7 The 100 Most Influential Musicians of All Time 7is especially known for his piano concerti and the piece
for piano and orchestra entitled Rhapsody on a Theme of
Paganini (1954).
Early Life
Rachmaninoff was born on an estate belonging to his
grandparents, situated near Lake Ilmen in the Novgorod
district. His father was a retired army officer and his
mother the daughter of a general. The boy was destined
to become an army officer until his father lost the entire
family fortune through risky financial ventures and then
deserted the family. Young Sergey’s cousin Aleksandr
Siloti, a well-known concert pianist and conductor, sensed
the boy’s abilities and suggested sending him to the noted
teacher and pianist Nikolay Zverev in Moscow for his
piano studies. It is to Zverev’s strict disciplinarian treat-
ment of the boy that musical history owes one of the
great piano virtuosos of the 20th century. For his general
education and theoretical subjects in music, Sergey became
a pupil at the Moscow Conservatory.
At age 19 he graduated from the Conservatory, winning
a gold medal for his one-act opera Aleko (after Aleksandr
Pushkin’s poem Tsygany [“The Gypsies”]). His fame and
popularity, both as composer and concert pianist, were
launched by two compositions: the Prelude in C-sharp
Minor, played for the first time in public on Sept. 26, 1892,
and his Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, which had its first
performance in Moscow on Oct. 27, 1901. The former
piece, although it first brought Rachmaninoff to public
attention, was to haunt him throughout his life—the pre-
lude was constantly requested by his concert audiences.
The concerto, his first major success, revived his hopes
after a trying period of inactivity.