Background
The First Symphony was actually Rachmaninoff's second attempt in the genre. During 1890–91, his final year at the Moscow Conservatory, he had been assigned by one of his composition teachers, Anton Arensky, to write a symphony as an exercise. Rachmaninoff later told biographer Oskar von Riesmann that he had completed the work; however, three of the four movements subsequently vanished. The single surviving movement, approximately 12 minutes in length, was published posthumously in 1947 as Rachmaninoff's Youth Symphony. This student work is written in traditional sonata form and modeled after the opening movement of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony. Rachmaninoff added that neither Arensky nor fellow-professor Sergei Taneyev was enthusiastic about the work, perhaps because of its lack of individuality. The First Piano Concerto, which he wrote later in 1891, showed a better indication of his ability to handle large-scale musical forces, and his transcription (1894) of Tchaikovsky's Manfred Symphony into a piano duet gave him further exposure to the symphonic genre.
Read more about this topic: Symphony No. 1 (Rachmaninoff)
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