Biography
Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff was born in 1873 into a Russian noble family and studied at the Moscow Conservatory, where in 1892 he completed his diploma with the one-act opera 'Aleko', earning the Great Gold Medal. As a composer, pianist and conductor, he became one of the leading musicians of his era; after the failure of his First Symphony in 1897 he fell into a years-long creative crisis, from which his Second Piano Concerto (1901) helped him recover. Following the October Revolution, he left Russia for good in 1917 and lived thereafter in Europe and the United States, where he performed mainly as a pianist. He died in 1943 in Beverly Hills, a few weeks after being granted American citizenship.
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