Rachmaninov Symphony No 3

It was with a heavy heart that Rachmaninov decided to emigrate from Russia in 1917. He had accepted that the country he loved so much was changing beyond all recognition and would no longer be a place where he could express himself as either a man or a musician. After a year in Stockholm and Copenhagen, he sailed with his wife and daughters to America where, as the greatest pianist of his day, he would make a lucrative living from giving concerts and making recordings.

Nevertheless, though he may well have enjoyed the glamorous lifestyle that being a star virtuoso afforded, Rachmaninov always felt profoundly connected to his homeland and a nostalgic longing for his cultural roots took its toll. ‘There is a burden heavier to me than any other,’ he said. ‘It is that I have no country.’

He felt isolated as a composer as well. Schonberg and Stravinsky had also emigrated to the United States, but Rachmaninov struggled to be part of their modernist approaches. ‘I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien,’ he wrote. ‘I cannot cast out the old way of writing and I cannot acquire the new. I have made an intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me.’ Rachmaninov’s reluctance to embrace the musical avant-garde may have garnered him some snooty detractors over the years but remaining true to his beliefs hasn’t done him any harm in the long run. He believed ‘a composer’s music should express the country of his birth, his love affairs, his religion, the books that have influenced him, the pictures he loves. It should be the sum total of a composer’s experience.’ It is encouraging that a composer so honest in making sure his music was so personal is still the most popular composer of the twentieth century.

During the summers, Rachmaninov recuperated from the exertion of his concert tours at a beautiful villa he had built by the shores of Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. It was here in 1935 that he set about writing his Third Symphony, something he had been contemplating doing for many years. His First Symphony, composed in 1897, had been such a disaster that he almost gave up writing music altogether. His Second, ten years later, was so successful that he was paralysed by the pressure of trying to follow it. It seems his personal and musical confidence was threatened by both failure and success and he had not written a purely orchestral work for twenty-five years.

It is perhaps understandable then that the symphony should begin with a tentative dipping of a toe into uncertain waters. But once the opening mysterious melody (one that returns in different guises throughout the piece) has been played by just three musicians, an orchestral flourish launches us into a movement of great brilliance and panache. To continue the aquatic metaphor, ‘It’s lovely once you’re in!’ The whole movement bathes us in a warm glow of lyricism, underpinned by sensual harmonies expressed through crystal clear and transparent orchestration.

In his piano concertos Rachmaninov had often written a central movement which contained both slow and fast music. Such structural economy must have appealed to him because this is a model he adopted in his Third Symphony too. The combination of slow movement and scherzo brings the romantic Russian face to face with American pizzazz. Though there seems no animosity between the two, it is perhaps significant that Rachmaninov chooses to give the last word to his dark and longing soul rather than the helter-skelter of contemporary trans-Atlantic life.

The finale bursts into life with an effervescent celebration of swirling Russian dance rhythms and amorous expressions of tenderness and passion. And a boisterous fugue maintains the sense of joyful song and dance. A work that began with nostalgia, has ended in thrilling resolve.

At first, the symphony struggled to gain popularity. Audiences seem to have been upset as much by the work’s sentimentality as they were by the concise clarity of thought that goes alongside it. For me it is this very juxtaposition that makes the piece one of Rachmaninov’s greatest works. It is precisely the economy of means that gives the emotion such power. I can well imagine the composer at his villa in Lucerne, looking to the East with melancholic longing, and at the West’s optimism and luxury, while all the while surrounded by Swiss cool efficiency and sophistication. It is the combination of all three states of mind that makes his Third Symphony such a complete experience.

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