Title: Symphony No. 2 in E minor, op. 27
Duration: Approximately 60 minutes
Composer: Sergei Rachmaninoff (Born in Oneg, Russia in 1873; died in Beverly Hills, California in 1943)
Work composed: October 1906 – April 1907
World premiere: Rachmaninoff himself conducted the premiere on January 26, 1908 at the Mariinsky Theatre and its Orchestra in Saint Petersburg
Instrumentation: 3 flutes, piccolo, 3 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (snare drum, bass drum, cymbals, glockenspiel), strings
Sergei Rachmaninoff was perhaps the most acclaimed among the modern Russian pianists, conductors, and composers. Just after the turn of the 19th Century, his Piano Concerto No.2 brought him some newfound fame provoking even more demands. Although playing and conducting paid the bills, Rachmaninoff was soon performing and conducting with an extremely busy schedule. But Rachmaninoff considered himself primarily a composer, and he was finding it increasingly difficult to find time to do so. In the summer of 1906, amid growing political upheavals in Moscow and in between several teaching and conducting engagements, Rachmaninoff decided to escape the noise and move his family to Dresden, Germany. The first piece he began composing was his Symphony No. 2.
The Second Symphony is one of Rachmaninoff’s finest works – a tapestry of ingenious thematic connectivity clothed in the composer’s uncanny gift for pathos and verve and jaw-droppingly beautiful themes. It was instantly lauded as a masterpiece at its 1908 premiere, but the background to its creation was fraught with angst and self-doubt. That Rachmaninoff began work on a second symphony at all must have filled him with trepidation. A decade earlier, his First Symphony of 1897 was performed very poorly and met with only vitriol and scorn at its premiere. The damage to the 20-year-old Rachmaninoff was devastating, driving him to binge drinking and a deep depression, which quickly led to severe writer’s block. Thanks to the newly emerging success of hypnotherapy, however, Rachmaninoff was able to recover, and within a few years he composed his immediately popular Piano Concerto No. 2 (1901), which helped him regain a place in Russian musical circles. Nonetheless, as a former student and life-long admirer of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff could hardly abandon symphonies if he considered himself firstly a composer. Many of his contemporaries thought of Rachmaninoff, in fact, as Tchaikovsky’s successor – in filling those shoes, trying to achieve at least one successful symphony was basically inevitable. But tackling the symphonic form again in 1906 must have been a courageous quest for him.
Indeed, Rachmaninoff complained at the time at how sluggish his Symphony’s progress was coming and how he had to put it aside for a time – in hindsight, however, it seems as though fate had other plans. In the Spring of 1907, a friend of Rachmaninoff’s caught wind of his work on the new symphony and broadcast it to the press. Shortly afterwards, Rachmaninoff was persuaded to finish and premiere his Symphony No. 2 as soon as possible – the first performance took place in early 1908 with Rachmaninoff conducting. Though his anxieties ran high at the premiere, his Second Symphony was heralded as one of his greatest achievements to date. Soon after he would be awarded Russia’s top musical prize, the Glinka Award, for the work. As much as he felt vindicated with the music world, Rachmaninoff was even more so relieved. And there’s little to argue with about this great Symphony.
The Second’s remarkable opening seems to represent the work’s genesis, of something growing out of deep darkness. The basses begin in the low registers marked Largo (slowly and broadly), playing only seven notes, rustling and settling, almost without any sense of pulse or time. The winds and horns answer the basses’ solo with eerily glowing chords, after which the upper strings quietly appear and then gently cascade downwards. The section repeats two more times with slightly higher sets of pitches – as though emerging toward light. It’s one of the most evocative moments that Rachmaninoff would ever write, and the passage is integral to the entire Symphony – the bass line is the musical motive, or motto, that nearly every other theme in the work will be based upon. Often, these thematic connections might be hard to recognize as such, but in a subconscious way, these ties bring a deeply felt unity to the entire work, which is one of the reasons why the Symphony is so popular.
The introduction is lengthy, but its moodiness sets the stage for an epic to follow. But first, the English horn plaintively sings the Symphony’s beginning motto, alone and fragile, before the violins scurry upward to begin the main section of the first movement, Allegro moderato (moderately fast). This first full theme we hear in this new tempo is that original motto, played in the violins, slightly varied, and sped up. It works its magic – transporting us into an intense musical adventure. Rachmaninoff will bring us through lots of music in this first movement, from pathos-laden moments to mighty flashes of breathtaking grandiloquence, excitement, and hushed tenderness – all of it deeply lyrical. As the final bars come to their dramatic close, we’re left with the feeling of having already come a long way in this epic.
The second movement, Allegro molto (very fast), is the Symphony’s Scherzo movement (a fast, tumultuous middle movement). And indeed, the music jumps out from the start like a racehorse. The horns then play a majestic, swashbuckling little melody, but with a twist. The horn’s theme is derived from the Dies irae, an ancient plainchant that describes the Day of Judgement – Rachmaninoff was rather obsessed with this chant, in fact, the very next work he would compose, The Isle of the Dead (1909) uses this chant, as will several more of his works to come. And it will return again in this movement. At about nine minutes in, just after the timpani plays a series of rhythmic solos, the brass enters in a magical moment with a chorale version of the Dies irae – but it will then lay dormant until a future, surprising moment in the Symphony. The movement then comes to a delightfully whispered close, as if the notes are trying to sneak off the stage.
The third movement is a quintessential “Rachmaninoff Adagio,” something that has become a cherished hallmark of his large-scale works – a wonderfully gentle, lyrical and wandering rhapsody. Its swooping, opening motive in the violins harkens back to the first movement and is a key element herein, but the rhapsodic main theme, first played by the clarinet, showcases Rachmaninoff’s deftness for making modestly simple melodies sound so vast and rich. About half-way through, this rhapsodic theme reaches an epic climax, enveloping everything in its lushness and beauty – and then a truly enchanting moment occurs when the music has seemingly come to its conclusion, but instead, merely pauses before the Adagio sweetly stirs again. This lovely afterthought then concludes with a blissful, prayer-like softness.
The final movement, Allegro vivace (fast and lively), opens boisterously in a carnival mood, horns yelping, trumpets proclaiming, strings and winds leaping. Here, the music bursts with color and electricity, and the orchestration (instrumentation) is thick with instruments and sound. As the movement cycles through several recurring sections, the Symphony begins to clamor increasingly with activity from every angle. And just as everything begins to reach an almost hyper excitement, that wonderful Dies irae brass chorale from the second movement makes its majestic return, lifting everything into the hair-raising final bars.