Why Rachmaninoff Erased His First Concerto Twice — Piano Concerto No. 1 in F-sharp Minor

An eighteen-year-old wrote a piano concerto as his first published work. Twenty-six years later, in the middle of the Russian Revolution, he tore the score apart and rewrote it from scratch. In between, when he made his American debut in 1909, he composed an entirely new third concerto rather than carry his first across the Atlantic. He pushed his earliest concerto aside, twice.

And yet, in December 1917, when Rachmaninoff fled Russia for good, one of the only scores he packed was that very concerto. The work he supposedly disowned twice was sitting in his exile suitcase.

This essay traces that contradiction. From the four bars he borrowed from Grieg to the eve of the 1917 revision, Rachmaninoff’s twenty-six-year tangled relationship with his first published concerto.

라흐마니노프 — Library of Congress, Public Domain

Composer: Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)
Work: Piano Concerto No. 1 in F-sharp minor, Op. 1
Composition: 1890-1891 (original, age 17-18) / 1917 (full revision, age 44)
Premiere: March 17, 1892, Moscow Conservatory — first movement only. Piano: Rachmaninoff. Conductor: Vasily Safonov
Dedication: Alexander Siloti (cousin and mentor, the last pupil of Liszt)
Movements: I. Vivace — Moderato (F-sharp minor) / II. Andante (D major) / III. Allegro vivace (F-sharp minor → F-sharp major)
Duration: About 26 minutes
Orchestration: Solo piano, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, strings

Table of Contents

The Four Bars He Took From Grieg

In the spring of 1890, Alexander Siloti — Rachmaninoff’s cousin — was practicing the Grieg A-minor Piano Concerto every day at the Rachmaninoff household in Moscow. Siloti was preparing the work for the autumn concert season, and Rachmaninoff, then seventeen, heard him through the wall every day for months.

The following year, when Rachmaninoff began his own first concerto, Grieg refused to leave his hands.

Everyone knows the Grieg opening. A single timpani roll, then the piano slams a two-handed A-minor chord. From the second bar the piano pours down a chromatic cascade — top to bottom, an octave and a half, in seconds. The first four bars of Rachmaninoff’s First Concerto are built on the same skeleton. A wind fanfare, the piano hurling double octaves down the keyboard, top to bottom, chromatic.

The differences are small. Grieg lands in A minor, Rachmaninoff in F-sharp minor. Grieg opens with a timpani stroke, Rachmaninoff with a brief horn-and-bassoon fanfare. But the kind of shock the listener absorbs is identical: the orchestra barks once, and the piano falls from above.

This is no accident. Most musicologists treat the resemblance as a conscious quotation. A seventeen-year-old who heard the same piece every day from the next room transferred its skeleton, almost unaltered, into the opening of his own first published work. Too blatant for plagiarism, too precise for coincidence. The only honest reading is deliberate homage — or deliberate borrowing.

What is interesting is that even when Rachmaninoff overhauled the entire concerto in 1917, he barely touched the opening. He rewrote dozens of inner bars, slashed twenty-two bars from the finale, thinned the orchestration throughout — but the four Grieg-shadowed bars at the start stayed almost exactly as the seventeen-year-old wrote them. The forty-four-year-old Rachmaninoff consciously preserved his teenage self there. Embarrassed, but not embarrassed enough to erase.

One more layer. The opening Grieg gave Rachmaninoff was not, in fact, originally Grieg’s. Schumann wrote it first, in his A-minor Piano Concerto of 1845. Grieg studied that score and built his own 1868 concerto on the same foundation. So when Rachmaninoff borrowed from Grieg in 1891, he was tapping into a chain — Schumann to Grieg to himself. By the late nineteenth century the concerto-opening cascade had become a kind of grammar of romantic concertos. Rachmaninoff was registering himself in that lineage. To listeners who knew Schumann and Grieg, those first four bars said: I am the heir to this tradition.

March 17, 1892 — One Movement, One Afternoon

The premiere was unusual. Only the first movement was played.

March 17, 1892, Moscow Conservatory. At the piano, Rachmaninoff himself, eighteen years old. On the podium, Vasily Safonov — director of the Moscow Conservatory and one of the most powerful musical figures in Russia. Not the dedicatee Siloti. That detail matters. The dedication went to a cousin; the public premiere was led by the conservatory director. A private debt acknowledged on one hand, an institutional endorsement on the other.

The reviewer for Dnevnik Artista wrote a short notice: “An agreeable impression. The composer’s skill is beyond doubt, although nervousness during the performance somewhat diminished its assurance.” A conservatory director conducts an eighteen-year-old’s first concerto, and a critic writes that the skill is beyond doubt. This was not a routine student showcase.

