Rachmaninoff - Symphony No. 2 - Program Note

Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony might have been the end of his compositional career. Its disastrous premiere in 1897—led by Alexander Glazunov, whose work as a conductor was by all accounts significantly weaker than as a composer— was for Rachmaninoff “the most agonizing hour of [his] life.” The misfortune of a dreadful performance and scathing public and critical reception on his first symphonic outing plunged Rachmaninoff into a bout of depression and writer’s block that lasted for years. While his formidable skills as a pianist and conductor were enough to sustain him in the interim, he had to seek psychotherapy before his confidence in setting pen to paper would return. After numerous visits to Dr. Nikolai Dahl, a specialist in treatment via hypnosis, the composer began to write again, and by 1901 he had completed and performed the solo part at the triumphant premiere of his Second Piano Concerto – perhaps his best known and most celebrated work. Accordingly, he dedicated the concerto to Dahl, whose assurances through hypnotic suggestion that he would write again “with great facility” proved wholly true.

The next several years were filled with such productivity and success for Rachmaninoff that he had to relocate to escape the constant demands on his schedule. In the fall of 1906, he moved with his wife and daughter to Dresden, where he quietly began work on another symphony. His period of newfound creativity was accompanied by the birth of his second daughter Tatiana, and it included the tone poem The Isle of the Dead, his First Piano Sonata, and his Third Piano Concerto. After a few close associates caught wind of his endeavors, he announced in February of 1907, “I have composed a symphony. It’s true! . . . I finished it a month ago and immediately put it aside. It was a severe worry to me and I’m not going to think about it anymore.” If not yet entirely free of his demons, Rachmaninoff must have been sufficiently vindicated by the symphony’s Saint Petersburg premiere in 1908 under the composer’s own baton. The public response was effusive, and the work won him a second Glinka Prize.

For such a major psychological achievement, the Second Symphony begins not with bombast but with hushed tones. Basses and cellos outline in pianissimo a simple motive that becomes the root melodic material for much of the piece; in fact, almost all of the principal themes we hear over the course of its four long movements carry at least some audible trace of the stepwise contour presented in these first few bars. After the disaster of his First, Rachmaninoff seems intent from the outset of the Second on establishing compositional unity. Yet, what stands out even more over the course of the work, and more immediately affects our associations with the piece, is the simple beauty and ease of its melodies. Rachmaninoff would be criticized further for writing with such unabashed romanticism at a time when Schoenberg and his Viennese counterparts were stretching the tonal system to its absolute limits. Modern reappraisals of his music have coalesced around the characteristics of Rachmaninoff’s voice that grant it the most staying power: its unparalleled virtuosity and inimitable melodic craft.

The muted opening of the introduction swells to climactic proportions before the first movement’s main tempo even begins. After a doleful soliloquy from the English horn, a simple tremolando gesture in the strings eases forward into the movement’s principal section. Not long after the presentation of the main theme, scurrying triplet gestures intrude to foreshadow the energetic activity of the symphony’s finale, though they are but one element in the first movement’s extended dialogue. The second movement’s frenetic scherzo also includes a broadly songful secondary theme and an elaborate fugue. The third movement’s lyric tapestry interweaves a long series of richly melodic ideas all spun out from the first movement’s principal motto. Each movement has such an expansive approach to form that the symphony’s performance history has been riddled with extensive cuts, made by almost every conductor except the composer himself. Most modern readings, including PSO’s performance, tend toward restoring the work to its grandiose proportions. In the last movement, we sense the optimism of a composer who has surely rediscovered his creative voice; its three contrasting ideas continue to recollect and expand on those of the previous movements, with its most lyrical and unapologetically romantic theme carrying the work to an exultant close.

~Eric Dudley, D.M.A. Yale Univ.