About this Piece

Rachmaninoff composed his Second Symphony from 1906 to 1907, a decade after the First Symphony, whose failure with critics and the public resulted in one of the most storied nervous breakdowns in musical history. But Rachmaninoff was creatively active again within a couple of years and in 1901 achieved what would remain his greatest popular success―the C-minor Piano Concerto, Op. 18.

The acclaim that came in the wake of the concerto was so great that by 1905 Rachmaninoff was in constant demand as a performer of his own works in Russia and throughout Europe and had achieved celebrity status at home and abroad. The tall, gaunt Rachmaninoff was recognized and often mobbed by fans on the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Even for as sociable a man as he was at the time, it all became too much. He found it impossible to compose. So, early in 1906 he, his wife, and their young daughter moved to quiet, dignified Dresden, a city Rachmaninoff had loved since his first visit there in 1891.

The Saxon capital appealed not only for its own sedate charms but also for its proximity to Leipzig and the famed Gewandhaus Orchestra, whose conductor, Arthur Nikisch, Rachmaninoff admired above all others.

Rachmaninoff began composing the moment he arrived in Dresden, producing in rapid (for him) succession his First Piano Sonata; the songs of Op. 6; the finest of his symphonic poems, The Isle of the Dead; and his orchestral masterpiece, the Second Symphony.

He drafted the symphony in less than three months, the orchestration took two more, and the whole was completed in fall 1907. The composer conducted the first performance in St. Petersburg the following January. It was a smashing success.

Sketches for the opening pages of the E-minor Symphony―including the dark, seven-note motto theme from which the first movement and the whole symphony grows―were lifted virtually intact from a fragment of a student work that was quickly abandoned. That opening is announced by the cellos and basses. It is followed by some portentous woodwind phrases and a luscious descending violin figure that winds down to a mournful English horn solo recalling the motto theme.

The faster main theme, still based on that seven-note motto, is a long-lined, gorgeous affair in which the composer seems to achieve the ultimate soulful Russian melancholy that has come to signify the quintessential “love music” of the classics. The composer reveals his bursting heart uninhibitedly. But this is Rachmaninoff, and he goes the first movement one better with the voluptuous third movement. Not, however, before a respite in the form of a festive scherzo (Allegro molto) brazenly announced by four unison horns, their tune taken up and reshaped by the violins.

There are contrasting, slower episodes before the second movement ends. The music fades away to prepare us for that improbably gorgeous Adagio, with its two killer melodies―one for the violins, the other for solo clarinet―which become contrapuntally interwoven.

The finale is a rowdy affair whose opening and main theme recall a Neapolitan tarantella. It is followed by a brief, rather grotesque march, yet another delicious slow tune (violins and violas in unison octaves) and an unexpected recapitulation of one of the slow movement’s heartbreakers before the tarantella rhythm returns and ushers in the jolly, raucous conclusion. —Herbert Glass