After his First Symphony was destroyed at its premiere he could not write for three years, and it took daily hypnotic suggestion from a doctor to bring him back.
Rachmaninoff was born in 1873 into a landowning family in north-west Russia whose fortune vanished quickly; his father sold the estates and left. His mother boarded him with a severe piano teacher in Moscow, and those years turned him into one of the Conservatory's best students; his graduation piece, written at nineteen, was a one-act opera.
At twenty-four he ran into a public failure. The premiere of his First Symphony went badly — the conductor was said to have been drunk — and the next day's reviews were brutal, one of them calling the work a homework exercise from a conservatory in hell. He produced almost nothing for three years, and finally accepted hypnotic-suggestion treatment from Dr Nikolai Dahl: the same sentence every day in the consulting chair — you will begin to write a concerto, and it will come easily. The Second Piano Concerto came out of that, and Dahl's name is on the dedication page.
When revolution broke out in 1917 he took his family across the Finnish border by sledge just before Christmas and never returned. In America he shifted almost entirely to performing to support them — dozens of concerts a year and a great deal of recording — with composition squeezed into the summers. In the twenty-six years after he left Russia he finished only six works.
He spent his last years in California and died in 1943, a few weeks short of American citizenship.
Rachmaninoff's melodies arrive long. Where others write a four-bar phrase, he will spin a dozen bars without seeming to breathe, like someone talking who does not want to stop — it is the easiest thing to recognise in him.
The second mark is weight at the bottom. His own hand spanned a twelfth, so the left hand often takes a wide stretch under a full chord and the sound grows upward from the floor, dark and warm at once.
The third is bells. He grew up with Russian Orthodox church bells and buried a rocking two-note figure in a great deal of his music, especially at beginnings and endings. That ding-dong back and forth is usually him.
He also wrote very light things — short dances and study-like miniatures that sound too playful to be by the same man.