What is striking is that Rachmaninoff almost never played the original 1891 version after that day. Interlude magazine notes that the 1892 premiere may have been the only time the composer himself performed the original score in public. He played it once at eighteen, and then let it sit untouched for twenty-six years.

1909 — The Concerto He Did Not Take to America

In autumn 1909 Rachmaninoff faced his American debut tour. From November 4 at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, to late January 1910, the schedule called for twenty-six engagements: nineteen as pianist, seven as conductor. His first major attempt to plant his name in front of American audiences.

He did not bring the First Concerto.

Instead, he composed a new one. The Third Concerto in D minor, Op. 30. He wrote it during the summer at his Ivanovka estate, finished it in September, and gave the world premiere on November 28 at the New Theatre in New York with Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony. For the second concerto on the tour, he reached back to his already-famous Second Piano Concerto from 1901. He played it eight times across the tour, beginning with his American orchestra debut on November 8 in Philadelphia under Max Fiedler with the Boston Symphony.

The First Concerto was never on a single program.

Think about what that means. At the moment when Rachmaninoff was introducing himself to American audiences, the thirty-six-year-old composer was ashamed of his eighteen-year-old self. He chose to write a brand-new concerto from scratch rather than carry his first across the Atlantic. The Third Concerto — the most fearsome piano concerto in the standard repertoire — was born out of that embarrassment. A small but real footnote of music history.

This is the first turning-away. After the explosive success of the Second Concerto in 1901, Rachmaninoff steadily pushed the First out of his concert programs. The American debut of 1909 was the decisive cut. With the new continent watching, he hid Op. 1 entirely and built his American identity on Concertos Two and Three.

Look at the 1909 itinerary as a strategic document and the picture sharpens. November 8, Philadelphia: introduce yourself with the Second, the proven hit. November 28, New York: stake your claim with a brand-new Third. January 16, Carnegie Hall: repeat the Third under Mahler. Concerto Two to win the room, Concerto Three to define the artist. Nowhere in that plan was there room for a teenage essay he no longer believed in.

It is also worth pausing on the choice to write the Third specifically for the trip. By 1909 Rachmaninoff was already a famous composer in Europe; he had a finished First Concerto in his catalog that he could have brought along simply to fill a slot. Instead, he spent the entire summer at Ivanovka writing a new concerto from scratch — and not just any concerto, but the most punishing one in the standard repertoire. The implication is that he felt an inadequacy and chose to write his way past it rather than rehabilitate the earlier work. The Third is, among other things, a refusal to revisit Op. 1.

1917 — Rewriting His Eighteen-Year-Old Self in the Ruins

By autumn 1917, everything was collapsing.

On the day the February Revolution broke out in Petrograd, Rachmaninoff was performing a charity recital in Moscow for wounded soldiers. Two months later he traveled to Ivanovka, the country estate where he had spent every summer for twenty-seven years and where he had written almost every piece he cared about, including the First Concerto. He found peasants of the Socialist Revolutionary Party occupying the property and declaring it communal. Rachmaninoff stayed three weeks, then left, vowing never to return. He never did. The estate was confiscated, fell into ruin, and disappeared.

That same autumn, with the October Revolution looming, he sat down in Moscow and rewrote the First Concerto from the first bar.

Why this concerto, why now? In a letter to a friend he later wrote: “I have rewritten my First Concerto. It is really good now. All the youthful crudities have gone, and now it plays itself.” For Rachmaninoff in 1917 the work was both a musical clean-up and a deeper kind of taking-stock. A man who already knew he was about to lose everything, putting one last thing in order.

He left Russia with his family at the end of December 1917. On the sled out of the country he carried almost nothing. Furniture, books, the twenty-seven years of memories at Ivanovka — all left behind. He took only two scores. An unfinished opera called Monna Vanna, which he would never complete, and the freshly revised First Concerto, Op. 1.

This is the twist. The piece he supposedly disowned twice was one of only two scores he packed for exile. The eighteen-year-old self he had been embarrassed of, the forty-four-year-old composer carried with him to the end. Polished, tidied, but not abandoned.

Once Rachmaninoff was settled in the West, the revised First made it onto his concert programs more often than the original ever had. He gave the New York premiere of the revised version on January 28-29, 1919, with the Russian Symphony Orchestra. He came back to it intermittently across the next two decades, played it on tour, and eventually recorded it. None of this rises to the visibility of the Second or Third, but it is no longer disowned. The 1917 revision was the act that put the First into Rachmaninoff’s adult repertoire — late, quietly, but for good.

