Symphony No.2 in E minor, Op.27
Largo – Allegro moderato
Scherzo: Allegro molto
Adagio
Finale: Allegro vivace
Sergei Rachmaninov’s career as the rising star of the Moscow Conservatoire came to an abrupt end in St. Petersburg on the evening of March 27, 1897. The première of his First Symphony, his most ambitious work to date, was an unmitigated disaster. Rachmaninov left the hall in despair even before the performance had ended; the critics tore into him, and the 24-year old composer fell into a state of nervous collapse. " I felt like a man who had suffered a stroke and had lost the use of his head and hands" he wrote later. Destroying the score of the symphony, he wrote no more music for three and a half years until a course of treatment with the psychotherapist Nikolai Dahl restored his creativity and re-started his career with what would become his best-known work, the Second Piano Concerto. By 1907 he was world famous as a conductor and pianist as well as a composer, but when a Russian newspaper reported that he had completed a new symphony even his close friends were surprised. "It’s true" he confirmed to his friend Mikhail Slonov " 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 any more". It’s not hard to understand why Rachmaninov chose to write another symphony – he needed to prove to himself and the world that his new success as a composer was more than a by-product of his fame as a pianist – and equally easy to understand why he kept its composition a secret, even to the extent of moving to Dresden to compose it. The failure of the First Symphony haunted him throughout his life. But if he aimed to prove his new confidence, he succeeded magnificently. The completed Second Symphony shows not a trace of compositional difficulty, and, freed of the constraints of the concerto form, his inspiration breathes and expands more freely than in any of his previous works, noble and memorable melodies unfurling effortlessly in the space afforded by huge, but perfectly measured, musical paragraphs.
The Second Symphony is Rachmaninov’s longest concert work, lasting well over an hour if all the repeats are observed. This made it the principal victim of the critical reaction against his music that set in after his death, and for years it was performed, if at all, in a heavily cut version omitting up to 20 minutes of music. Rachmaninov was alleged to have sanctioned these cuts himself, but a story survives of when the conductor Eugene Ormandy invited Rachmaninov to cut the symphony for a Philadelphia performance. Rachmaninov considered the score for some hours, finally returning it to Ormandy with his reluctant consent to cut the symphony as he’d marked. He had crossed out two bars. Today, when Bruckner and Mahler symphonies fill concert halls, the Second Symphony can be appreciated for the perfectly crafted and beautifully balanced whole it is. Of all the great late-Romantic symphonies it requires the least analysis to enjoy; the stream of inspired melodies is continual and the listener need only sit back and let them sweep past. But the Symphony is nonetheless highly structured, in straightforward but very effective classical forms. In the sonata-form outer movements the transitions between sections are always clearly marked with instrumental recitatives or grand cadences, and the whole structure is tied together with a range of thematic cross-references. Music first heard in the slow introduction recurs in the Adagio and at the climax of the Finale; material from the second and third movements also re-appears in the fourth. The rich, deep-hued orchestration throughout the symphony confers another level of unity on the whole.
However, although the Symphony has a strong formal unity, Rachmaninov’s orchestration and melodic invention is so characterful that it is not difficult to see it as a programmatic work. "There is something in the Russian soul that corresponds to the immensity, the vagueness, the infinitude of the Russian land" wrote Nicholas Berdayev, and the long introductory Largo surely evokes some vast, overcast Russian steppe. The climax of the development section resembles a tremendous winter storm, while the great Adagio conjures a glowing vista of an endless, sunlit landscape. Equally, the Symphony’s emotional programme is not hard to read; the archetypal Romantic journey from darkness to light, despair to triumph, as found in the symphonies of Rachmaninov’s youthful idol Tchaikovsky and in most of his own works from the Second Piano Concerto onwards. One writer has compared the Adagio directly with the love scene in Rachmaninov’s 1905 opera "Francesca da Rimini", with which it shares certain melodic and harmonic traits; its emotional message is certainly unambiguous.
The symphony opens with a slow introduction on the broadest scale; almost a self-contained movement in its own right. ‘Cellos and basses intone the chant-like motto-theme, and bass clarinet, violas and cor-anglais create a sombre atmosphere as the Largo builds to a climax and subsides once more into the gloom. A cor-anglais recitative and a shiver from the violins launch the first movement proper, a huge sonata-form structure built principally upon the violins’ urgent and lyrical first subject. A solo clarinet ushers in the tender second theme; hesitant woodwinds with a meltingly romantic string response. Rachmaninov builds another long paragraph from this subject, and concludes the exposition with a radiant, arching melody for ‘cellos. Thereafter the movement follows a conventional sonata-form course, the titanic storm of the development section peaking in two successively louder and more dissonant climaxes. Unsurprisingly, after this, the recapitulation makes most use of the quieter second subject-group, rendered even gentler by the contrast.
Rachmaninov is at his most energetic in the Scherzo; the vigorous opening theme for horns flying by amid flashing triplet figures and glittering writing for violins and glockenspiel. A lyrical second theme takes us briefly back to Rachmaninov’s more usual romantic mood, but this is no more than an interlude and the opening music makes a rapid return. The central section of the movement begins with a crash and resembles a Russian Orthodox procession, a chant-like melody carried forward by the wind instruments and surrounded by sparkling staccato figuration for strings. A straightforward repeat of the scherzo follows, the motto-theme sounding balefully in the low brass before the movement vanishes into silence.
The Adagio is quite simply the most openly and completely romantic music Rachmaninov ever wrote. An ardent, rising motif for the strings introduces the great clarinet melody that is the heart of the whole symphony. "He sang, and in every sound his voice made there breathed something familiar as our birthright and so vast no eye could encompass it, just as if the Russian steppe were being unrolled before us, stretching away to an endless distance" (Ivan Turgenev). The exquisitely soft and intricate accompaniment, with strings divided into 16 parts, subtly underlines the beauty of this extraordinary theme. The continuation sees the return of the opening motif, still more ardent, and it returns again after the second subject group, a poignant question-and-answer between the woodwinds. There is a bar’s silence before the brief development section, but comment on such expressive material seems unnecessary and the main melody soon returns, quieter and even sweeter, on violins. The movement ends in profound tranquillity.
After the hushed close of the Adagio, the finale bursts in with exuberant self-confidence. Four bars of pounding rhythm introduce a swaggering, march-like principal theme, and even after the initial energy subsides, galloping triplet-figures continue to drive the music vigorously forward. A cymbal crash and a triumphant fanfare introduce the sweeping second subject, a broad and expansively happy melody which Rachmaninov gradually winds down, finally bringing it to rest in a peaceful reminiscence of the Adagio. The development section is more agitated but the festive mood is never far from the surface, and in a tremendous passage beginning with a descending scale on the bassoon, the whole orchestra gradually joins in what sounds like a great celebratory peal of bells, heralding the recapitulation and the build- up to the final climax of the symphony. A majestic restatement of the second subject is crowned by the final return of the motto-theme and a brilliant coda winds the symphony up with a flourish. The overwhelming feeling is of a triumphant and joyous homecoming – exactly what awaited Rachmaninov when the Symphony was premiered in St. Petersburg in the spring of 1908.
R.G. Bratby
Copyright Classical Notes.co.uk 2000
CLICK HERE for a wide and diverse selection of contemporary music and standard repertoire programme notes.