Sergei Rachmaninoff
His first symphony was savaged so badly he could not compose for three years
Sergei Rachmaninoff was born into a landowning family near Novgorod whose fortunes his father gambled and drank away; by the time Sergei was nine the last estate had been sold and the family was crammed into a flat in St Petersburg. His parents separated and a sister died of diphtheria. He was a lazy student who forged his marks, and was sent to Moscow to board with a strict piano teacher who made his pupils practise from six in the morning.
He graduated from the Moscow Conservatory with the highest honours and wrote the C sharp minor Prelude at nineteen, a piece so popular that audiences would later shout for it wherever he played. Then, in March 1897, his First Symphony was premiered in St Petersburg under a conductor who was probably drunk. The performance was a shambles and the critic Cesar Cui wrote that it would have delighted the inhabitants of Hell. Rachmaninoff fell into a depression and wrote almost nothing for three years.
Friends took him to Nikolai Dahl, a doctor who used hypnosis. Through the spring of 1900 Dahl repeated to him daily that he would write a concerto and that it would be very good. The Second Piano Concerto, dedicated to Dahl, was finished in 1901 and remains his most loved work.
The Russian revolution in 1917 cost him his home and his income. He left with his family and a few possessions and spent the rest of his life touring as a pianist to support them, composing only six more works. He died in Beverly Hills in 1943.