Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff in Exile

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 the throes of the Russian Revolution. He was forty-four years old, at the peak of his powers as composer-conductor-performer, moving in elite Tsarist circles, as well as...