What Twenty-Six Minutes Contains — Movement by Movement

I. Vivace — Moderato (F-sharp minor)

Four bars of brass fanfare, then the piano cascades down in double octaves and chords. The Grieg-borrowed opening. When the cascade ends the music slows abruptly to Moderato, and the piano takes over the first theme as song — a brief minor melody that already carries the unmistakable Rachmaninoff melancholy. Long sighing descents, parallel chords reminiscent of Slavic Orthodox chant.

The first movement’s centerpiece is the cadenza at the end of the development, about two and a half minutes long. The opening fanfare motive returns, transformed, then expands into a wave of huge chords and runaway octaves. It is not the fifteen-minute monster of the Third Concerto’s first-movement cadenza, but for the First it carries the entire weight of the movement. When the orchestra returns after the cadenza, the music doubles back to those opening four bars and closes the circle. A first movement that begins and ends with the same gesture.

II. Andante (D major)

Seventy-four bars. About four minutes. The shortest slow movement in any of Rachmaninoff’s concertos.

Brevity is the point. Compare it to the eleven-minute Adagio of the Second Concerto or the ten-minute Intermezzo of the Third, and the First’s Andante feels like a single drawn breath. Because it is short, it carries no weight; because it carries no weight, the young Rachmaninoff’s sentimentality flows through without resistance. A short horn introduction, the piano sings a lullaby, a brief surge, and it is over almost before you notice. Rachmaninoff barely touched this movement in the 1917 revision. He had decided, correctly, that its brevity was its identity.

III. Allegro vivace (F-sharp minor → F-sharp major)

The finale received the heaviest revision in 1917. The original ran 240 bars; the revised version runs 218. Most of what Rachmaninoff later called “youthful crudities” lived here.

The movement is a rondo. Alternating 5/4 and 9/8 meters create a Slavic dance pulse, and the piano runs almost without pause from start to finish. The second theme that emerges in the middle is one of Rachmaninoff’s richest melodic inventions — a singing cantabile line dropped into the whirlwind, a moment to breathe. Then the coda. The F-sharp minor of the entire concerto resolves to F-sharp major in the closing bars, and the piano plunges from the highest octave to the lowest in one final descent.

That last octave plunge — twenty-six minutes of music collapsing into one motion. An ending written by an eighteen-year-old that the forty-four-year-old composer, looking again, could find no better way to write. He left the skeleton of the coda intact.

One small detail worth noticing across the three movements: the F-sharp tonality. F-sharp minor for the outer movements, F-sharp major for the resolution. Rachmaninoff would never write another concerto in F-sharp. The Second is C minor, the Third D minor, the Fourth G minor, the Paganini Rhapsody A minor. F-sharp belongs to the First alone. It is also a comparatively rare key for a Russian piano concerto. Tchaikovsky’s three concertos are in B-flat minor, G major, and E-flat major. Glazunov went F minor and B major. The eighteen-year-old Rachmaninoff chose a key almost no one else was using and never returned to it. Whether that was instinct or intention, the First Concerto stands acoustically apart from everything else in his concerto catalog.

1891 Original vs. 1917 Revision — What Actually Changed

Both versions exist. But on record the original is rare. The overwhelming majority of recordings use the 1917 revision. The first commercial recording of the original score arrived in 2001, with Alexander Ghindin (piano) and Vladimir Ashkenazy (conductor) on Decca. Before that, hearing the original meant pulling the score from a library shelf.

The difference between the two versions, in one phrase: thick became thin.

Aspect	1891 Original	1917 Revision
Finale length	240 bars	218 bars (-22)
Brass section	includes tuba	tuba removed, bass trombone added
Orchestration	heavy doublings, episodic	thinned texture, integrated
Piano writing	decorative episodes throughout	ornamentation pruned
Finale rondo episodes	long, blurred transitions	heightened chromaticism, sharper transitions
Total duration	about 28-30 minutes	about 25-26 minutes

In the twenty-six years between the two versions Rachmaninoff had written the Second and Third Concertos, The Isle of the Dead, The Bells, and two symphonies. Everything he had learned about harmony and orchestration during those years was poured into the 1917 revision. In his own words, the music “plays itself.” The crudities had been polished out, and only the bones remained.

Here is the paradox. Some critics now argue that the “crudity” of the 1891 original is precisely what made it a genuine teenage work — that the 1917 revision is too clean, that it sands away the raw energy of the boy who wrote it. The argument has merit. But Rachmaninoff himself was ashamed of that crudity. There is something strange about later generations defending as “authentic” the very rough edges the composer chose, with his own hand, to remove.

