Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff in Exile

The moving story of Rachmaninoff's years in exile and the composition of his last great work, set 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—his iconic “Symphonic Dances.” What happened in those final haunted years and how did he come to write his farewell masterpiece?

Rachmaninoff left Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) in 1917 during...