Sergei Rachmaninoff
A Lifetime in Music
-
-
4.3 • 4 Ratings
-
-
- $4.99
-
- $4.99
Publisher Description
Throughout his career as composer, conductor, and pianist, Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) was an intensely private individual. When Bertensson and Leyda’s 1956 biography appeared, it lifted the veil of secrecy from several areas of Rachmaninoff’s life, especially concerning the genesis of his compositions and how their critical reception affected him.
The authors consulted a number of people who knew Rachmaninoff, who worked with him, and who corresponded with him. Even with the availability of such sources and full access to the Rachmaninoff Archive at the Library of Congress, Bertensson and Leyda were tireless in their pursuit of privately held documents, particularly correspondence. The wonderfully engaging product of their labors masterfully incorporates primary materials into the narrative.
Almost half a century after it first appeared, this volume remains essential reading.
Sergei Bertensson, who knew Rachmaninoff, published other works on music and film, often with a documentary emphasis.
Customer Reviews
Sergei Rachmaninov: A Lifetime in Music
Sergei Bertensson’s and Jay Leyda’s carefully crafted biography of Rahcmaninoff gives a fascinating insight into the man behind all that incredible music. Rachmaninoff’s story is told largely through the correspondence of the composer and those who were close to him, punctuated with helpful, factual but economical narrative.
If you admire Rachmaninoff’s music this biography gives us some ideas as to what inspired his compositions, and into SVR’s complex character, although it also becomes clear that the composer may not always have been the best judge of his music. He had, for instance, some doubts about his wonderful and hugely popular second symphony.
And the pages are peppered with some colour about Rachmaninoffs love of motor cars and also motor boating. While I knew he composed his last major piece, Symphonic Dances, Op. 45, at the Honeyman estate in Orchard Point, near Huntington, on the north shore of Long Island, during the summer of 1940, I had no idea while he stayed there he frequently ventured across Long Island Sound in the house’s cabin cruiser to visit Chekov’s studio in Connecticut.
That he was able to find the peace and quiet he needed to complete Symphonic Dances, the only composition he created from start to finish in America, was, perhaps, a miracle and maybe even a realisation that the Russian exile finally felt at home in his last years in America.
In my view, his Third Symphony did not get the recognition it deserved at the time, although it was championed in England by Sir Henry Wood. Perhaps now it is beginning to get the recognition it deserves. It contains some of the happiest music in the last movement of all of his output and says to me it was the product of somebody content in life at the time.