The argument can be sharpened. A piece of music does not have a single “true” version that the composer first imagined and later ruined. The 1891 score and the 1917 score are two different documents, made by two different people who happen to share a name. The eighteen-year-old who wrote the original could not have written the revision, and the forty-four-year-old who wrote the revision could not have written the original. Both versions are authentic in their own moment. What changed between them is the composer’s own taste, which had been shaped by the Second Concerto, the Third Concerto, the symphonies, the choral works, and the political collapse of the country he was about to leave. The 1917 revision is not a correction of the 1891 original. It is a separate work that uses the same material as raw stock.

Three Recordings, Ranked Without Apology

The First Concerto’s discography is small. The Second and Third take roughly ninety percent of Rachmaninoff’s concerto recording market; the First and Fourth share what is left. But there are essential recordings, and three of them are enough. All three use the 1917 revision. (The 1891 original is essentially represented by a single Decca disc — Ghindin/Ashkenazy — which I would not recommend as a first listen.)

1. Rachmaninoff / Ormandy / Philadelphia (1939-1940)

This is not up for debate. It is the composer’s only commercial recording of the work. Recorded December 4, 1939 and February 24, 1940, at the Philadelphia Academy of Music with Eugene Ormandy. Rachmaninoff was sixty-six years old, and his finger accuracy was still intact.

The decisive value of this recording is tempo. The composer plays his own piece at the speed he meant it. The “Hollywood lingering” later pianists added to Rachmaninoff is absent here. The first movement opens at an actual Vivace; the finale is an actual Allegro vivace. First-time listeners will find the speed startling. That was the intent.

The sound is, of course, 1940 mono. Orchestral colors are smudged, the bass is thin. But what you are hearing is not audio — it is evidence. The only document of how Rachmaninoff himself heard the First Concerto.

2. Ashkenazy / Previn / London Symphony (1970, Decca)

March 25-26, 1970, Kingsway Hall, London. The reference recording of the modern era for the First Concerto, holding that position for fifty years. Ashkenazy’s fingers run nearly as fast as Rachmaninoff’s own; Previn’s LSO produces both Slavic color and English precision. Both halves arrive.

Compared to the composer’s recording, Ashkenazy sings more. The Andante in particular shifts character — what was the eighteen-year-old’s brief lullaby becomes, under Ashkenazy, an adult’s recollection of a lullaby. Some listeners find this too soft; others believe it is the essence of the First. Either way, the recording must be heard once.

Decca’s Kingsway Hall sound is also worth saying out loud. It is one of the high points of 1970s classical recording, and on this disc the engineering is part of the performance.

3. Yuja Wang / Dudamel / LA Phil (2023, DG)

February 9, 2023, Walt Disney Concert Hall. The First Concerto opened the LA Phil’s Rachmaninoff 150 cycle. Yuja Wang played all four concertos plus the Paganini Rhapsody within a single week, and Deutsche Grammophon recorded the entire run live, releasing it as a complete cycle in September 2023.

What this recording proves is that the First Concerto does not have to live in the shadow of the Second and Third. Yuja Wang refuses to treat it as a smaller piece. The weight she generates in the first-movement cadenza compares to her Third Concerto cadenza; the final octave plunge of the third movement physically shakes the hall. Dudamel’s LA Phil rides that runaway energy without losing control.

If Ashkenazy is “song,” Yuja Wang is “structure.” The same piece sounds like a different building. A new reference point for the First Concerto in the twenty-first century.

One-Line Summary

For a first encounter, Ashkenazy/Previn. To hear how the composer heard it, the 1939-40 recording. For a twenty-first-century reading, Yuja Wang. With those three you have a complete recording cycle of the First Concerto.

A Five-Minute Guide for First-Time Listeners

Compared to the Second and Third, the First is short. Twenty-six minutes. Less than an hour, and the entire young Rachmaninoff is compressed inside. For a first listen, follow these five points.

0:00-0:30 — The four bars borrowed from Grieg. Wind fanfare, piano octave cascade. Listen, then immediately compare with the opening of the Grieg Concerto. The skeleton is the same.
9:00-11:30 (end of first movement) — The cadenza. The opening motive returns transformed and the octaves pour out.
13:30-17:30 — The Andante. A four-minute lullaby. Let it pass.
20:00-22:00 (mid-finale) — The second theme. A cantabile line dropped into the whirlwind.
Final 30 seconds — The octave plunge. F-sharp minor resolves to F-sharp major; the piano collapses from top to bottom.

