Piano Sonata No. 1 (Rachmaninoff)

Piano Sonata No. 1 in D minor, Op. 28, is a piano sonata by Sergei Rachmaninoff, completed in 1908. It is the first of three "Dresden pieces", along with Symphony No. 2 and part of an opera, which were composed in the quiet city of Dresden, Germany. 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. After numerous revisions and substantial cuts made at the advice of his colleagues, he completed it on April 11, 1908. Konstantin Igumnov gave the premiere in Moscow on October 17, 1908. It received a lukewarm response there, and remains one of the more underperformed of Rachmaninoff's works.

It has three movements, and takes about 35 minutes to perform. The sonata is structured like a typical Classical sonata, with fast movements surrounding a slower, more tender second movement. The movements feature sprawling themes and ambitious climaxes within their own structure, all the while building towards a prodigious culmination. Although this first sonata is a substantial and comprehensive work, its successor, Piano Sonata No. 2 (Op. 36), written only five years later, became the better regarded and more enduring work.

In November 1906, Rachmaninoff, with his wife and daughter, moved to Dresden primarily to compose a second symphony to diffuse the critical failure of his first symphony, but also to escape the distractions of Moscow. There they lived a quiet life, as he wrote in a letter, "We live here like hermits: we see nobody, we know nobody, and we go nowhere. I work a great deal," but even without distraction he had considerable difficulty in composing his first piano sonata, especially concerning its form. The original idea for it was to be a program sonata based on the main characters of the tragic play Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Faust, Gretchen, and Mephistopheles, and indeed it nearly parallels Franz Liszt's own Faust Symphony which is made of three movements which reflect those characters. However, the idea was abandoned shortly after composition began, although the theme is still clear in the final version.

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