Sergei Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 1 in F-sharp minor, Opus 1
Program note written for the San Francisco Symphony.
“Everything around me makes it impossible for me to work and I am frightened of becoming completely apathetic.” So wrote Sergei Rachmaninoff to his lifelong mentor Alexander Siloti in the fall of 1917 as revolution shook Russia. Guns fired in the streets outside his Moscow apartment and Rachmaninoff found himself incapable of creating new music. A long-planned revision of his Opus 1, his first piano concerto, became a welcome distraction from his inescapable circumstances and one we can be grateful for as it gave us the piece we know today (and the one we hear on this concert). On December 22, 1917, Rachmaninoff boarded a train with his family for Stockholm and never returned to Russia. The Piano Concerto No. 1 is therefore both his first large-scale work and the last one he touched before leaving his homeland, offering a fascinating window into his development as a composer.
When Rachmaninoff initially wrote the concerto as a teenager between 1890–91, he enjoyed a youthful confidence, blithely composing the piece in his head and writing it down only after several months’ delay, then angering the Moscow Conservatory’s new director, Vasily Safanov, by publicly rejecting his feedback on the piece. Rachmaninoff had good reason to be a bit cocky: he was just embarking on what would become a stunningly successful international career as a pianist and composer. He had the support of Russia’s leading composers of the day: Anton Arensky and Sergei Taneyev, with whom he studied composition at the Moscow Conservatory, and Tchaikovsky, who commissioned arrangements from him and championed his early work. But his self-confidence would not last. A tepid review of the first movement’s premiere stated “there was not yet of course any individuality.” Rachmaninoff judged the piece even more harshly later in his career, writing “its orchestration is worse than its music.” He named the first concerto as one of “three pieces that frighten me,” alongside his disastrous First Symphony of 1897 which resulted in a three-year creative block.
By the time Rachmaninoff returned to revise the concerto, he had lived through nearly 26 years of wild successes and crushing depression, and he was at the end of his most prolific period as a composer. He never revised his ill-fated First Symphony, but he was quite pleased with the First Piano Concerto’s revision and disappointed that audiences did not respond in kind. He bemoaned, “I have rewritten my First Concerto; it is really good now. All of the youthful freshness is there, and yet it plays itself so much more easily. And nobody pays any attention.” Late in life, he performed it himself on a 1941 concert with the San Francisco Symphony and Pierre Monteux at the War Memorial Opera House. While it is still not played as often as his second or third concertos (the SF Symphony would not program it again until 1980), Rachmaninoff would be pleased to see that many of today’s leading pianists do cherish it.
The Music
Rachmaninoff has long been snubbed as a hopeless Romantic, behind the times of his innovative era, though the soaring melodies and dramatic climaxes that some critics deride have made him beloved by audiences and musicians. In a posthumously published letter written in 1939, he lamented: “I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien. I cannot cast out the old way of writing, and I cannot acquire the new. I have made intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me.” However, by comparing the 1891 and 1917 versions of the First Concerto, we can clearly see that Rachmaninoff’s harmonic language shifted away from that of his Romantic idols and mentors as his unique voice developed. The 1891 version of the piece sounds like it belongs squarely in the 19th century, alongside Arensky and Tchaikovsky. The 1917 revision sounds like something else: certainly not ground-breaking like his contemporary Stravinsky, but reflecting turn-of-the-century culture. Rachmaninoff’s Romanticism is his own and could no more have existed in the 19th century than the music of his more experimental contemporaries.
The piece begins with the horns, clarinets, and bassoons intoning a fanfare of impending doom, perhaps invoking the “fate” motif from Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4. The piano responds with cascading octaves and chords from the top of the keyboard down to the bottom, echoing the opening of Edvard Grieg and Robert Schumann’s seminal Romantic-era piano concertos. The piano fights with the orchestra until the orchestra finally gives us relief in the form of the melancholy, sweeping central theme of the movement. Playful passages abound with fantastically virtuosic writing in the piano and we hear the fateful opening motif and the main theme transformed in various ways. Rachmaninoff wraps up the movement with a gargantuan cadenza in the piano, impressive in both its length and emotional scope, followed by a return to the foreboding music of the opening and one final descending torrent of chords in the piano.
The second movement opens with a plaintive rising line in the winds. It wanders uncertainly, questioning, until the piano takes over and creates an improvisational wonder from the material. The climax is a study in delayed gratification. In a 2025 video for the Chicago Symphony, soloist Simon Trpčeski describes the evocative music as a scene, imagining Rachmaninoff improvising in a smoky bar, or admiring the Russian countryside from his Ivanovka estate.
The third movement offers childlike excitement, bubbling bravura piano writing, and a luscious E-flat major middle section. It ends with a triumphant answer to the concerto’s opening, an explosion of major chords bubbling up from the bottom of the keyboard to the top where the piano and orchestra join together in an emphatic final cadence.