Sergei Rachmaninoff

• 1. Introduction

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  Sergei Rachmaninoff stepped onto the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre in May 1892 knowing, he later admitted, that his one-act opera was "sure to fail." He was nineteen years old. The audience disagreed so completely that the theatre agreed on the spot to stage a full production. Tchaikovsky had attended, and he praised the young composer openly. A gold watch from his former teacher landed in Rachmaninoff's palm that same evening, ending years of estrangement between the two men.

  From that triumph, the story takes turns that are almost cruel in their timing. A catastrophic premiere five years later would silence him for the better part of a decade. Revolution would force him to leave Russia forever, carrying little more than a suitcase and some unfinished scores. And in his final years, the composer who gave the world the Piano Concerto No. 2 would complete just six new pieces, haunted by the feeling that when he lost his country, he lost himself.

  What drives a man of such gifts into that kind of silence? And what does it mean that the music he made after that silence became some of the most beloved ever written?

• 2. Roots and Early Losses

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  Rachmaninoff was born into a family of Russian aristocracy on an estate in the village of Semyonovo, near Staraya Russa, in Novgorod Governorate. He would mistakenly cite a different estate as his birthplace in later life, having moved at age four to Oneg, about 110 miles north, where he was raised until he was nine.

  His paternal grandfather, Arkady Alexandrovich, had taken piano lessons from the Irish composer John Field. Music ran alongside military service in the family, and his father, Vasily Arkadievich, was a retired army officer and amateur pianist. That domestic comfort did not last. Financial incompetence forced Vasily to sell all five family estates to pay off debts, and the last of them, at Oneg, was auctioned off in 1882. The family moved to a small flat in Saint Petersburg. That same year, his father left the family for Moscow. Rachmaninoff later described him as a compulsive gambler, a pathological liar, and a skirt chaser.

  His maternal grandmother, Sofia Litvikova Butakova, moved in to help. She covered household expenses and took Rachmaninoff regularly to Russian Orthodox Church services, where he first encountered the liturgical chants and church bells that would echo through his compositions for the rest of his life. In 1885, his sister Yelena died at age eighteen of pernicious anaemia. She had introduced him to the music of Tchaikovsky.

  By that point, Rachmaninoff had already been sent to the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. His early teacher there, Anna Ornatskaya, had recognised his gift at age four, when his mother noticed he could correctly reproduce passages from memory. Ornatskaya would later be the dedicatee of his well-known romance "Spring Waters." Yet the boy's progress at the Conservatory was erratic. He played truant, failed general education classes, and altered his report cards. His piano teacher notified his mother that his admission might be revoked, and it was his cousin Alexander Siloti, a former student of Franz Liszt, who intervened. Siloti recommended a transfer to Moscow and study under the stricter Nikolai Zverev.

• 3. The Moscow Years

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  In the autumn of 1885, Rachmaninoff moved in with Zverev, as was customary at the time. He shared a bedroom with three other students and practiced piano for three hours each day on a rotating schedule. Among his housemates was Alexander Scriabin, who became a lifelong associate.

  After two years, the fifteen-year-old received a Rubinstein scholarship and graduated from the lower division. He then studied counterpoint under Sergei Taneyev and free composition from Anton Arensky. In 1889, a rift formed when Zverev refused to help Rachmaninoff rent a piano and have greater privacy to compose. Zverev believed composition was a waste of a gifted pianist's talent, and the two stopped speaking. Rachmaninoff was moved to live with his aunt and uncle, the Satin family.

  At their country estate at Ivanovka, near Tambov, where he would return every summer until 1917, Rachmaninoff found a kind of peace and productivity he could rarely achieve in the city. In July 1891, at Ivanovka, he completed his Piano Concerto No. 1 and dedicated it to Siloti. He also completed the one-movement Youth Symphony and the symphonic poem Prince Rostislav that year.

  Siloti left the Conservatory before the academic year ended in 1891. Rather than risk being assigned another teacher, Rachmaninoff asked to take his final piano exams a year early. Despite only three weeks of preparation, and with little faith expressed either by Siloti or Conservatory director Vasily Safonov, he passed each one with honours. For his final theory and composition exam, he wrote Aleko, a one-act opera drawn from Alexander Pushkin's narrative poem The Gypsies, in seventeen days. After Tchaikovsky attended and praised the premiere at the Bolshoi in May 1892, Zverev handed Rachmaninoff his gold watch. Years of estrangement dissolved in a single gesture.

  That September, at his public debut as a pianist at the Moscow Electrical Exhibition, Rachmaninoff premiered his Prelude in C-sharp minor, part of his five-piece Morceaux de fantaisie, Op. 3. He was paid fifty rubles. It would go on to become one of his most enduring pieces.

