Rachmaninoff Practiced His Hardest Concerto on a Silent Keyboard at Sea

Sergei Rachmaninoff finished his Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor at his country estate Ivanovka on September 23, 1909, with a transatlantic crossing to America already booked. He had been engaged to tour the United States with the work as soloist, and the boat to New York left on November 4. He had not had time to learn his own concerto.

Rather than push the schedule, Rachmaninoff packed a silent practice keyboard — a hinged dummy with weighted keys but no strings or hammers, used at the time for travel rehearsal. He played through the concerto on it for the entire ocean voyage, working on the fingering and dynamics by feel and memory. He premiered the piece on November 28, 1909, at the New Theatre in Manhattan, with Walter Damrosch conducting the New York Symphony Orchestra. Six weeks later, on January 16, 1910, Gustav Mahler conducted the second performance at Carnegie Hall — an experience Rachmaninoff later said was one of the high points of his career; Mahler, he wrote, was "the only conductor whom I considered worthy to be classed with Nikisch."

The concerto is dedicated to the pianist Josef Hofmann, who never publicly performed it — "it wasn't for me," he said. The technical difficulty has become its mythology; pianist Vladimir Horowitz, who befriended Rachmaninoff in 1927, claimed without false modesty to have brought the work to its proper place in the repertoire with a 1930 studio recording. Rachmaninoff himself preferred the Third to his more famous Second; the Second, he said, was "so uncomfortable to play."