In December 1975, Eric Carmen released his first solo single, watched it climb to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, and never had a bigger hit again. The song was "All By Myself." The big swooning tune in the verses, the part everyone can hum, he did not write. It belongs to Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Rachmaninoff had been dead for thirty-two years.
The part everyone can hum is the part he borrowed
Play "All By Myself" in a room and watch what happens. People will wait through the talky bit and then come in, loud and a little embarrassed about it, on the swell: the long, climbing melody that the song is really about. It aches on purpose. It is built to make you stare out of a rain-streaked window.
Carmen lifted that melody from the slow movement of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, the Adagio sostenuto, written in 1900 and 1901. That is the lush, heartbroken centre of one of the most beloved concertos ever composed, and it had been making concert halls go quiet for seventy-odd years before a pop singer set words to it. The chorus is Carmen's.
The thing that wrecks you is Rachmaninoff's.
He thought it was free. He was half right.
Carmen assumed the music was public domain, that the old stuff was fair game, and that he needed nobody's permission to use it.
In the United States, he was correct. The Rachmaninoff concerto really was out of copyright there at the time, so the borrowing was clean on home soil. Outside the United States, it was a different matter, because the work was still under copyright, and copyright tends to come with people who notice. The Rachmaninoff estate noticed.
The dead Russian who got a co-writing credit
The two sides came to an arrangement. The estate takes 12% of the royalties from "All By Myself," and Rachmaninoff is credited as a co-composer of the song.
A man who died in 1943, three decades before disco, picked up a co-writing credit and a cut of the cheque on a 1975 soft-rock smash, without lifting a finger and without ever knowing the song existed. Twelve percent of a career-defining hit, paid out forever, to a composer who had been gone for a generation. As deals go, it is hard to beat.
And it is not a coincidence you can dismiss, either, because Carmen did it again. His very next single, "Never Gonna Fall in Love Again," leaned on the third movement of Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 2. The estate took 12% of that one too. At a certain point you have to admire the consistency. The man knew where the good tunes were kept, and the estate knew exactly where he kept finding them.
You have heard this melody more than you think
If "All By Myself" sounds less like 1975 and more like the soundtrack to every dramatic breakup you have ever witnessed, that is because the song refused to stay in its decade. Twenty-one years after Carmen, Celine Dion recorded it for her 1996 album and turned it into the version a lot of people now think of as the original.
Same borrowed Rachmaninoff melody, scaled all the way up, sung at full power, sold by the truckload. The concerto that filled European concert halls in 1901 was now filling stadiums under a French-Canadian voice, with the long-dead composer still quietly taking his percentage. Whichever version lives in your head, Carmen's or Dion's, you have been humming Rachmaninoff this whole time and calling it pop.
Go hear what Rachmaninoff actually wrote
Once you know the tune, you cannot unhear it, and the obvious next move is to go find out what it sounds like before anybody put words on it. The answer is on the Essential Classics channel.
The Adagio sostenuto that "All By Myself" is built on sits inside our Rachmaninoff collection below, the exact movement the song leans on, alongside a deep run of the rest of his work. The clip opens right on it. You will recognise the melody the instant the piano reaches for it, except now it has the full orchestra underneath, no chorus to resolve into, and nowhere to hide. This is the source. The pop song is the cover.
And if you want to catch Carmen red-handed a second time, the Symphony No. 2 behind "Never Gonna Fall in Love Again" is in that same collection. Its slow movement, the Adagio, is the one to find, and this clip opens straight on it. Listen to a few bars and you will hear exactly why the estate kept sending letters.
The next time "All By Myself" comes on somewhere and the room goes quiet for the big part, you can be the one who knows the big part is a hundred and twenty years old, and that its composer is still getting paid.