• 4. Collapse and Recovery

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  On the 28th of March 1897, Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 1 premiered in one of a long-running series of Russian Symphony Concerts devoted to Russian music. Critic and nationalist composer Cesar Cui savaged it, comparing the work to a depiction of the seven plagues of Egypt and suggesting it would only be admired by the inmates of a music conservatory in Hell.

  The performance itself had been troubled. According to a memoir by Alexander Ossovsky, conductor Alexander Glazunov had made poor use of rehearsal time. Other witnesses, including Rachmaninoff's wife, suggested that Glazunov may have been drunk. Rachmaninoff wrote in May 1897 that he was not affected by the lack of success, but felt deeply distressed that the symphony had not pleased him even at its first rehearsal. The piece was not performed again in his lifetime.

  A three-year depression followed. Rachmaninoff described the period as being like a man who had suffered a stroke and lost the use of his head and hands. To support himself he gave piano lessons, which he hated. A small measure of relief came from the industrialist Savva Mamontov, who offered him the post of assistant conductor at the Moscow Private Russian Opera. He took it, conducting Camille Saint-Saens's Samson and Delilah as his first opera on the 12th of October 1897.

  His aunt eventually arranged a visit to the writer Leo Tolstoy, whom Rachmaninoff greatly admired, hoping words of encouragement from that quarter would unlock the composer's creativity. The visit was unsuccessful. His aunt then turned to physician and amateur musician Nikolai Dahl, who had successfully treated a family friend. Between January and April 1900, Rachmaninoff underwent daily hypnotherapy and supportive therapy sessions with Dahl for over three months. That summer, new musical ideas began to stir.

  In July 1900, he composed the Love Duet for his opera Francesca da Rimini. That autumn he began the Piano Concerto No. 2, which he dedicated to Dahl. The entire concerto premiered in 1901 and was enthusiastically received. It earned the composer a Glinka Award, the first of five he would receive, along with a 500-ruble prize in 1904.

• 5. Marriage, Conducting, and Departure

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  On the 12th of May 1902, Rachmaninoff married Natalia Satina, his first cousin. Because the Russian Orthodox Church forbade marriages between first cousins, and because Rachmaninoff did not attend church regularly and avoided confession, a conventional ceremony was impossible. The couple organised a small ceremony in a chapel inside an army barracks in a Moscow suburb, with Siloti and the cellist Anatoliy Brandukov as best men.

  In 1904, Rachmaninoff agreed to become conductor at the Bolshoi Theatre for two seasons. He brought rigorous standards, demanded high performance, pioneered the modern arrangement of orchestra players in the pit, and accompanied soloists on the piano himself. Influenced by Richard Wagner, he also introduced the modern custom of standing while conducting. The theatre staged the premieres of his operas The Miserly Knight and Francesca da Rimini. But the social and political unrest of the 1905 Revolution was affecting performers and theatre staff. Protests and demands for improved wages made working conditions increasingly difficult. After conducting fifty performances in his first season and thirty-nine in his second, he resigned in February 1906.

  By November 1906, Rachmaninoff and his family had left Moscow for Dresden, Germany, seeking seclusion from the turbulence. He remained there until 1909, returning to Russia only for summers at Ivanovka. In the summer of 1907, in Paris, he saw a black and white reproduction of Arnold Bocklin's painting The Isle of the Dead, which became the inspiration for his orchestral work of the same name.

  For the 1909-10 concert season, he agreed to tour the United States with conductor Max Fiedler and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He prepared a new concerto specifically for the visit, his Piano Concerto No. 3, which he dedicated to Josef Hofmann. His first US appearance was at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, on the 4th of November 1909. The second performance of the concerto, with the New York Symphony Orchestra, was conducted by Gustav Mahler, an experience Rachmaninoff personally treasured.

• 6. Exile and Reinvention

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  On the day the February 1917 Revolution began in Saint Petersburg, Rachmaninoff was performing a piano recital in Moscow in aid of wounded Russian soldiers. He returned to Ivanovka two months later to find it seized by members of the Social Revolutionary Party as their communal property. Having invested most of his earnings in the estate, he left after three weeks and never returned. It was soon confiscated by communist authorities and became derelict.

  In June 1917, he asked Siloti to obtain visas for his family to leave Russia. Siloti could not help. A last concert in Yalta on the 5th of September 1917 would prove to be Rachmaninoff's final performance on Russian soil. An unexpected offer to perform ten piano recitals across Scandinavia gave the family a pretext to obtain travel permits. On the 22nd of December 1917, they departed Saint Petersburg by train to the Finnish border, crossing into Finland on an open sled and then by train to Helsinki. In his small suitcase, Rachmaninoff packed some compositional sketches and scores to the first act of his unfinished opera Monna Vanna and Rimsky-Korsakov's The Golden Cockerel.

  The family arrived in Stockholm on the 24th of December, relocated to Copenhagen in January 1918, and eventually boarded the SS Bergensfjord in Oslo on the 1st of November 1918, bound for New York. They arrived eleven days later. A crowd of musicians, artists, and fans had gathered outside The Sherry-Netherland hotel where he was staying.

