Devilish Discords

At 24, Sergei Rachmaninoff had already arrived as a composer. But the night his first symphony had its premiere he was full of fright. Recalling it years later, he wrote: "I stepped out to the fire escape to hide. There I remained throughout the performance. . . . Soon I found myself on the Nevsky Prospekt, where I wandered aimlessly. . . ."

Next day, the critics were merciless. Composer Cesar Cui called the symphony's discords "devilish"; Rimsky-Korsakov told Rachmaninoff, "Forgive me, I do not find this music at all agreeable."

Rachmaninoff put the score aside, and for three years couldn't write a note. In despair he went to Dr. A. Dahl, who day after day, while Rachmaninoff slept in an armchair, repeated hypnotically, "You will begin to write." The cure finally took.

A four-hand piano version of Rachmaninoff's long-forgotten first symphony was found in Moscow two years ago; Soviet scholars, looking farther, uncovered orchestral parts in Leningrad. (The Russians, who once scorned Rachmaninoff as "the servant and tool of the worst enemies of the proletariat" because he left Russia after the revolution, now honor him as one of Mother Russia's own.)

Last week, five years after Rachmaninoff's death, Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra gave the U.S. its first chance to hear Rachmaninoff's First, on the first U.S. symphony network program ever televised (see RADIO). After 50 years, its discords no longer sounded devilish, but neither did they sound heavenly. The First had little of the lush lyricism of his later works; it sounded more like Tchaikovsky's Festival Overture, "1812"--without the cannon.

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