Fantastic Builders and Where to Find Them, 4th Installment

The story of Rachmaninoff's 2nd piano concerto—and why it's dedicated to his therapist

Dear readers: as you can see, I’ve really gotten into this Fantastic Builders series, to the point where it’s been hard to pull myself away to work on other things. I’ll go back to publishing other things eventually, but in the meantime I’d love to hear what you think about these stories, and—most important—what other inspiring builders you’d like to nominate!

Builder spotlight #5: From “I ought to give up composing” to history’s greatest piano concerto in 3 short years (Sergei Rachmaninoff)

Young Rachmaninoff, a bronze sculpture by Kelsy Landin (who knew and appreciated the story I’m about to tell long before I did, and captured it exquisitely in this sculpture, which last I checked is available for sale)

Principles on display: Your Flaws Matter Less Than You Think; Building Yourself by Building

The first time I fell in love, it wasn’t with a person, but with a piece of music.

I was 14 years old, and I was spending my summer on tour with the Blue Lake Youth Symphony Orchestra. The crown jewel of our concert program was Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto, played by a handsome pianist of 17 or 18 years old whose name was Brandon—and that’s literally all I can tell you about him, apart from the fact that he played exquisitely. I clawed my way to the position of “co-concert-mistress” just so I could sit in the front row of the first violin section and feel the uninterrupted sweep of chords descending from Brandon’s fingers straight up into my spine, as if enveloping me from within and bouying me up to where I could see the final, radiant triumph unfolding out of every passing darkness I would fight through over the course of my entire life.

Not only was the concerto my first love, but it has been among the most enduring. To this day, I can never listen to it casually in the background; it is too intensely intimate, too viscerally sublime an experience to admit of such dilution. 

And yet—perhaps implicitly fearing that Sergei’s life story would not live up to the grandeur and romance of his greatest work—I’d learned almost nothing of his biography until recently, when a friend mentioned him as an example of someone who had battled depression. This claim intrigued me enough to warrant the purchase of a recent biography, and, wow: if I’d set out to invent the most personally satisfying origin story imaginable for my beloved concerto, I couldn’t have come up with anything remotely this good. 

Not only did Rachmaninoff compose the 2nd piano concerto as a literal act of triumph over a 3-year depression during which he composed almost nothing; but he DEDICATED IT TO HIS THERAPIST. 

Image credit: https://www.talubook.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=10398

I don’t really go in for hashtags, but if ever anything could inspire me toward the eager exclamation of #LifeGoals, this would be it. 

In all seriousness: having reviewed the facts I summarize below, I don’t believe Rachmaninoff could have composed his 2nd Piano Concerto without the many-year struggle that preceded it; nor that he could have triumphed so fully over that struggle except by composing his 2nd Piano Concerto. 

Biographers typically date the onset of Rachmaninoff’s depression to the catastrophic failure of his Symphony No. 1 premiere in 1897 (more on this below). But to understand the premiere’s crushing impact on Rachmaninoff’s mental state, we need to start a bit earlier in the story. 

In 1893, the 20-year-old Rachmaninoff received news that his idol and friend, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, had suddenly died by cholera. Rachmaninoff had already grieved the deaths of 2 beloved sisters—one of whom had introduced him to Tchaikovsky’s works—by the time he was 12 years old, and Tchaikovsky’s death likely had a compounding effect; all the more so given just how much Tchaikovsky’s support and recognition of Rachmaninoff’s talent had meant to him. Here is Rachmaninoff’s recollection of one of their first interactions (as quoted in Bertensson and Leyda’s Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music):

“Timidly and modestly, as if he were afraid I might refuse, he asked me if I would consent to have my work produced with one of his operas. To be on the poster with Tchaikovsky was about the greatest honor that could be paid to a composer, and I would not have dared to suggest such a thing. Tchaikovsky knew this. He wanted to help me, but was anxious also not to offend or humiliate me.”

Upon learning of Tchaikovsky’s death, Rachmaninoff immediately channeled his grief into composition: within a month he had completed his deeply mournful Trio élégiaque No. 2 as a tribute. As he wrote to a friend:

• “This work is a composition on the death of a great artist. It’s now finished, so I can speak with you. While working on it, all my thoughts, feelings, powers belonged to it, to this song....I trembled for every phrase, sometimes crossed out everything and started over again to think, think. Now that’s over, and I can speak calmly. I wrote no one, not even the Skalons, whom I love sincerely.... You ask how things go with me? These days things go well only with priests and pharmacists.”