  At forty-four, with a limited concert repertoire and mounting debts, he chose performing as his primary income. He hired pianist Dagmar de Corval Rybner as his secretary and interpreter. A loan from Russian banker Alexander Kamenka covered the travel fare. Pianist Ignaz Friedman contributed two thousand dollars. His first concert on the new continent, a piano recital in Providence, Rhode Island, took place on the 8th of December 1918, with Rachmaninoff still recovering from the Spanish flu. He included his arrangement of The Star-Spangled Banner in the program.

  Among his first choices was which piano manufacturer to align with. Several had offered money. He chose Steinway, the only one that did not. The association lasted the rest of his life. In 1920, he signed a recording contract with the Victor Talking Machine Company, beginning a longtime association with what would become RCA.

• 7. The Compositional Silence

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  Rachmaninoff later admitted that by leaving Russia, he had left behind his desire to compose, saying "losing my country, I lost myself also." In the twenty-four years between his arrival in the United States and his death, he completed just six new works.

  The demanding schedules of concert touring left little time or mental space for composition. From 1932 onwards he spent his summers at Villa Senar, his home on the banks of Lake Lucerne in Switzerland, named from the first two letters of his and his wife's names with the "r" from the family name. There he found some peace. He completed the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in 1934 and Symphony No. 3 in 1936. The Symphonic Dances, his final completed composition, were premiered by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra in January 1941, with Rachmaninoff in the audience.

  The years of performing were not without consequence for his body. By early 1942, he was suffering from sclerosis, lumbago, neuralgia, high blood pressure, and headaches. His doctors advised a warmer climate. He and his wife settled in Beverly Hills in May 1942, living near Vladimir Horowitz, who visited regularly and played piano duets with him. That July, Rachmaninoff informed his doctor that the upcoming 1942-43 concert season would be his last, intending to return to composition.

  The season began on the 12th of October 1942. His last appearances as a concerto soloist were on the 11th and the 12th of February 1943 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where he played Beethoven's First Piano Concerto and his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. On the 17th of February, at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, he gave his final recital. He died on the 28th of March 1943, at his Beverly Hills home, at age sixty-nine. His death came from an aggressive form of melanoma. A message of greetings from several Moscow composers arrived too late for him to read.

  In his will, Rachmaninoff had wished to be buried at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, alongside Scriabin, Taneyev, and Chekhov. His American citizenship made that impossible. He was interred instead at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York. The fifth movement of his All-Night Vigil was the piece he had asked to be sung at his funeral.

• 8. The Music Itself

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  Rachmaninoff's most frequently used motif throughout his career was the Dies irae, a medieval chant sequence, often appearing as just a fragment of its first phrase. He wove it into works as varied as his Second Symphony, his choral symphony The Bells, and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Cellist Yuki Ito observed that even the Vocalise, his wordless song for voice and piano, alludes to the Gregorian chant in its opening.

  Bells shaped his sound in a more literal way. He wrote with unusually widely spaced chords to produce bell-like resonances, most notably in The Bells, the Second Piano Concerto, and the B minor Prelude. A scholar observed that the church bells of Novgorod, Saint Petersburg, and Moscow did not merely influence Rachmaninoff but featured prominently, with a remarkable variety of bell sounds serving structural functions across his output. His grandmother's habit of taking him to Russian Orthodox services as a child had given him a sonic vocabulary he never abandoned.

  As a pianist, Rachmaninoff possessed hands large enough to play a twelfth. He could play, with his left hand alone, the span of C, E-flat, G, C, and G. His playing was marked by rhythmic drive, precision, and an unusual clarity in complex textures. Arthur Rubinstein wrote of his glorious and inimitable tone, describing it as possessing an irresistible sensuous charm not unlike that of Fritz Kreisler.

  Rachmaninoff planned every performance around what he called a culminating point, a moment of maximum intensity in a piece toward which every other detail had to be aimed with absolute calculation. He learned this theory from the bass singer Feodor Chaliapin, who had become a lifelong friend at the premiere of Aleko. His approach to repertoire outside his own compositions remained narrow but deep. The two pieces he singled out from Anton Rubinstein's historical recitals in Moscow, Beethoven's Appassionata and Chopin's Funeral March Sonata, became cornerstones of his own programs.

  Musicologist Joseph Yasser, writing in 1951, identified a specific harmonic characteristic he called intra-tonal chromaticism that ran through Rachmaninoff's works and distinguished them from the inter-tonal chromaticism of Wagner and from the more radical extra-tonal approaches of Arnold Schoenberg. It was not a deviation from tonality but a subtle and variable kind of coloring within it, a description that fits the composer's own statement that what mattered most in interpretation was color: "Without color it is dead."