Rhapsody on Rachmaninoff

There is a signature dream-like quality about Sergei Rachmaninoff's works. Take this passage from Ayn Rand, who adored Rachmaninoff:

A young photographer … noticed Howard Roark standing alone across the street, at the parapet of the river. He was leaning back, his hands closed over the parapet, hatless, looking up at the building. It was an accidental, unconscious moment. The young photographer glanced at Roark’s face -- and thought of something that had puzzled him for a long time: he had always wondered why the sensations one felt in dreams were so much more intense than anything one could experience in walking reality - why the horror was so total and the ecstasy so complete - and what was the extra quality which could never be recaptured afterward; the quality of what he felt when he walked down a path through tangled green leaves in a dream, in an air full of expectation, of causeless, utter rapture - and when he awakened he could not explain it, it had been just a path through some woods. He thought of that because he saw that extra quality for the first time in walking existence, he saw it in Roark’s face lifted to the building.

This describes beautifully Rachmaninoff’s music too. There is that quality of utter rapture--"causeless, utter rapture"--in “Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini.” Of ecstasy--not evident immediately: it is so intensely personal that it creeps up on you, a slow, delicious langour. The rapture of being alive. And alone.