Sergei Rachmaninoff
Composer

A Boy With Big Hands and a Short Attention Span

I was born in 1873 at Semyonovo, near Staraya Russa, to a father who was a retired army officer and amateur pianist. I started piano at four, and in 1883 I went to the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, where I was not exactly the most devoted student in the building. Soon after, I moved on to the Moscow Conservatory and lived in the house of my strict teacher Nikolai Zverev, who believed that practice should come before everything else. It worked, because I graduated in 1892 with the highest honours in both composition and piano.

Graduating With a Bang

My graduation piece was an opera called Aleko, and it made people in Moscow take notice of me. That same year, 1892, I wrote the Prelude in C-sharp minor, which opens with heavy, tolling chords that sound like a very large door closing. Audiences loved it so much that for years they asked me to play it at nearly every concert. I was grateful, but I also quietly wished that I had written something else they could ask for.

Wandering Between Moscow and Dresden

In 1902 I married my cousin Natalia Satina, and our daughter Irina arrived the following year. In 1904 I became a conductor at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, a job I kept until I resigned in February 1906. I then moved to Dresden, where I lived from 1906 to 1909 and found the peace and quiet I needed for composing. Around those years my Symphony No. 2 was first performed in 1908 and my Piano Concerto No. 3 followed in 1909, so the quiet was well spent.

The Concerto That Put Me Back on My Feet

The work I am best known for is my Piano Concerto No. 2, which I completed in 1901. It begins with a series of slow piano chords that grow louder, like a bell being rung from far away, and then the orchestra sweeps in with a big, warm, singing melody. I wrote it with my own large hands in mind, and the pianist has to stretch, lean into the sound and still keep the melody tender. People received it very warmly, and it has never gone out of fashion, which is more than I can say for most things I wore in 1901.

The Time I Lost My Confidence

To explain how that concerto came about, I have to go back to 1897, when my Symphony No. 1 was performed for the first time. It went badly, partly because there had been so little rehearsal time, and the story goes that the conductor may have been drunk, though nobody can say for sure. The critic César Cui tore it apart, and I fell into about three years of depression in which I could hardly compose at all. In early 1900 I had treatment with the physician Nikolai Dahl, who used hypnosis and encouraging words, and I went back to writing music.

Leaving Home for Good

In 1917 I left Russia permanently, and I never wrote another song after that, because all 83 of my songs were written before I left. From 1918 I lived in Copenhagen and then in New York, where I spent much of my time giving concerts as a pianist. Later I had a house called Villa Senar, at Hertenstein on Lake Lucerne in Switzerland, and my last composition, the Symphonic Dances, came in 1940. In 1942 I moved to Beverly Hills, California, became a US citizen with Natalia in 1943, and died there that March of melanoma.

Not Quite Buried Where I Wanted

I had hoped to be buried at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, but my American citizenship made that impossible. So I was buried at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York, a long way from home. Even so, Russia has not forgotten me, because Rachmaninoff Hall at the Moscow Conservatory opened in 1986 and a monument to me went up in Moscow in 1999. Another monument followed in 2009 in Veliky Novgorod, which is close to the region where I was born.

What I Hope You Take Away

If you remember one thing from all this, I would like it to be that music can carry a lot of feeling without needing a single word. When you listen to my Piano Concerto No. 2, I hope you feel what I felt when I came out of those dark years, which was a kind of quiet relief. You do not need to know anything about classical music, because a long melody is easy to follow once you let it lead you. So put it on, sit back, and let the piano tell you what I could not always say myself.