Author:
Maddocks, Fiona (Music critic) author.
Edition Statement:First Pegasus Books cloth edition.
ImprintNew York : Pegasus Books, 2024.
Descriptionxxiii, 360 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm
Note:1915-1918 : revolution, departure, arrival -- Rewind : life before exile -- 1918-1930 : America, the glory years -- 1930-1939 : France, Switzerland, second exile -- 1939-1943 : gathering in -- Last rites -- Wild strawberries : remembering Ivanovka -- Epilogue -- The 'exile' works : compositions written after 1917.
Bibliography Note:Includes bibliographical references (pages 321-322) and index.
Note:The moving story of Rachmaninoff's years in exile in America and the composition of his last great work, against a cataclysmic backdrop of two world wars and personal tragedy. In 1940 Sergei Rachmaninoff, living in exile in America, broke his creative silence and composed a swan song to his Russian homeland. What happened in those final haunted years and how did he come to write his farewell masterpiece, the Symphonic Dances? Rachmaninoff left Petrograd in 1917 in the throes of the Russian Revolution. He was 44 years old, at the peak of his powers as composer-conductor-performer, moving in elite Tsarist circles, as well as running the family estate, his refuge and solace. Reeling from the trauma of a life in upheaval, he wrote almost no music and quickly had to reinvent himself as a fêted virtuoso pianist, building up untold wealth and meeting the stars, from Walt Disney and Charlie Chaplin to his Russian contemporaries and polar opposites, Prokofiev and Stravinsky. Yet the melancholy of leaving his homeland never lifted. Using a wide range of sources, including important newly translated texts, Maddocks' immensely readable book conjures impressions of this enigmatic figure, his friends and the world he encountered.
