Piano Sonata No. 1 (Rachmaninoff)

[2] It was originally inspired by Goethe's tragic play Faust; although Rachmaninoff abandoned the idea soon after beginning composition, traces of this influence can still be found.

I work a great deal,"[6] but even without distraction he had considerable difficulty in composing his first piano sonata, especially concerning its form.

[1] Rachmaninoff enlisted the help of Nikita Morozov, one of his classmates from Anton Arensky's class back in the Moscow Conservatory, to discuss how the sonata rondo form applied to his sprawling work.

[8] Writing to Morozov before he left in May 1907, he expressed his doubt in the musicality of the sonata and deprecated its length, even though at this time he had completed only the second movement.

[6] On returning to his Ivanovka estate from the Paris concert, he stopped in Moscow to perform an early version of the sonata to contemporaries Nikolai Medtner, Georgy Catoire, Konstantin Igumnov, and Lev Conus.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov had died several months previously, and the burden of heading Russian classical music had fallen on this all-Rachmaninoff programme of October 17, 1908.

22, 1903), was "filled to overflowing", one critic called the sonata dry and repetitive, however redeeming the interesting details and innovative structures were.

[6] Lee-Ann Nelson, via her 2006 dissertation, noted that Rachmaninoff's revisions are always cuts, with the material simply excised and discarded.

It has been recorded by Eteri Andjaparidze, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Boris Berezovsky, İdil Biret, Sergio Fiorentino, Leslie Howard, Ruth Laredo, Zlata Chochieva, Valentina Lisitsa, Nikolai Lugansky, Olli Mustonen, Robert Silverman, John Ogdon, Michael Ponti, Santiago Rodriguez, Alexander Romanovsky, Howard Shelley, Daniil Trifonov, Xiayin Wang, Rustem Hayroudinoff, Alexis Weissenberg and Steven Osborne.