SERGEI VASILIEVICH RACHMANINOFF
Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 27
Rachmaninoff composed the Symphony No. 2 between October 1906 and April 1907 and conducted the first
performance in Saint Petersburg on 26 January 1908. The dedication is to Rachmaninoff’s teacher, the
composer Sergei Taneyev.
When Rachmaninoff was working on this symphony, he was living in Dresden, where he had gone to escape
the constant clamor for his services as a conductor. There he also composed his Piano Sonata No. 1, the tone
poem The Isle of the Dead after the Böcklin painting he had seen in Dresden’s Semper Gallery, and, for his first
American tour in 1909, the Piano Concerto No. 3. Thirty-three years old, he was in his fifth year of contented
marriage, a father (his second daughter, Tatiana, was born about the time the symphony was completed), an
experienced composer in many genres, an unsurpassed and scarcely equaled pianist, and a highly esteemed
conductor. As a composer he was original as well as experienced, with a tone of voice and melodic style all his
own and, as many attempts, particularly in film studios, have proved, inimitable. In his Preludes and ÉtudesTableaux for piano he developed an impressive skill at composing a highly economical sort of music, but in his
symphonies and concertos he preferred at least to this point in his development, a more expansive manner.
Expansive enough in this instance to have disturbed conductors into making many cuts. Some of the standard
deletions consist of petty impatiences like reducing the four measures of accompaniment at the start of the first
Allegro to two, but they have also entailed such brutal surgery as the removal of the entire principal theme from
the recapitulation of the Adagio. Cuts do not solve formal problems: they merely shorten the time you have to
spend dealing with them. Paradoxically, a work may feel longer when it is cut because the proportions are off
and the distribution of light and shade is all wrong.
Rachmaninoff himself was strangely passive about this. In 1940, Leslie J. Rogers, the Boston Symphony’s
librarian in the early part of this century, sent Pierre Monteaux the twenty-nine cuts “supposedly given to [Josef
Stransky, conductor of the New York Philharmonic] by the composer” as well as the list of different excisions
made by Serge Koussevitzky, conductor of the Boston Symphony. In his cover letter Rogers writes: “I asked
them and he ‘approved’ them. I asked him if he wanted cuts made and he said that if he conducted it himself
there would be no cuts but had no objections to others cutting if they thought it should be cut.” In a note for his
wonderful 1973 London Symphony recording, Andre Previn writes that, having begun by making the standard
cuts, he had decided, “on reexamining the score . . . to re-instate every note. . . . It makes the symphony
undeniably long, but I feel that its honesty, its power, its heart-felt lyricism can stand it.”
Rachmaninoff began in mystery, with pianissimo low strings.
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What the cellos and basses play here is a motto that turns out to have a large role in the symphony,
sometimes on the surface, sometimes beneath it. Immediately, sonorous wind chords vary its first three notes,
and the violins make lachrymose response. The texture becomes more tightly woven, with imitative entrances
following fast upon one another; at the same time, the melodic flow is gorgeous. The penetrating high writing
for violas, who enter on the same high C as the violins, is especially effective. Rachmaninoff slowly works this
up to an intense climax from which he then descends rapidly. Harmonically, this whole introduction describes
one great half-cadence from tonic to dominant.
Alone, the English horn muses on these events for a moment. Strings, in a softly shuddering tremolando, play
a fragment of a rising scale, and the main part of the first movement has begun. The first theme, which the
violins introduce, is yet another variant of the introduction’s motto, now urgent and forward-thrusting. It is
presented in a broad paragraph, and Rachmaninoff’s command of such spans is very impressive indeed.
Accelerating, the music moves toward a new key, the relative major, G. The theme is new, yet both the
design—wind chords leading to a melancholy violin response—and the actual shapes of the phrases are
familiar from the introduction. Violins and cellos carry the music forward and, though the key is now officially G
major, the yearning for darker E minor is strong. One of Rachmaninoff’s beautiful ever-descending melodies
brings the exposition to its quiet close.
A violin solo reminds us of the introduction. After the brief moment of quiet, the music pushes forward. Slowly
the bass descends from A to G on F-sharp. The cellos recall the motto, the violas interject violent tremors. The
bass skips over E—Rachmaninoff is not yet ready to re-establish the tonic and begin the recapitulation—but
sits for a long time on E-flat. Then, as the bass starts to rise again, a great crescendo begins. We hear some
triumphant fanfares, but this is just a way station. The agitated journey resumes: Rachmaninoff has learned
well from Tchaikovsky how to build suspense. Through the storm, we can make our fragments of the opening
theme. At last the long dominant pedal on B is resolved ton E, the keynote. We are home; the recapitulation
has begun.
The fragments we heard in the tempest are as much a return of the opening theme as we are going to get.
When at last we land back in E, we are given the second theme, the one with the wind-string dialogue. And
once home, Rachmaninoff moves swiftly into a powerful coda. The final E-minor chord is followed by a thump
on low E for cellos and basses alone.
