Between frustration and freedom
Rachmaninoff in the US

Do all good things come in threes? Not in the case of Sergei Rachmaninoff and his relationship with the US. He went to the “New World” three times – twice involuntarily and once rather reluctantly. About the composer’s ambivalent relationship to his last home.

It is 1909.  A long-planned and much-delayed tour of America is about to begin; but somehow the stars refuse to align.  The Rachmaninoffs have just returned from Dresden – where they had fled from the Russian Revolution of 1905 – to their beloved country estate in Ivanovka. The ink has barely dried on his latest work, The Isle of the Dead, and now they are to set off on a long journey to a strange world. When his American agent dies a few months before his departure, Rachmaninoff loses all interest in the project: “To hell with it,” he moans in a letter. He lets time pass. He has begun a new piano concerto, his Third, especially for the tour, but does not finish it until shortly before the ship embarks. He no longer has time to practice it; he has to do that on a silent keyboard during the journey.

The tour is a huge success – both musically and financially. And with good reason: a good decade earlier, the composer’s cousin Alexander Siloti had played the Prelude in C minor, op. 3 no. 2, on his American tour, and the piece caused a storm. The resultant hype proves both a blessing and a curse for Rachmaninoff.  His name is already on everyone’s lips, but no concert can end without the Prelude being played – at least as an encore. At some point, the audience no longer shouts “encore”, but rather, “C sharp minor”; Rachmaninoff is no longer Rachmaninoff, but “Mr. C sharp minor”. The tour becomes torture for him.

Escape from Russia

In 1914, dark clouds began to gather over the Rachmaninoffs again: the First World War and the October Revolution of 1917 forced the family to flee once more. Unrest, strikes, inflation and supply shortages make it impossible for them to stay. The peasant uprising seriously jeopardises their personal safety on their estate. They travel via Sweden to the US, where Rachmaninoff, as a celebrated yet completely overworked pianist, tries to maintain the standard of living to which his family had become accustomed.

With up to 70 concerts every six months, there is left little time for composition. “I have very little love for my current job! I haven’t composed a single line during the whole time,” he complains in 1922 to an acquaintance in Moscow. Rachmaninoff is also homesick. He does not really want to assimilate, barely speaks English, and socialises chiefly with other Russian exiles. In a newspaper interview from 1930, he confesses: “And an even heavier burden lies on my shoulders. It is the awareness that I have no home. The whole world is open to me; only one place is closed to me, and that is my own country, Russia.” 

It seems set to remain like that: Because Rachmaninoff signs an incendiary letter in the New York Times protesting against the catastrophic conditions under Stalin, he becomes persona non grata: “Down with Rachmaninoff!” was the headline in Russia. His works are banned there for two years. However, he is at least able to return to Europe for a while. The family buys a piece of idyllic countryside in Switzerland and names the property “Senar“ (from Sergej & Natalja Rachmaninoff). At Senar, he finally has the time and leisure to compose again.

The last few years in the USA

Just a few years later, this happiness is also taken away from them when, in Rachmaninoff, there is “little sun” in Europe: “…very little! Because it’s Hitler’s weather”. His defiant “come what may” attitude is soon replaced by growing nervousness – despite Switzerland’s declared neutrality. With one of the last overseas connections, he leaves his beloved country estate and travels back to the USA – one day before the Hitler-Stalin Pact: “This is the only place in the world where a person is respected for what he is and what he does, and it doesn’t matter who he is or where he came from,” he writes. Rachmaninoff also owes a great deal to the United States. 

Despite his increasing age – he is now in his mid-60s – he carries on as usual. He gives concert after concert all over the country, even when he has to struggle to the piano behind a closed curtain, because his back pain has become so severe that he can no longer walk the short distance unaided. 

But America is not only music; it is also film. During the last year of his life, the Rachmaninoffs buy a house in Beverly Hills and move very close to the major film studios. And here, too, Rachmaninoff is extremely successful – without ever having aspired to be. He never writes a single note of film music in his life, and yet his works can be heard in countless films, especially the aforementioned Prelude and the Second Piano Concerto. Ten years after their first significant use, films are already so overloaded with Rachmaninoff’s music that Disney felt compelled to make a parody – Mickey Mouse plays Rachmaninoff. At the film screening during a studio tour, Rachmaninoff states that he has “never been so moved as by the performance of the great Maestro Mouse”. If you don’t laugh, you’d have to cry.

In Beverly Hills, Rachmaninoff not only lives near the film studios, but also in the same neighbourhood as Arthur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz and Igor Stravinsky, with whom he reconciles after a lifetime of hostility. In the end, Rachmaninoff does find a little piece of home in the US, his autumnal contentment – and also his final resting place? Although he becomes an American citizen shortly before his death and is buried in Valhalla, New York, Russia has attempted – most recently in 2015 - to repatriate Rachmaninoff’s body to the country of his birth.