The Rock, Op. 7

Program notes

About the Work

Rachmaninoff wrote ‘The Rock’ in the summer of 1893, when he was twenty. He called it a fantasy for orchestra; its Russian title, ‘Utyos’, is also translated as ‘The Crag’. Jurgenson published the score in Moscow in 1894, and he dedicated it to Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, whose brilliant way with the orchestra it plainly admires.

At the head of the score stand two lines from a poem by Mikhail Lermontov: a little golden cloud spent the night on the breast of a giant crag. In the poem the cloud is gone by morning, and the old rock is left alone with a trace of moisture in its wrinkles, weeping quietly in the wilderness.

Rachmaninoff later let it be known that he had a second source in mind, a short story by Anton Chekhov, ‘Along the Way’, which carries the same two lines as its epigraph. Two travellers are held overnight at a roadside inn on Christmas Eve while a blizzard blows: a middle-aged man, worn down by his own enthusiasms and failures, and a young woman. He tells her the story of his life. In the morning she is moved by him, but she has to travel on, and he is left standing in the snow. The man is the crag and the girl is the cloud.

The piece had a distinguished first listener. In September 1893 Rachmaninoff played it at the piano at the home of his former teacher Sergei Taneyev, on an evening when Tchaikovsky was present to hear a run-through of his own new Sixth Symphony. The composer Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, who was there, recalled that the piece pleased everyone, and Tchaikovsky most of all, for its colour. Tchaikovsky asked to include it in a concert tour of Europe he was planning. He died a few weeks later. The first performance was given in Moscow on 20 March 1894, by the old Russian calendar, at a concert of the Russian Musical Society conducted by Vasily Safonov.

What to Listen For

The opening sets out the characters. A weary phrase low in the cellos and double basses stands for the man, or the rock. A flute answers with a graceful, lively figure, the cloud or the young woman. A third idea, passed between solo woodwinds, has been read as the strivings and disappointments of his life.

From these the piece grows as a single span of between fifteen and eighteen minutes. The orchestra is a large one, with harp and a good deal of percussion, and Rachmaninoff uses it for atmosphere: listen for the anger of the storm, and for bell sounds that seem to come through the driving snow. The music works up to an impassioned climax and then falls away into a despairing coda, with the rock left alone.