Student Post: Sergei Rachmaninoff - The Forgotten Composer, Part 2

Part 1 here.

Career
 
After years of hard work, in 1892 Sergei graduated with a gold medal. He was only 19 years old!

The gold medal was for his opera Aleko, which was first performed in 1893. It was admired by a great many people, including Pyotr Tchaikovsky. (Tchaikovsky even asked if Sergei's opera could be performed with one of Tchaikovsky's, which excited Sergei very much.) But Sergei's First Symphony was not so well received. In fact, nobody liked it. Sergei was so upset that he stopped composing for a while. He didn't write any more music for almost three years.

He did start writing again, though, and before World War I started, he had written three concertos, two more symphonies, a symphonic poem, many songs, and lots of piano music. The piano music was written partly for his own amazing hands, so the music is very difficult and full of wide stretches.

In 1902, Sergei finally married his fiancée and cousin Natalia Satina. In the beginning, Sergei was in love with her younger sister, Vera, but Vera and Natalia's mother would have none of that. So Sergei wrote back and forth with Natalia. By the time of their wedding, they had been engaged for three years.

In 1917, the Russian Revolution broke out. The Rachmaninoff family were aristocrats, and so the forty-four-year-old Sergei moved to Switzerland with his family (his wife and two daughters) and decided to focus more on the piano. Many people in the United States offered him work as a composer, and although he turned them down, he finally decided that moving to America would solve some of his financial problems. In 1935, he moved to the United States. He kept composing during this time, even though he was very sad to leave Russia. He and his family tried to make their house in America like their house in Russia.

Sergei became ill during a concert tour in late 1942 and was diagnosed with melanoma, a type of skin cancer (The doctors told his family, but not him). Soon after, he and his wife became American citizens, just two months before he died. He died in Beverly Hills, California, four days before his 70th birthday.

Music

Sergei wrote a lot of music, including: Piano Concerto No. 4; the Variations on a Theme by Corelli, for solo piano; the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, for piano and orchestra; the Third Symphony; and the Symphonic Dances, as well as pieces like Vocalise, Variations on a Theme of Chopin, and The Isle of the Dead. Sergei Rachmaninoff has been somewhat forgotten, but his music is still popular. He was perhaps the best pianist of his lifetime. As part of his daily warm-up exercises, Sergei would play the difficult Étude in A flat, Op. 1, No. 2, by Paul de Schlozer. When performing, he would go up on stage, sit down at the piano, and wait for the audience to be quiet. When he played, it was perfect: he never made a mistake, and his playing could be heard in the back row of the music hall. And he remembered things - if he heard a piece of music just once, he could remember it for a long time, note by note. He could sit down the next day, or six months later, or ten years later, and play it on the piano. He was dedicated to music - he once said, "That is the most important thing for me in my interpretations, color. So you make music live. Without color it is dead." 

Guest Writer: Rachel Holbrook

Student Post: Sergei Rachmaninoff - The Forgotten Composer

Historical Period: Late Romantic-Early Contemporary
Nationality: Russian
Born: April 1, 1873
Died: March 28, 1943
Contemporaries: Bela Bartok, Antonin Dvorak,  Vladimir Horowitz, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Sergei Prokofiev, Arnold Schonberg, Alexander Scriabin, Igor Stravinski, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Works: Aleko, Prelude in C-Sharp Minor, Second Piano Concerto, Spring, Vocalise, Variations on a Theme of Chopin, The Isle of the Dead

What's Happening in History?

In America, the Civil War (1860-1865) has been over for more than eight years. The Russian Revolution (1917) is going to begin in several years and World War I (1914-1918) is beginning in Europe.

Life

Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff was born to Vasily Arkadyevich and his wife Lyubov Petrovna Butakova, on their estate in Oneg, near the Novgorod district in Russia. Sergei's mother taught him a bit of piano when he was four, but his grandfather hired a teacher for him the next year. But she left when he was nine - Sergei's family moved to St. Petersburg, because his father was irresponsible and lost his estate. Young Sergei began taking preparatory classes at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, but when he was twelve, he transferred to the conservatory in Moscow. It was a hard life in the Moscow Conservatory. The students got up at 6:00 AM every morning, and they worked sixteen hours every day. They took language lessons and wore uniforms, because the school was in part seeking to train the students to be gentlemen. Sergei studied there with a group of well-known musicians, one of which also went on to be important in the music world was Alexander Scriabin. Alexander and Sergei became good friends. (When Alexander died, Sergei gave a piano recital in his honor. Alexander's students hated the way Sergei played Alexander's pieces. Sergei was offended, naturally.)

Sergei was still a student when he composed several pieces of music for the piano. One of those pieces was his First Piano Concerto. Now, at the Moscow Conservatory at that time, the conductor, Safonov, could change the students' pieces however he wanted to for a recital. But 18-year-old Sergei would not agree to the changes made to his piece. One of his fellow students, Mikhail Bukinik, said this about Sergei:

        "...Rachmaninoff's talent as a composer was so obvious, and his      
          quiet self-assurance made such an impression on all, that even 
          the omnipotent Safonov had to yield."

Guest Writer: Rachel Holbrook