With the death of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff not only suffered a great personal loss, but also the loss of the more famous composer’s public support and encouragement. Over the next several years, both his inspiration and his commissions ran dry. To supplement his income, he taught piano lessons, which he hated and approached as a dreaded chore (writing in one letter, “I am in general a poor teacher and today, moreover, I was unpardonably malicious”). His few compositions came in torturous fits and starts; after a month of working on a symphonic poem he would never end up completing, he wrote: “I was terribly tormented, and even threw away part of what I had written; worst of all, I may throw away all that I now have…” 

His financial situation got so desperate during these years that he began pawning some of his most prized possessions, such as the gold watch given to him as a symbol of renewed friendship by his beloved mentor Zverev. 

The one major work he did manage to compose during this time was his Symphony No. 1, on which he worked tirelessly (“about ten hours a day”) from January 1895 until its completion 8 months later. To this work he hitched, not only his hopes of financial success and renewed professional glory, but, apparently, his entire self-worth as a composer. Bertensson and Leyta’s biography describes how he “had put so much of himself into his symphony” that he “could not settle down to further serious composition until it was heard; his future work was to be determined by the public’s reaction to his symphony.” Rachmaninoff himself later recalled (as quoted in Rachmaninoff’s Recollections):

“I imagined that there was nothing I could not do and had great hopes for my future. It was in the confidence bred of this feeling that I composed my First Symphony in D minor, and the ease with which I worked encouraged my pride and self-esteem. I had a very high opinion of my work… The joy of creating carried me away. I was convinced that here I had discovered and opened up entirely new paths in music.”

And yet the symphony’s premiere was, in the estimation of every critic and, above all, Rachmaninoff himself, a disastrous flop. 

Even before he read the many scathing reviews, like the one famously proclaiming that his symphony would “enchant all the inmates of Hell,” Rachmaninoff was devastated. In a letter written weeks after the premiere, he wrote: 

“I’m not at all affected by its lack of success, nor am I disturbed by the newspapers’ abuse; but I am deeply distressed and heavily depressed by the fact that my Symphony, though I loved it very much and love it now, did not please me at all after its first rehearsal.”

Interestingly, most historians today blame the failed premiere on a poor performance by the conductor, Glazunov, who by some accounts may have actually been drunk. And Rachmaninoff seemed to reach a similar conclusion at the time: “[a]t present I am inclined to blame the performance,” he wrote in the same letter quoted above. Yet here is how Rachmaninoff described the whole experience years later, as quoted in Rachmaninoff’s Recollections: 

“According to my present conviction this fate [the symphony’s terrible failure] was not undeserved. It is true that the performance was beneath contempt and the work in parts unrecognizable, but, apart from this, its deficiencies were revealed to me with a dreadful distinctness even during the first rehearsal. Something within me snapped. All my self-confidence broke down, and the artistic satisfaction that I had looked forward to was never realized… I ‘listened in’ to my own work. I found the orchestration abominable, but I knew that the music also was not up to much. There are serious illnesses and deadly blows from fate which entirely change a man’s character. This was the effect of my own Symphony on myself. When the indescribable torture of this performance had at last come to an end, I was a different man… All my hopes, all belief in myself, had been destroyed.”

And: 

“I returned to Moscow a changed man. My confidence in myself had received a sudden blow. Agonizing hours spent in doubt and hard thinking had brought me to the conclusion that I ought to give up composing. I was obviously unfitted for it, and therefore it would be better if I made an end to it at once… (emphasis added). A paralyzing apathy possessed me. I did nothing at all and found no pleasure in anything. Half my days were spent lying on a couch and sighing over my ruined life…. This condition, which was as tiresome for myself as for those about me, lasted more than a year. I did not live; I vegetated, idle and hopeless.”

Reading Rachmaninoff’s own different accounts of his judgment and mental state after the premiere, I recognize a thought process common to many people whose basic self-worth has been shaken in some way: the spiraling back and forth between self-condemnation and self-justification,¹ with neither narrative bringing full satisfaction or relief, and both only serving to suck the person farther down into hopeless, resigned passivity. 

Here are just a couple of illustrative excerpts from Rachmaninoff’s letters in the months following that premiere: 

“I'm starting, it seems, to suffer from a black melancholy. That's a fact. This melancholy. Today I cried like an idiot. I have not yet begun to drink vodka or wine at all, but I'm almost ready to give you my honest word that if my affairs do not change, I will start to drink. I'm very drawn to this.”

And:

“I will die by the end of the season of black melancholy. Look and weep more, come visit me at my grave.”

