Symphonic Dances, Op.45

As Rachmaninov was working on his Symphonic Dances - recuperating from illness at Huntington, Long Island, in 1940 - he cannot have escaped the thought that it might be his last major work. And so, although he had another three years to live, it sadly proved to be. The fact that he had a studio built at the house he bought in Beverly Hills in 1942 indicates that he hoped to go on working but the premonitions so eloquently expressed in the last movement of the Symphonic Dances proved to be more realistic.

Although Rachmaninov thought at one time of naming the three dances “Noon,” “Evening” and “Night,” intimations of mortality are evident in all three of them. Even amidst the daytime vigour of the opening Non allegro the dread Dies irae motif, familiar in Rachmaninov’s music from his First Symphony to his Paganini Rhapsody, makes a dramatic entry at an early stage. It is heard first, heavily disguised, in the aggressively articulated wind and string chords immediately following the preliminary woodwind anticipations of the main theme. It is true that this movement is remarkable not so much for the occasional sardonic utterance as for its youthful freshness, not least in the lovely saxophone melody in the Lento middle section. It is surely not insignificant, however, that near the end of the movement, just as the key changes from C minor to C major, there is a nostalgic memory - on cantabile strings accompanied by twinkling arpeggios on bells, piano and harp - of the Dies irae motif much as Rachmaninov had reshaped it in his First Symphony forty-five years earlier.

The second movement is a waltz but, haunted as it is by the sinister fanfare with which it begins on muted trumpets and horns, it is clearly not one of the common or ballroom variety. In fact, it has something in it of the hallucinatory aspect of Ravel’s La Valse or the fatalistic element of the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, the waltz-like theme of which it seems to echo at one point. It is melodically irresistible and most voluptuously scored and yet, in its predominantly minor harmonies and its avoidance of the basic waltz-time metre, it is consistently uneasy. The presence of the Dies irae motif (in inversion) in the main theme, first presented by cor anglais and oboe after an introductory violin solo, is surely not accidental.

If the Symphonic Dances were a symphony - and, in spite of the balletic associations of the work, Rachmaninov was clearly thinking in symphonic terms - it would still need both a slow movement and a finale. Sure enough, the third dance is shaped in such a way as to perform the two functions within the one structure. The slow-movement equivalent is the Lento assai middle section, which is briefly anticipated in the introduction with its sighing version of the Dies irae motif on woodwind.

The first Allegro vivace section is an eerily scored dance of death beginning with tolling bells and incorporating innumerable both concealed and overt references to the Dies irae in its melodic and background material. The second Allegro vivace, following Rachmaninov’s last lyrical effusion in the deeply nostalgic middle section, is less macabre. It is based on the same material but the energetically syncopated second theme, which makes a splendid re-entry on fortissimo brass in D major, assumes a much more prominent, indeed heroic role. Based on a motif asociated with the words “Blessed be the Lord” in the Orthodox liturgy, it finally puts the Dies irae to flight. “I thank thee, Lord,” wrote Rachmaninov on the last page of his last score.