After the performance of his First Symphony in 1897 Rachmaninov's career seemed to be in ruins. It was a fiasco; the conductor, Glazunov, was said to be drunk, and critics were hostile, Cui likening it to “a programme symphony on the Seven Plagues of Egypt”. Rachmaninov had a nervous breakdown, is said to have destroyed the score (the orchestral parts were discovered only in 1945, in the library of the Leningrad Conservatoire), and vowed never to compose again. However, he was persuaded to undergo medical hypnosis whose direct result was, extraordinarily enough, the inspiration and composition of what became his most popular work, the Second Piano Concerto, which he accordingly dedicated to his psychologist. Its success encouraged him to resume composition, but his onerous conducting duties at the Bolshoi Theatre, together with the political unrest that had swept Russia after the 1905 uprising, left him so little time that in the autumn of 1906 he decided to move to a secluded villa in Dresden in order to concentrate on composing. Here he worked in secrecy on a new symphony, hoping to eradicate the painful memory of the first, though its initial draft still left him miserable and even in 1907 he could still write to a friend, “To hell with them! I don't know how to write symphonies, and what's more, I have no real desire to write them.” Bored with it, he let it lie, only revealing its existence at all when one of his friends spotted a reference to it in a Russian newspaper. Upon his return to Russia he managed to complete it towards the end of that year, and conducted the first performance in St Petersburg in February 1908, which happily was a success, earning him the Glinka Prize.

sources

A  Autograph full score (1907), since 2014 on loan by the Robert Owen Lehman Foundation to the Morgan Library, New York. Each movement has its own separate pagination: pages 1 (title page) and 2–4 of I (as far as, and including, 14), pp.19–22 of IV (463–1364 inclusive) and the last two pages (902 to end) are missing