Piano Sonata No.1 in D minor Op.28 (1907)

Considering who wrote it and considering the period in which it was written, between the Second Symphony and the Third Piano Concerto, Rachmaninov’s Piano Sonata in D minor should be at least as popular as its successor in B flat minor. The reason why it isn’t has at least a little to do with the fact that it has had no great champion, not even the composer himself: he wasn’t entirely sure that he liked it. A more fundamental reason is that it is programmatic and we don’t know any more about the programme than that is is based on Goethe’s “Faust” and that – as in Liszt’s “Faust” Symphony, which Rachmaninov much admired – its three movements are devoted, respectively, to Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles. But, really, we don’t need to know any more than that since, for the most part, it behaves like a regular late-romantic piano sonata and where it doesn’t we can speculate with some confidence on the thinking behind the apparent anomaly.

Faust himself is characterised at the beginning of the first movement in two different ways. His existential desolation is represented in the opening bars by the reality of hollow fifths rising and falling in the left hand and meeting a negative answer. But there is another side to Faust, the visionary who emerges, though still in D minor, in a rather less stark chordal texture. The following agitated episode offers little hope until it makes way, in a Moderato tempo and B flat major harmonies, for a chorale melody concealed at first between arpeggios in the two hands and then carried ever higher in the right. This, a second subject in sonata-form terms, has been interpreted in programmatic terms as the Easter hymn that rescues Faust from suicide. However that may be, a dramatic, extended and technically highly demanding development follows. It leads not to a regular recapitulation but, after a series of vigorous trills, to an anticipation in D major, of the Gretchen theme that is to follow in the slow movement. Given that encouragement, Faust is elevated by a radiant D major version of the chorale melody and, in the closing bars, finds himself in more congenial harmonies than at the beginning of the movement.

Gretchen is presented in the central Lento as though in a dream. The dreamer is Faust, or so it seems reasonable to conclude from the prominent fifths in the introduction, falling in the left hand or rocking in the bass line before the entry of her distinctively lyrical theme in F major. That theme – which also includes    prominent fifths, perhaps to symbolise the lovers’ relationship – supplies most of the melodic interest, often in amorously entwined counterpoint, of the rest of the movement. There is a distinct middle section, where the accompanying figuration changes from quaver triplets to semiquaver quintuplets, but the new theme poised over the arpeggios is clearly related, at least rhythmically, to the first. Though intensified by a gradually rising tempo and increasing agitation, the emotional pressure dissolves in a poetic cadenza. Having halted the momentum in this way, Rachmaninov can now recall the opening material, which this time is treated even more rapturously, with a chain of ecstatic trills, before the ever quieter closing bars.

The last movement defies formal specification. At least as long as the first, it is astonishing for its unrestrained and unfailingly sustained energy – the superhuman energy of Mephistopheles for the most part, though he is by no means the only one who plays an active part in the tumult. The galloping music at the beginning is usually thought to represent the ride to the Brocken and the still wilder episodes are surely inspired by the hellish activities of Walpurgisnacht. Mephistopheles himself is usually associated with more or less clear allusions to the Dies Irae theme – a Rachmaninov obsession which is more appropriately indulged here than in most of the other works that make a feature of it. Even so, and in spite of the apparently overwhelming force of evil, both Faust and Gretchen are not only observed in the maelstrom but are also ultimately triumphant. Or so we can take it from the glorification of the chorale which saved Faust in the first movement and now, molto marcato in B flat major, saves him again just before the D minor ending.