Sergei Rachmaninoff Research Paper

Sergei Rachmaninoff, one of the greatest pianists of all time and one of the most outstanding melodists amongst composers, was born at Oneg, near Novgorod, on 20 March 1873 (1 April New Style), into a musical family: his grandfather had been a pupil of John Field and his father, too, played the piano. When Sergei was nine, financial difficulties forced the sale of the family estate and they moved to St Petersburg, where he took piano lessons at the Conservatoire. Rachmaninoff’s cousin, the pianist and conductor Alexander Siloti, had studied in Moscow with the strict Nikolai Zverev, and suggested that Rachmaninoff go to Zverev as well, and so in 1885, he made the journey to Moscow, staying with Zverev for three years. In 1888 Rachmaninoff began …show more content…
The little-heard cantata Spring followed in 1902, the year in which he married his cousin Natalya Satina; their daughter Irina was born in 1903. In 1904 Rachmaninoff took up a conductor’s post at the Bolshoi Opera in Moscow, stimulating the completion of two further operas, Francesca da Rimini and The Miserly Knight, in 1906. The pressures of conducting life in the Bolshoi persuaded the Rachmaninoffs to spend some time away from the capital, and they moved for a short while to Dresden, where he worked on his Second Symphony; Rachmaninoff himself conducted the premiere, in St Petersburg, in 1908.

The years up to the Russian Revolution were spent in an exhausting whirl of playing and conducting, with the family’s country estate at Ivanovka, in the countryside south-east of Moscow, offering a haven of peace where he could concentrate on composition. The works that emerged during this period include the Third Piano Concerto, the symphonic poem The Isle of the Dead, the choral symphony The Bells, and two a cappella choral works, the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom and the