This week would have been the 150th Birthday of Sergei Rachmaninoff, the great Russian composer. Rachmaninoff was a true virtuoso on the piano and, standing at 6 foot 6, an absolute colossus of Russian classical music. He is considered one of the last bastions of the Romantic movement and his luscious musical compositions contain some of the most expressive melodies in existence.
Rachmaninoff’s works were consistently influenced by each phase of his life. He was born into an aristocratic family in Russia, but his childhood was marked with tragedy through the deaths of two of his sisters and his parents’ divorce. Rachmaninoff demonstrated precocious talent on the piano and entered the prestigious Moscow Conservatory aged just 14. It was here where Rachmaninoff encountered and studied the works of his most prevalent influence, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
Rachmaninoff’s first symphony was composed in 1895 but its premiere and initial reception were unsatisfactory, to say the least. It was first performed in St Petersburg in March 1897 but it was extemporaneous, and accounts of the night have stated that the conductor appeared drunk on stage. The symphony was never performed again during Rachmaninoff’s lifetime, and the failure of the night is now considered to have contributed to the three years of depression that he suffered in the final years of the 19th century.
During this bout of depression, Rachmaninoff was plagued with self-doubt and writer’s block. He eventually sought the help of a psychiatrist and after months of hypnotherapy, he began to recover. Rachmaninoff soon went on to compose his Piano Concerto No.2, his most widely loved and recognised work. The concerto is a majestic journey, with ethereal melodies which help the listener wander between the polarities of defeat and victory. To this day it remains an example of how music can help us through our most difficult times, and it has been highly influential on musicians of all genres. You can even hear the themes of the second movement being almost directly emulated in the piano passages of Celine Dion’s “All By Myself”.
In the following years, Rachmaninoff experienced great success. He toured throughout Western Europe and composed many of his most notable works including “Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini” and his Prelude in c sharp minor. However, these prosperous years were abruptly brought to an end by the Great War and the 1917 Russian Revolution. The composer became fearful of the new Bolshevik regime and fled to America with his family, never returning to Russia. From 1917 to his death in 1943, Rachmaninoff had financial difficulties and to provide for his family had to rely on performance rather than composition; in this period, he only completed six major works.
Critics of Rachmaninoff argue that he was overly concerned with looking back to a time gone by, stating that he refused to embrace the modernity which was being ushered in by his contemporary Russian composers such as Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and Shostakovic. Nonetheless, his sheer virtuosity and deeply felt compositions make him considered by many to be one of the greatest composers of the Romantic era. My favourite work of his is the Adagio movement in his second symphony which perfectly demonstrates his melodic abilities and masterly grasp of the epic build-up.
Image: “Sergei Rachmaninoff at a Steinway grand piano” by Royal Opera House Covent Garden is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.