Prelude in C-sharp Minor, Op. 3, No. 2

Rachmaninoff was nineteen when he wrote the Prelude in C-sharp Minor, and he spent the remaining fifty-one years of his life trying to escape it. Audiences demanded it at every recital. Encore after encore after encore. He reportedly grew to despise the piece with an intensity usually reserved for ex-spouses and parking tickets. When fans requested it, he would sometimes play it at a deliberately punishing tempo, or add dissonant harmonies, or simply refuse. The piece didn't care. It was bigger than his feelings about it.

The opening is three chords — A, G-sharp, C-sharp — played fortissimo in the lowest register of the piano, like church bells tolling from underground. If you've heard it once, you'll recognize it forever. Rachmaninoff had hands that could span a thirteenth on the keyboard — well over an octave — and the Prelude exploits that freakish reach in ways that make pianists with normal hands weep with frustration. The piece was written for Rachmaninoff's hands specifically, which is a polite way of saying he composed it partly to show off. He was nineteen. Showing off is what nineteen-year-olds do.

Here's the financial tragedy: Rachmaninoff sold the Prelude to his publisher for a flat fee of about forty rubles. No royalties. No residuals. As the piece became one of the most performed piano works in the world, played by every pianist from Vladimir Horowitz to your neighbor's kid at a recital, Rachmaninoff received exactly nothing beyond that initial payment. Forty rubles. He later called it the worst financial decision of his life, which given that he also fled the Russian Revolution with almost nothing, is saying something.

Rachmaninoff eventually left Russia in 1917, just ahead of the Bolsheviks, and rebuilt his career in America as a concert pianist. He was tall, gaunt, unsmiling, and played with a physical power that terrified other pianists. Critics called his style 'Russian granite.' He missed his homeland every day for twenty-six years and composed relatively little in exile. The Prelude in C-sharp Minor, written by a teenager in Moscow who hadn't yet lost everything, followed him like a shadow he couldn't shake — a reminder of what it felt like to be young, home, and certain that the future was infinite.