Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 01/01/2010, uploaded on 01/18/2011

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Born on April 1, 1873 in Oneg, Russia, pianist, conductor, and composer Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff serves as a seminal figure in the late romantic piano repertoire. His oeuvres are original, mystic, and emotionally powerful, and embody the essence of Russian music exploiting ancient chants, evocation of bells, and Russian church and folk music.

A work of lyricism and grandeur, his Piano Sonata No.1, Op. 28  consists of three large movements. Among his colleagues presented with a draft of his sonata was pianist and pedagogue Konstantin Igumnov who would later premiere the work in 1908. In response to a series of comments, Rachmaninoff rewrote the reprises in both first and last movements, shortening them fifty and sixty measures respectively. Following the premiere of the sonata, critic Yuli Engel remarked: "The 'peak' of the concert was a new piano composition of Rachmaninoff, performed for the first time on this occasion. This new sonata is musically complex and quite intricate in its pianism. Merely to read it for oneself at the piano, unraveling this tangle of passages, rhythms, harmonies, polyphonic twistings, is no easy matter, even for an accomplished pianist."  Rachmaninoff innovatively extends the capabilities of the piano and the spirit of improvisation, extended sonata form, and references to literary sources prevail throughout the sonata.  Rachmaninoff stated, "at one time I wanted to make a symphony of this sonata, but this seemed impossible because of the purely pianistic style in which it is written."

 - from Rachmaninoff's Integrative Technique and Structural Organization: A Schenkerian Analysis of Allegro Moderato from Piano Sonata No. 1 in D Minor, Opus 28.  Christine M. Yoshikawa (D.M.A. Dissertation)

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Piano Sonata No. 1 in D minor    Sergei Rachmaninoff

Sergei Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Sonata is one of his three “Dresden pieces.” Along with the Symphony No.2 in E major and the aborted Maeterlinck opera Monna Vanna, it was composed while the composer and his family resided in the German city on the Elbe River. Rachmaninoff spent three winters in Dresden beginning in 1906, a period which was an intensely creative period for him. The city was an ideal place for the composer to work. In a letter, he admitted that he and his family lived as hermits, knowing no one and going nowhere, but he worked profusely.  Each summer, though, he returned to his family estate in Ivanovka.

The First Piano Sonata was composed simultaneously with the Symphony No. 2. Originally, Rachmaninoff conceived it as a programme sonata based on the legend of Faust, a legend already treated multiple times by past composers. Indeed, his initial plan of three movements depicting the three main characters—Faust, Gretchen, and Mephistopheles—practically mimics Franz Liszt’s Faust Symphony. The composer’s fascination with the Faust drama dated back to his teenage years when he transcribed Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony for piano duet and in 1890 sketched his own musical telling of the Byron spin-off of Goethe’s tragic play. However, the programmatic element of the sonata was dropped not long after work began. Yet, elements of this original intent may still be detected throughout the work. 

Cast in a three-movement form, the sonata embodies the traditional Classical structure with two faster paced movements framing a more docile and lyrical central movement. Rachmaninoff completed the initial form of the sonata in May 1907, but after performing it in Moscow, assented to the opinion of his contemporaries to shorten the work. He removed some one-hundred measures and roughly ten minutes of music before the work achieved the final form in which it is known today. It received its official premiere in Moscow on October 17, 1908 by Konstantin Igumnov. The work’s reception, however, was rather cool and posterity has not much improved its standing. Of Rachmaninoff’s two sonatas for the piano, it is the least performed and recorded.       Joseph DuBose