The second movement, the scherzo, is wildly energetic; it is in fact rare for Rachmaninoff to write a movement
so consistently athletic. It is particularly brilliant as orchestral writings. The key is A minor, and the reason the
beginning rings as it does is that the violins playing their rapid anapests get to use their open A and E strings
so much. A little later the glockenspiel adds a nice edge. Midway, Rachmaninoff also gives us one of his
broadly Romantic tunes. That provides its own pleasure, but even greater is the delight of the quietly stalking
retransition to the driving main theme. The close is humorous disintegration.
Then the trio: as Haydn is supposed to have said of the big bang in his Surprise Symphony, “This will make the
ladies jump.” The second violins start a brilliant fugue, and probably every one of the violinists you hear play
this passage today had to present this excerpt at his or her audition. A swift transition leads us into the return
of the scherzo, in whose coda Rachmaninoff, as he was so fond of doing, cites the Dies irae (Day of Wrath)
from the Gregorian Mass for the Dead. This phrase is suggested by the horns at the opening of the movement;
toward the end it becomes explicit.
In the beautiful Adagio we find Rachmaninoff’s melodic genius working at full power. He begins as though in
mid-phrase, with violas winding long garlands of triplets, over which the violins play a phrase that begins with
an unforgettable upward thrust. That one is the phrase people usually come out singing after this symphony.
But all this is just introduction. The main matter is a lovely clarinet solo, a wonderful instance of Rachmaninoff’s
way of explaining an idea on and on. The melody takes twenty-three measures to have its say, never repeating
itself literally, though circling, as many Russian melodies are apt to do, around a few notes within a limited
compass. It is, among other things, a reminder that Rachmaninoff was also a marvelous songwriter. But even
when the clarinet stops, the melody is not over, and the violins carry it still further.
When this long and arresting paragraph ends, which it does with the great yearning phrase that began the
movement, the violins bring back their lamenting phrase from the symphony’s introduction, though it is now
more than twice as fast. In fact, the introduction now yields material for the violins, for English horn and oboe,
and eventually for the full orchestra to explore. Again Rachmaninoff brings in one of his gradually descending
bass lines. This leads to a grand arrival in C major. There is a swift drop to pianissimo, a long silence, and then
a lovely passage, full of mystery, in which solo instruments, one after one and beginning with the horn, briefly
caress the yearning phrase. When the flute takes its turn, the violins swiftly interject their phrase from the
introduction.
This touchingly intimate passage proves to be the transition to the return of the great melody the clarinet
played at the beginning of the movement, but which is now given to the violins. (This is one of the passages
that used to be cut.) Woodwinds now decorate the melody with the yearning phrase. From here, the movement
sinks to a spacious and quiet close.
The finale, back in E, but now E major, begins headlong. The contrasting theme is a hushed conspiratorial
march; the transition to this, with timpani, plucked low strings, and muted horns, is particularly fine. The march
is just an interlude. The forceful and speedy opening music returns, to lead to one of Rachmaninoff’s “big
tunes.” If we know the Second and Third piano concertos, we can safely guess that this, grandly presented, will
be the material for the final cresting.
But there is much adventure before we get to that point. First comes the surprise of a return for just six
measures to the tempo of the slow movement and to its beautiful introductory phrase. Then the high-speed
tempo resumes, and in this development section Rachmaninoff gives us one of his most amazing passages, a
network of descending scales, slow and fast, high and low, syncopated and straight, that generate such a swirl
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of sound, that all the bells in Russia seem to be ringing. It is rather like Arvo Pärt eighty years ahead of time.
From here on, matters develop much as we would expect, with a recapitulation in whose first pages the carillon
scales are not altogether forgotten, with a grand peroration based on the big lyric tune, and a blood-stirring
rush to the close, which is sealed with Rachmaninoff’s familiar “signature” cadence—YUM-pa-ta-TUM (this
time slightly up to YUM-pa-ta-ta-TUM).
© Michael Steinberg
1. Until the appearance in 1994 of new recordings by Valery Gergiev and Yuri Temirkanov, Edo de Waart is the only conductor in my
experience to have taken the repeat of the first movement’s exposition, and very effective it was, too. The numbers are interesting. The
early and uncut Boston Symphony performances under Max Fielder and Karl Muck took sixty-five minutes. André Previn’s uncut
performances average fifty-nine minutes and change. Monteaux, making the twenty-nine “Stransky” cuts, came in at fifty-two, but
Koussevitzky, making fewer cuts than Monteaux, gave consistently quicker performances (forty-one to forty-six minutes). So far as I
know, the speed record is held by Izler Solomon, who brought the Boston Symphony to the last double bar in thirty-eight minutes!
2. This type of opening, so popular in works from Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony to Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, was invented by
Haydn in his Symphony No. 103, the Drumroll.
3. Most of the earlier conductors did not find these scales as magical as I do. At any rate, this was a passage subjected to brutal
cutting: I am sure I never heard it until Previn’s uncut
performance in the early 1970s.