Sergey Vasil'yevich Rachmaninov

I open my eyes again and with a sharp and most disagreeable surprise find that my feet are still on the ground, on the floor of the theater. For the lat least 30 minutes I had been delightfully wandering around the perfectly combined parade of notes, tones and themes which beautifully build the Rapsody on a Theme of Pagannini. I look at program that lied on my lap, whiten me is the urgent need to know who was the responsible of taking my senses into such a high state, a state I cannot describe, a state I’d never known before. Is it possible that someone sharing our human nature, could have created a piece which exceeded by much what I considered the limits of humanity? I opened my program and there he was Sergei Rachmaninov.
I find, in this program, a paragraph account of his life, and one more giving information on the Rapsody. At reading this I learn he was a Russian pianist and composer of the beginning of the century who wrote 4 piano concertos, a few symphonies and so. In the second paragraph I learn he was a great admirer of Paganini, an Italian composer who lived a century before him. According to the program this Rapsody is merely an adaptation of Paganini’s 14th Concerto for violin extended by Rachmaninov for piano and orchestra to tell also about the Italian composer’s tormented life, but, interestingly enough, the Rachmaninov’s has being more prized an acclaimed than the original piece.
Not finding this information sufficient to satisfy my desire of meeting this extremely gifted composer (not of Paganini but of Rachmaninov, of course.) What exceptional life was his which led him to such compositions? How was his mind that allowed him to play along with emotions so distant as hatred to passion, from violence to peace and delicate tranquility? Visiting some of his fan web pages and find the most comprehensible explanation to my riddles, here is a summary of it.
Through all his lifetime Rachmaninov always exhibited an icy demeanor when performing, but this was no more than a protective mechanism he had acquired slowly and painfully in his youth, when one difficulty after another presented itself to him: a sensitive and naturally withdrawn young man who was nevertheless determined to make his way in the world as a musician.
He had little help from his parents. His father squandered the famiIy fortune so quickly that when he was only nine years old he saw the estate at Novgorod, where they had lived, the last of their property, auctioned off to pay debts.
His family moved to St. Petersburg and he continued his piano studies at the Conservatory. But soon, when a diphtheria epidemic swept the city, his sister Sofiya died.
Not long after that, his parents separated. And, being still twelve, he reacted to it by failing all his final examinations at school . This brough him as a consequence his being shipped off to Moscow, where he would live and study with the strict disciplinarian Nikolay Zverev.
Life with Zverev was no picnic: the day began at 6:00 a.m. and included a stiff regimen of communal practice, group and private instruction and attendance at various concerts in the city. In a while, he was, at last, able to transfer to the senior division of the Moscow Conservatory, taking more of his classes outside the Zverev household. But when, in order to compose without the constant distraction of his housemates' practice, he asked for a private room, Zverev responded by him out.
During that time, his professor at the Conservatory was his cousin Alexander Ziloti. That was when he started his composing. He had to endure lots of hardships during that time, but at least his genius began to be recognized.
At last, in 1892, he was ready for graduation and he gave his graduation piece, the opera Aleko, at the Bol'shoy and was heard by the older Russian composer Peter Tchaikovsky, who agreed to conduct another work of his, but, unfortuanally enough, he died before that. Nevertheless he left a great impression on the young composer, who acquired some characteristics of his style and wrote by an Elegiac Trio in his memory.
During the following years he composed piano pieces, songs and orchestral works, but in 1897 one of his ambitious early works the Symphony No 1 in D minor, suffered a terrible fate. It was premiered during the 1896 Russian Symphony Concert season but the conductor was drunk and delivered an incoherent, unfeeling performance. The reviews were uniformly bad and, because of that, went into a deep depression and composed almost nothing for another three years. In the end, the young composer consulted everyone from Leo Tolstoy to a medical hypnotist. The hypnotist was the one who proved the most successful. After several weeks of treatment, he rejoined the community of active composers.
Once out of his depression, he quickly composed his Second Piano Concerto, were he takes to the highest the essentials of his: the command of the emotional gesture conceived as lyrical melody extended from small motifs, the concealment behind this of subtleties in orchestration and structure, the broad sweep of his lines and forms, the predominant melancholy and nostalgia and the loyalty to the finer Russian Romanticism inherited from Tchaikovsky and his teachers.
Meanwhile, he set out a new career as a conductor, appearing in Moscow and London and later at the Bol'shoy from 1904 to 1906.During those years, he married his cousin, Natalya Satina, who gave him two children.
From then on he began to enjoy international acclaim as a pianist, conductor, and composer. His most popular piano concerto, the Second, was written in 1900 and 1901. The Second Symphony, the symphonic poem The Isle of the Dead, and a number of other important works followed in the next several years. In 1909 he made his first American tour as a pianist, for which he wrote the Piano Concerto no.3.
Soon after the October Revolution he had to leave Russia, along with his family, and go to Scandinavia. In 1918 they arrived in New York, where he mainly lived thereafter, spending only short periods in Paris, where he founded a publishing firm.
He gave himself a period of creative silence until 1926, on those days he was active as a pianist on both sides of the Atlantic, though never again in Russia. As a pianist he was famous for his precision, rhythmic drive, legato and clarity of texture and for the broad design of his performance.
In 1926 he wrote the Piano Concerto no.4, which was followed by only a handful of works over the next 15 years, even though all are on a large scale..
He died in Beverly Hills in 1943.