Symphony No. 1

Rachmaninoff’s first venture into symphonic writing was with his First Symphony, written when he was in his early/mid twenties, in 1895. The piece received its world premiere in 1897 in St. Petersburg with Alexander Glazunov conducting. Rachmaninoff’s reaction to the initial failure of the work – which was depression and several years away from composing – eventually waned and he began to compose for orchestra again several years later. He never did get the opportunity to revise the First Symphony as he wanted to; however under different, more prepared conductors, the work has since been done justice. The score calls for two flutes and piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion and strings. Duration is approximately 41 minutes.


Though first performances and initial judgments may be inept, most of the concert works and operas we most cherish did not lack adherents in the composer’s lifetime. There are exceptions. Berlioz’s The Trojans – neglected for decades after his death, then resurrected as one of the peak achievements in French opera – is a dramatic example. Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony may be another.
The first performance, in St. Petersburg in 1897, was a fiasco. The conductor, Alexander Glazunov (better known – and better – as a composer and teacher) was ill-prepared and out of sympathy with the work. Rachmaninoff, 24 years old, fled the hall when it was over. Among the reviews was one by Cesar Cui reading in part:

If there were a conservatory in Hell, if one of its talented students were instructed to write a program symphony on the “Seven Plagues of Egypt,” and if he were to compose a symphony like Mr. Rachmaninoff’s, then he would have fulfilled his task brilliantly and would bring delight to the inhabitants of Hell.

Two months later, Rachmaninoff confided to a friend:

I am amazed how such a highly talented man as Glazunov can conduct so badly. I am not speaking now of his conducting technique (one can’t ask that of him) but about his musicianship. He feels nothing when he conducts. It’s as if he understands nothing . . . So I assume that the performance might have been the cause of the failure. (I do not say for certain; I am just assuming.) If the public had been familiar with the symphony, then they would have blamed the conductor (I continue to “assume”); if a symphony is both unfamiliar and badly performed, then the public is inclined to blame the composer

As late as 1908 Rachmaninoff considered revising the First Symphony. Instead, he decided to bury it. And it vanished – until, several years after his death, the original orchestral parts were discovered in the library of the Leningrad Conservatory. And so Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony received its second performance in 1945, and was first published two years later.
In a challenging commentary, the British composer Robert Simpson has proposed that the symphony is – not to mince words – Rachmaninoff’s highest achievement, his “one large-scale masterpiece,” achieving

A genuinely tragic and heroic expression that stands far above the pathos of his later music. . . . It never lapses into facile sentiment . . . And at no time is it ever less than intensely personal, strongly compelling. . . . [It] might still come to be regarded as the strongest by a Russian since Tchaikovsky. I don’t think such a claim is too high; at any rate, one is left with the feeling that here is a grand master, that if Rachmaninoff had followed this work with advancing successors, he would have been one of the great symphonists of the first half of the twentieth century.

Simpson’s claims – even the implicit assertion that Rachmaninoff here bears comparison with Shostakovich at his most existentially intense -- deserve to be taken seriously.
Like the Second and Third Symphonies, the First begins with a short motto theme. As with the Second Symphony and Third Piano Concerto, the opening material overtly permeates the entire work. The score bears the biblical epigraph “Vengeance is mine, I shall repay” – and the stern, curling motto is surely a “Vengeance” theme. It typically infiltrates as a disturbance – turning the symphony into a battleground. The concentrated, sometimes savage intensity of this musical warfare is (as Simpson says) more personal than picturesque. Rachmaninoff, in the most important music he had yet attempted, is playing for the highest possible stakes.
The symphony’s introduction, beginning with the motto, is curt. (Its only other element is a sinking triple-forte chord whose existential passage from major to minor happens to evoke another momentous motto theme: of the finale to Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, composed seven years later.) The first movement’s main subject, introduced by the clarinet, is a folkish derivative of the Vengeance theme. The second subject, in a slower tempo, is languorous and “oriental” after the fashion of Borodin or Rimsky-Korsakov – except for its utilization: it, too, proves malleable and recurrent, a prime ingredient in the dense thematic web unifying all four movements. Think of it, if you wish, as a benign or amorous counterpart to the Vengeance motto and its offshoots.
The development, which is both fiery and broad, begins with a crash and a furious fugato. Its climax is a massive carillon: an early taste of Rachmaninoff’s lifelong intoxication with Russian bells; a backward glance at Rimsky, whose operas Rachmaninoff conducted with distinction.
The symphony’s second movement is one of Rachmaninoff’s whirring high-velocity waltz-derivatives (cf. the Second Suite for two pianos and the Symphonic Dances). This one is wonderfully and subtly sinister: the Vengeance motto, in the background, is  a sleeping giant. Its growlings, midway through, instigate a prolonged perturbance.
The symphony’s Larghetto is arguably Rachmaninoff’s most lyrically intense slow movement. The theme is a variant of the first movement’s “oriental” second subject. The Vengeance motto again supplies eruptive undertones, turning the middle section into an episode of pleading and rebuff. The reprise builds to a climax of incomparable amplitude. The coda summarizes the movement’s lights and darks.
The finale resounds with competing strains from the previous movements. Its coda (Largo) is apocalyptic. Rachmaninoff loved to distend climactic recurrences of his themes. They can sound artificially puffed up. Here, the climactic, slow motion peroration of the Vengeance motto is a fated and irresistible exhalation. It pounds the symphony into silence.
        A tantalizing suggestion of a road not taken, this emotionally exhausting symphony is notably acquiring advocates. The current season includes performances by Valery Gergiev with the London Symphony, by  Edo de Waart with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, by Neeme Jarvi with the London Philharmonic, and no fewer than seven performances by Gianandrea Noseda (in St. Petersburg, London, Stockholm, Manchester, and Chicago) in addition to his three with the Pittsburgh Symphony. Noseda has also recently recorded the Rachmaninoff First with his BBC Philharmonic in Manchester. He is a fresh convert to the work. “It astonished me greatly,” he says. “It has such melodic beauty, the harmony is so refined, the structure is so well controlled and fluent -- a great symphony!”


 - Joseph Horowitz