1873–1943 · Russia, United States · Romantic
Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor known for piano concertos, preludes and études-tableaux that became part of the world repertoire. For players, he is known above all for vivid, song-like piano pieces — several of his preludes make a good starting point for getting to know his music.
Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff was born on 1 April 1873 (20 March, Old Style) at the Semyonovo estate in the Staraya Russa district of Novgorod Governorate, into a noble family. His father, Vasily Arkadyevich, came from the Tambov nobility, and family tradition traced the Rachmaninoff line back to a grandson of a Moldavian ruler; his mother, Lyubov Petrovna, née Butakova, was a general's daughter. The composer's paternal grandfather was himself a musician, who had taken piano lessons from the pianist John Field and left behind romances and piano pieces of his own.
Rachmaninoff's interest in music appeared very early: his mother gave him his first piano lessons, and a hired teacher, Anna Ornatskaya, then joined the household. With her help he was admitted, in the autumn of 1882, to the junior division of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. His studies there went badly — he often skipped lessons — while the family, meanwhile, lost its estate over his father's debts and moved to a small flat. On relatives' advice, it was decided to move the boy to Moscow, to a stricter teacher.
In the autumn of 1885, twelve-year-old Rachmaninoff moved to Moscow to live in the boarding house of Conservatory professor Nikolai Zverev, known for its strict discipline: pupils rose early, practised at the instrument for several hours a day, were required to attend the opera and played ensemble music, including on several pianos. Other future musicians lived there with him in different years, including Alexander Scriabin, with whom Rachmaninoff became friends. It was there, at thirteen, that he was introduced to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
Four years later a rift opened between pupil and teacher: Zverev regarded composing as a waste of a pianist's talent and refused Rachmaninoff a separate room to work on music. Rachmaninoff left the boarding house and moved in with Moscow relatives, the Satins — a family in which he later met his future wife. Continuing his studies in the senior division of the Conservatory under his cousin Alexander Siloti, he also began studying composition under Sergei Taneyev and Anton Arensky.
At nineteen, Rachmaninoff graduated from the Conservatory with the Great Gold Medal as both pianist and composer. His graduation work was the one-act opera Aleko, based on Pushkin's poem The Gypsies — Tchaikovsky thought highly of it and secured its staging at the Bolshoi Theatre. By this time the young composer had already written his Piano Concerto No. 1 and several pieces, among them the Prelude in C-sharp minor, later one of his best-known works. Zverev gave him a gold watch as a keepsake, putting an end to years of estrangement.
On 28 March 1897 (15 March, Old Style) the premiere of Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 1 was a disaster in Saint Petersburg, largely because of Alexander Glazunov's poor conducting and the novelty of the music, which the audience found unfamiliar. The reviews were scathing; the composer took particularly hard the negative verdict of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, whose opinion he valued highly.
The failure plunged Rachmaninoff into a severe depression that lasted several years: he composed almost nothing and spent most of his time lying on a couch, leaving the house only to give private lessons. Help came from the hypnotherapist Nikolai Dahl, to whom his aunt took him: daily sessions in the winter and spring of 1900 gradually restored his desire to compose.
In 1901 Rachmaninoff completed his Piano Concerto No. 2 — the work became possible thanks to the support of Dr Dahl, to whom the composer dedicated it. The audience received the concerto enthusiastically, and the Glinka Award it earned him, one of five he received over his lifetime, became an important mark of recognition. He then spent two seasons as conductor at the Moscow Bolshoi Theatre, conducting the entire Russian opera repertoire.
In 1902 Rachmaninoff married Natalya Satina, his first cousin, whom he had known since childhood at the Satin household in Moscow. Church rules forbade such a marriage, so to get around the ban the wedding was held in a small army church on the outskirts of the city.
In 1906 the composer and his family left restless Moscow for Dresden, where they lived for three years, returning to Russia only for the summer — to the Satins' Tambov estate at Ivanovka, which he later bought from his father-in-law and loved dearly. In Dresden he wrote his Piano Concerto No. 3, prepared specially for his first major tour of the United States and Canada in 1909, where he performed both as pianist and as conductor.
In the years before the Revolution Rachmaninoff composed and performed extensively in Moscow, readily conducted at concerts organised by Alexander Siloti, and headed the artistic council of a major music publisher. On 21 February 1917, in the hall of the Tenishev School, he gave his last concert performance in Petrograd.
In mid-January 1918 Rachmaninoff and his family left Russia for good, using an offer to give concerts in Scandinavia as a pretext to obtain an exit permit. Settling first in Copenhagen, he realised he could earn a living only by performing and applied himself to the piano: by the end of the season he had given eleven concerts and paid off his debts.
On 1 November 1918 the family sailed from Norway to New York, where Rachmaninoff was met with enormous interest; he continued his intense concert activity in the US for the rest of his life, playing dozens of concerts a season. His fame as a pianist was so great that reporters pursued him everywhere, and during his American tours he at one point even preferred living in his own railway carriage simply to escape excessive attention.
His creative crisis, however, dragged on for almost ten years: Rachmaninoff wrote no major works until 1926, when his Piano Concerto No. 4 and three Russian songs appeared. Living mostly in the United States, from 1930 to 1940 he spent long periods in Switzerland, where he built the villa Senar beside a lake, and toured Europe repeatedly, performing among other places at the Lucerne Festival.
In 1941 Rachmaninoff completed his last composition, the Symphonic Dances, which he himself considered one of his finest works.
Germany's invasion of the USSR shook the composer, who longed for the Russia he had left behind: he donated the proceeds of several concerts to a fund supporting the Red Army, and according to contemporaries this money paid for a warplane.
Rachmaninoff gave his last concert on 17 February in Knoxville, just six weeks before his death. He died on 28 March 1943 in Beverly Hills, three days short of his seventieth birthday, and was buried at Kensico Cemetery near New York.
The piano holds a central place in Rachmaninoff's output: he was himself an outstanding pianist and used the instrument's expressive and technical possibilities to the full. His style grew out of late Romanticism but acquired a recognisable character of its own — long, song-like melodic lines, dense, full-bodied texture and characteristic, "broad" harmonic turns. He combined in his music the traditions of the Saint Petersburg and Moscow schools of composition; alongside Scriabin and Medtner, he raised the twentieth-century Russian piano school to a world level, and his works — from concertos to miniatures — have held a firm place in pianists' repertoire ever since.
Besides piano music, Rachmaninoff wrote operas, symphonies, romances and large choral works on religious texts, among them the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom and the All-Night Vigil, in which he drew on the intonations of Russian church singing. But to music-school students he is known above all through short piano pieces — preludes and études-tableaux — each miniature built around a single vivid image or mood rather than unfolding according to the rules of large-scale sonata form.
Rachmaninoff's harmony is easy to recognise by ear: it is marked by distinctive, "broad" chord progressions (often called the Rachmaninoff subdominant) and turns of phrase borrowed from old modes — the Dorian mode, the gypsy scale — and from Russian church chant. Over his lifetime he twice reshaped his manner of writing substantially — around 1900 and around 1926 — and in his later works the texture becomes harder than in the early, song-like pieces of his conservatory years.
The sheet music available on the site consists of preludes for solo piano: here you can find his early Prelude in C-sharp minor (Op. 3 No. 2), written during his conservatory years and one of the composer's most recognisable piano works, as well as several pieces from the cycle of preludes, Op. 23, at "intermediate+" and "advanced" levels. It is more convenient to start with the Op. 23 preludes and return later to the texturally denser Prelude in C-sharp minor, once confident chord technique has been built up; the Op. 23 pieces themselves also vary noticeably in difficulty, so they too can be approached gradually.