Sergei Rachmaninoff — composer with roots in the Russian Empire
Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff was born on 1 April 1873 on his family's estate in the Novgorod Governorate, into a family of the minor nobility whose fortunes his father had largely spent. When the estates were sold, the family moved to St Petersburg, and his parents separated. He studied at the St Petersburg Conservatory without much success, and in 1885 was sent to Moscow to study with the strict piano teacher Nikolai Zverev, in whose house he lived.
At the Moscow Conservatory he studied composition with Anton Arensky and Sergei Taneyev, and graduated in 1892 with the Great Gold Medal; his one-act opera Aleko, written as his final examination piece, was produced at the Bolshoi Theatre the following year with Tchaikovsky's support. The disastrous premiere of his First Symphony in 1897 left him unable to compose for some three years. After treatment with the physician Nikolai Dahl he wrote the Second Piano Concerto (1901), dedicated to Dahl, which became one of the most popular works in the repertoire.
For the next fifteen years he divided his time between composing, conducting at the Bolshoi and touring as a pianist, and between Moscow and his wife's family estate at Ivanovka. In December 1917, after the October Revolution, he accepted an invitation to give concerts in Scandinavia and left Russia with his wife Natalia and their two daughters. He never returned. The estate at Ivanovka was lost.
In exile he became above all a concert pianist, one of the greatest of his age, touring the United States and Europe each season to support his family and the many Russian émigrés he helped. He composed less, but the works of these years include the Fourth Piano Concerto, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (1934), the Third Symphony and the Symphonic Dances (1940). In the 1930s he built the Villa Senar on Lake Lucerne. During the Second World War he gave the proceeds of a number of concerts to the Soviet war effort.
He became an American citizen in February 1943, a few weeks before his death. He died at his home in Beverly Hills on 28 March 1943, four days before his seventieth birthday, and was buried at Kensico Cemetery near New York; his wish to be buried in Russia could not be carried out.
Tracing the roots — Novgorod
Born Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff in Semyonovo (Novgorod Governorate, Russian Empire) in 1873 to an aristocratic Russian family, he trained at the Moscow Conservatory and built his career in Russia before the Revolution destroyed his world. He left Russia in 1917 and never returned, carrying within him a Russia that no longer existed.
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Novgorod. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"Music is enough for a whole lifetime — but a lifetime is not enough for music."