(Timestamps based on the Ashkenazy/Previn 1970 recording. Other recordings may differ by a minute or two.)

The Real Place of the First, Behind the Second and Third

In Rachmaninoff concerto statistics the First is always fourth. The Second is first, the Third second, the Paganini Rhapsody third, and then the First. The Fourth Concerto is fifth and even less heard. Between the competition-circuit warhorses of Two and Three, the First became “the one most people don’t know exists.”

And yet — the concerto the composer himself spent the longest with was the First.

He started writing it at seventeen and finished it at eighteen. He premiered it at eighteen. He turned away from it for his American debut at thirty-six. He rewrote it from the ruins at forty-four. He carried it in his exile suitcase at forty-four. He recorded it himself at sixty-six. Twenty-six years of distance, twenty-six years of return. Of all his concertos, the only one that followed Rachmaninoff for more than half his life was the First.

If the Second is the explosive masterpiece of his early career, and the Third is his American self-introduction, then the First is the work he kept polishing across his entire life and never fully closed. The eighteen-year-old self he could not stop being embarrassed by, and could not bring himself to throw away. The essay began with two acts of disowning. It ends with a different shape — distance, not rejection, and after the distance, a deliberate keeping. The argument here is that anyone listening through Rachmaninoff’s concertos should reorder the sequence: after the Second, the next stop should not be the Third, but the First.

There is one more reason to come back to the First. The composer who wrote the Second and Third was already Rachmaninoff in the form we recognize. The composer who wrote the First was Rachmaninoff before he became Rachmaninoff. The seventeen-year-old in that score is still figuring out what kind of melody he wants to write, what kind of cadenza he wants to perform, what kind of finale he wants to leave a listener with. The Second and Third are answers; the First is the question. And the 1917 revision is the answer revisiting the question, twenty-six years later, neither erasing it nor pretending it was already an answer. Few composers have left such a transparent record of becoming. That, more than the Grieg quotation or the American debut or the exile suitcase, is the real reason to listen to Op. 1.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is the 1891 original almost never heard?

Because the composer himself meant the 1917 revision to replace it, and the published edition standardized the revision. The original score lives in libraries and archives but the printed edition is out of print. Until the first commercial recording (Ghindin/Ashkenazy, Decca 2001), hearing the original required tracking down a scholarly source. Even now it surfaces in concert halls only once or twice a year, almost always as a curiosity rather than a standard programming choice.

Isn’t the Grieg borrowing simply plagiarism?

It is too open to be plagiarism. Rachmaninoff did not hide that the skeleton of his opening came from Grieg, and his contemporary critics knew it as they wrote about the work. Plagiarism normally requires concealment. This is much closer to deliberate homage. A useful comparison is Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto, whose opening has long been read as a conscious reference to Schumann. Russian composers of the late nineteenth century routinely linked their works to the Western concerto tradition through these kinds of openings.

Is the First easier or harder than the Second and Third?

Easier than the Third, and roughly comparable to the Second — perhaps a touch harder in spots. The first-movement cadenza’s octave passages and the finale’s fast passagework are demanding. But none of it reaches the level of the Third Concerto’s first-movement cadenza, that fifteen-minute cliff. Rachmaninoff himself, in the 1917 revision, cut down the original “crudities” while also making the work more playable. That is precisely what he meant when he said the revised version “plays itself.”

Why was the dedication to Siloti but the premiere conducted by Safonov?

Siloti was Rachmaninoff’s cousin and private mentor; his daily Grieg practice during the summer of 1890 directly fed the composition of the First Concerto. The dedication was a personal debt being repaid. Safonov, on the other hand, was the director of the Moscow Conservatory, and his presence on the podium for an eighteen-year-old’s first published concerto served as an institutional endorsement. A private gift on one side, a public certification on the other.

Which recording should I start with?

Ashkenazy/Previn/LSO, the 1970 Decca recording. Sound is excellent, tempo is balanced, and the interpretation sits close to standard. Then move to the 1939-40 Rachmaninoff/Ormandy recording — the shock of “this piece was supposed to go this fast” is part of understanding the work. Finish with Yuja Wang/Dudamel (2023) to feel the weight a twenty-first-century reading can carry. Those three together are a complete First Concerto cycle. If you want a fourth, Stephen Hough’s live Hyperion recording with Andrew Litton and the Dallas Symphony (2004) is a strong alternative — Hough deliberately resists the Hollywood-romantic style and pushes the work back toward the composer’s own brisk tempos, which makes for a useful bridge between the 1940 historical and the 1970 modern reference.