ergey
Vassilievich Rachmaninoff was born on April 1,
1873, at Semyonovo, a large estate near the ancient city of Novgorod,
Russia. His father, an army officer, gambled, drank, and squandered nearly
all of his wife's considerable inheritance. Vassily Rachmaninoff left his
wife when Sergey was nine years old, and Sergey's sister Sofia died
soon thereafter. The family was forced to auction off Semyonovo to
pay their debts and move to St. Petersburg, where Sergey
enrolled in the conservatory to continue his piano studies.
By all accounts, Sergey was a problem
child, but he had an extraordinary talent at the piano. Aware of his
natural gift and still reeling from the troubles within his family, Sergey
did not invest much effort in his studies. In 1885 he failed all of his
exams at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and was sent to Moscow to study
and live with Nikolai Zvereff, one of Russia's leading music teachers who
taught at the Moscow Conservatory and proposed to discipline Sergey. Four
years with Zvereff gave Sergey a new outlook on life as well as music.
Their relationship came to an abrupt end in 1889, when Zvereff refused to
give Sergey a private room to compose in and Sergey left to study with
his cousin Alexander Ziloti.
In 1892, Sergey graduated from the
conservatory with high honors and a commendation from Tchaikovsky himself
on Rachmaninoff's thesis project, the opera Aleko. Sergey's work
slowly continued to gain recognition and praise until 1897, when the
premiere of his First Symphony met with an unprecedented abysmal
reception. Sergey suffered a severe psychological setback which caused a
complete loss of self-confidence and left him unable to compose for the
next three years. It took a series of sessions with the hypnotist Dr.
Nikolai Dahl to restore Rachmaninoff's confidence in his creative
abilities. By 1900 he had begun work on his Second Piano Concerto and a
year later, despite religious objections, he married his first cousin,
Natalya Satina. Their daughter Irina, later to wed Prince Pyotr Volknosky,
was born in 1903.
In 1909, Sergey made his first visit to
the United States on a concert
tour and was greeted with open arms. After, he would visit America once
every season, even though he maintained a primary residence at Ivanovka,
his recently inherited estate in Russia. After the October Revolution of
1917 Rachmaninoff relocated briefly to Stockholm, but his affection for
the United States resulted in his moving to New York in 1918 and
purchasing a home there, on Riverside Drive and appropriately decorated to
imitate the atmosphere of Ivanovka, in 1921.
Before 1918, Rachmaninoff wrote some 135
compositions, but after his
self-imposed exile his total output was only nine or ten works. His music,
however, remained characteristically Russian, even though he was a vocal
opponent of the newly-established Communist regime, publicly announcing
his criticisms in the New York Times. Sergey Rachmaninoff died in Beverly
Hills on March 28, 1943, only a few weeks after attaining his American
citizenship and only five days before his seventieth birthday.
- Rachmaninoff, 1933