Sergei Rachmaninoff
Concerto No. 2 in C minor for Piano & Orchestra, Op. 18
Sergei Rachmaninoff was born at Semyonovo, Russia in 1873 and died in Beverly Hills, California in 1943. Rachmaninoff completed his Piano Concerto No. 2 in 1901, and the first complete performance took place in Moscow the same year with Rachmaninoff at the piano. The composer dedicated the score to Dr. Nikolai Dahl, his hypnotist. The Piano Concerto is scored for solo piano, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, and strings.
*****
Rachmaninoff had been a brilliantly successful student at the Moscow Conservatory, where he honed his pianism and studied composition. Like most composers of his time, especially those living in a city saturated with Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff wanted to write a symphony. And so he did.

But when Rachmaninoff’s symphony was performed, it ran into a snag. The players didn’t like it. The audience didn’t like it. The conductor, who was inebriated during the performance, didn’t like it. Even Rachmaninoff didn’t like it. Nobody liked it. Composer César Cui seems to have summed it up for everyone: “If there were a conservatory in Hell, and if one of its talented students was to compose a symphony based on the story of the Seven Plagues of Egypt, and if he had written one similar to Rachmaninoff’s, he would have brilliantly accomplished his task and would have delighted the inhabitants of Hell.”

  Rachmaninoff was devastated, and not just from the reception his piece received. He knew the piece was awful, and that was the worst part. He fell into a deep depression, started drinking heavily, and added to his woes with an unhappy love affair. Every morsel of confidence he had in his compositional ability vanished, and he didn’t compose a note for three years. Facing up to the dry well, Rachmaninoff concentrated on his piano playing and concertized with some success. But the creative spark was gone.

After a series of particularly successful concerts in London, he was asked to write a piano concerto and return with it the next season. Rachmaninoff had only written one piano concerto at the time and he was utterly dissatisfied with it, so he promised to compose a new work. When he returned from his tour, he realized he couldn’t do it and all the greater was his despair.

Rachmaninoff’s family and friends tried to help, suggesting all kinds of cures and therapies, but nothing seemed to work—nothing, that is, until they sent him to a hypnotist. “Although it may sound incredible, this cure really helped me,” Rachmaninoff wrote. “Already at the beginning of the summer I began again to compose. The material grew in bulk, and new musical ideas began to stir within me—far more than I needed for my concerto.” Rachmaninoff wrote the last two movements first, had them performed with encouraging results, and soon after composed the first movement. He dedicated the work to his hypnotist, and it was an instant hit. He would be visited now and again with bouts of depression but these were never as incapacitating.

What is more, he wrote a terrific piano concerto. To this day it is performed as frequently as any concerto for any instrument, and more often than most. The bell-like peals of the first movement, the nocturnal second, the dynamic drive of the Finale, the explosive piano cadenzas—all testify to Rachmaninoff’s rejuvenation. And, perhaps, to the power of hypnosis.