This was how Rachmaninoff passed the better part of the next 3 years, but for the intermittent distraction of a few musical endeavors tangential to composing (such as trying his hand at conducting, accompanying his great friend and opera legend Chaliapin on piano, and touring London with some of his earlier compositions). Meanwhile his friends and relations tried everything they could to bring him out of his melancholic apathy, even arranging for him to meet his literary hero Leo Tolstoy—whose “stereotyped phrases” of “You must work” and “Do you think that I am pleased with myself?” apparently did nothing to motivate or encourage Rachmaninoff (per his own account in a letter written years later). 

By January of 1900, Rachmaninoff had, according to Bertensson and Leyta, “become so severe in his self-criticism that completion and even initiation of any composition had become impossible.” So his aunt suggested he get some professional help. Specifically, she encouraged him to see Dr. Nikolai Dahl: a neurologist whose innovative therapeutic techniques—a mix of hypnosis and supportive talk therapy—had purportedly healed the mental afflictions of several people known to the family. 

Somewhat to the family’s surprise, Rachmaninoff assented to the treatment without protest. He visited Dahl every day for about 3 months, and by the end of that time he felt well enough to compose again. That summer he began work on his 2nd piano concerto, which premiered to thunderous applause in November 1901.

So what magic did Dahl work in those sessions to finally lift Rachmaninoff out of his depression and inspire him to compose the arguably greatest piano concerto in history? 

Here is Rachmaninoff’s own account of the work he did with Dr. Dahl (from Rachmaninoff’s Recollections): 

“My relations had told Dr. Dahl that he must at all costs cure me of my apathetic condition and achieve such results that I would again begin to compose. Dahl had asked what manner of composition they desired and had received the answer, ‘A Concerto for pianoforte,’ for this I had promised to the people in London and had given it up in despair. Consequently I heard the same hypnotic formula repeated day after day while I lay half asleep in an armchair in Dahl’s study. ‘You will begin to write your Concerto. … You will work with great facility. … The Concerto will be of an excellent quality. …’ It was always the same, without interruption. Although it may sound incredible, this cure really helped me. Already at the beginning of the summer I began again to compose. The material grew in bulk, and new musical ideas began to stir within me—far more than I needed for my Concerto.”

Likely this wasn’t the whole of Dr. Dahl’s treatment; according to Bertensson and Leyta, the hypnosis “was supplemented by general conversation, and as Dahl was a cultured and musically intelligent man, these talks must have enhanced the salutary effects of the treatment.” But it is to the hypnosis—i.e., the repetition of the same few mantras instilling in Rachmaninoff an expectancy that he’ll be able to get back to work and compose a great concerto—that the patient himself attributes his cure. 

From what we know today about placebo effects, common factors in therapy, and the importance of positive expectancies, we can at least form a reasonable conjecture as to the key ingredient in Dr. Dahl’s cure: his professional credentials and confidence in his own treatment gave Rachmaninoff permission to stop ruminating over Symphony #1 and get back to the work of creating. Then the creating itself did the rest. 

Notice what Rachmaninoff’s treatment didn’t involve: namely any sort of explicit “shadow work” or resolution of the questions that had been eating him up for years regarding the causes of his spectacular failure. Instead, I surmise, Dr. Dahl’s simple daily mantras pardoned Rachmaninoff from the felt need to seek some grand redemption for the “sin” of his failed First Symphony before permitting himself to value his life and work again. And as it turned out, no such grand redemption was needed. The unspoken message, as I might’ve articulated it had I been his therapist, was: so what if your symphony sucked? It probably did suck, like most first symphonies probably suck; which is all the more reason to get back to work, hone your craft, and write more music you can love.

In short-circuiting his ruminations and getting back to the work of composing, by the way, Rachmaninoff was able to achieve a far more objective and constructive view of his failed Symphony with time. Here’s how he writes of its merits in a letter dated 1917: 

“Before the Symphony was played, I had an exaggeratedly high opinion of it. After I heard it for the first time, my opinion changed, radically. It now seems to me that a true estimate of it would be somewhere between these two extremes. It has some good music, but it also has much that is weak, childish, strained and bombastic.” 

So the next time you need an elevated perspective on the weak, childish, strained and bombastic in your own work, just think of Rachmaninoff’s story. And if ever you struggle to recall the full meaning and essence of that story, you need only listen to his 2nd Piano Concerto. 

1. You may notice in these two ultimately low-agency narratives the echoes of our old friends “Drill Sergeant” and “Zen Master”, respectively.