Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 01/01/1983, uploaded on 01/22/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

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

Studio recording, Tbilisi 1983.