When 44-year-old Sergei Rachmaninoff packed a single bag and boarded a tram in November 1917, he “was aware that I was leaving Moscow, my real home, for a very, very long time . . . perhaps forever.”
Vladimir Lenin toppled Czar Nicholas II earlier that yr, hastening a revolution that overturned the social class construction. Wealthy landowners have been underneath risk. Some supporters of the czar left behind their estates, fleeing elsewhere in Europe or to the United States. As a member of the social elite, Rachmaninoff was amongst those that selected exile.
In Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff in Exile, Fiona Maddocks, the classical music critic at The Observer, attracts on archival supplies together with newly translated ones, as she paints a riveting portrait of the Russian composer’s struggles to adapt to a brand new life outdoors his beloved homeland.
In the U.S., he would transfer amongst different teams of Russian emigrés and set up friendships with stars resembling Walt Disney and Charlie Chaplin, however his deep eager for his nation property and for his life in previous Russia weighed closely on him. While he reinvented himself as a virtuoso pianist, he composed little or no, and he rejected modernist music and its cacophonous sonic constructions that reminded him of the upheaval of the Revolution. Some associates even reported that they by no means noticed him giggle.
Rachmaninoff, writes Maddocks, felt like a “ghost wandering in a world made alien,” longing all the time for his Russian homeland. In 1940, three years earlier than his demise, he composed his “Symphonic Dances,” a haunting melodic orchestral suite devoted to Russia. Maddocks gives illuminating glimpses of Rachmaninoff’s rigorous preparations for his performances, and his insistence on “dismantling every work he played in order to understand it, and then to reassemble it in performance.”
A fan’s affectionate ode to Rachmaninoff, Goodbye Russia gives a spirited tour via the evolution of his music whereas he was in exile, in addition to a glimpse of the cultural historical past of classical music within the early to mid-Twentieth century within the U.S.
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