The Largo has a hint of the blues and makes use of an earlier solo piano work, the Etude-Tableau in C Minor, which Rachmaninoff composed in 1911 but had held back from publication—it only appeared posthumously. The finale (Allegro vivace), which immediately follows, offers an energetic tour de force with allusions, as Rachmaninoff so often does, to the “Dies irae” from the Mass for the Dead.
Rachmaninoff composed the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in the summer of 1934 at his Swiss villa near Lucerne. At the time, he described it as “not a ‘concerto,’ and its name is ‘Symphonic Variations on a Theme of Paganini,’” which he then changed to “Fantasy.” But ultimately it was as a Rhapsody that Leopold Stokowski led the Philadelphians in the world premiere in Baltimore on November 7, 1934, with the composer as soloist. The forces recorded the piece on Christmas Eve.
Rachmaninoff had earlier been attracted to variation form and written substantial pieces based on themes by Chopin and Corelli. For the Rhapsody, he chose a simple but ingenious tune that has also seduced many other composers: the Caprice No. 24 in A Minor by Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840). The great Italian violinist—the first instrumental “rock star” of the 19th century—wrote a dazzling collection of 24 caprices for solo violin that explored everything that the instrument, and the instrumentalist, could do. In 1820 Paganini published the pieces, on which he had worked for nearly two decades, as his Op. 1. Franz Liszt, who at age 20 was deeply inspired when he first witnessed Paganini perform at the Paris Opera and who aspired to become the “Paganini of the Piano,” transcribed some of them for piano, as did Robert Schumann. More surprising and impressive are Johannes Brahms’s two sets of variations on the A-Minor Caprice, Op. 35. Prominent 20th-century composers after Rachmaninoff—including Witold Lutosławski, Alfred Schnittke, and George Rochberg—took Modernist looks at the alluring theme.
The original A-Minor Caprice is itself a miniature set of variations. Almost by definition, variation sets begin with a statement of the principal theme in the simplest possible way so that listeners can grasp the basis for what follows. After a very brief introduction for the full orchestra, Rachmaninoff begins unusually with a pointillist variation (marked “precedente”) before the strings actually state the theme with unobtrusive piano support. The first variations are dispatched at a quick pace until things slow down with No. 7, in which the rich piano chords introduce another theme that plays a prominent role in what follows. This is the well-known plainchant “Dies irae” from the Requiem Mass for the Dead. Rachmaninoff, who alluded to or quoted the medieval melody in other compositions, associated this motto not only with death but also with the violin’s longstanding connection to the devil. (Many contemporaries commented on demonic performances by Paganini, whose name translates as “little pagan.”)
Five years after writing the Rhapsody, Mikhail Fokine, the prominent Russian choreographer, used the piece for a ballet called Paganini. While in the planning stages, Rachmaninoff suggested to him: “Why not resurrect the legend about Paganini, who, for perfection in his art and for a woman, sold his soul to an evil spirit?” He further remarked that “the variations which have the ‘Dies irae’ represent the evil spirit.” Over the course of the 24 variations, Rachmaninoff devises many ingenious transformations of the theme, the most famous being the beautiful 18th variation, which offers a lyrical inversion (upside-down) of the tune as the emotional climax of the Rhapsody.
Rachmaninoff continued to build on the compositional successes of his Second Piano Concerto and Second Symphony during what turned out to be the most productive period of his career. Now in his mid-30s, he was about to undertake his first tour to America in 1909. In preparation, he decided to write a new concerto, again amidst the calm of the family retreat in Ivanovka.
Rachmaninoff dedicated the Third Concerto to Josef Hofmann, the great Polish-born pianist who would later become the director of the Curtis Institute of Music. Soon after his friend’s death, Hofmann commented: “Rachmaninoff was made of steel and gold; steel in his arms, gold in his heart.” In the end, Hofmann never performed the piece, which Rachmaninoff premiered as soloist in November 1909 with Walter Damrosch leading the New York Symphony Orchestra. Six weeks later, Rachmaninoff played the piece again in New York, this time with Gustav Mahler conducting the New York Philharmonic. (The competing orchestras later merged.)
The unforgettable opening of the Third Piano Concerto (Allegro ma non tanto) is simplicity itself: a hauntingly beautiful melody played in octaves that has a chant-like quality. Rachmaninoff stated that it was “borrowed neither from folk song nor from ecclesiastical sources. It just ‘got written’ … I wanted to ‘sing’ a melody on the piano the way singers sing.” Rachmaninoff composed two cadenzas, both of which he played. The short coda returns to the opening melody.
The following Intermezzo: Adagio begins with an orchestral section presenting the principal melodic ideas, melancholic in tone, until the piano enters, building to a broadly Romantic theme. There is a very brief, fast, scherzo-like section that leads without pause into the thrilling and technically dazzling Finale: Alla breve. The movement recycles some of the musical ideas of the first one, making this one of the most unified of the composer’s concertos.
—Christopher H. Gibbs
Program notes © 2023. All rights reserved. Program notes may not be reprinted without written permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association.