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Sergei Vasilevich Rachmaninov was born in Novgorod, Russia in 1873. Rachmaninoff was born fourth out of six kids into a noble family.
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Sergei and his family moved to St. Petersburg, where Sergei was granted a scholarship by the local conservatory.
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When Rachmaninoff was 14, he moved alone to Moscow to study at the Moscow Imperial Conservatory. His parents instructed for him to live with his piano teacher Nikolai Zverev.
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Sergei Rachmaninoff graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1892, winning the Great Gold Medal for his new opera "Aleko."
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Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote the one-act opera Aleko (based on Pushkin's The Gypsies), which premiered at the Bolshoi Theater in 1893, which led up to Rachmaninoff winning the Moscow Conservatory's Great Gold Medal.
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Rachmaninoff's Symphony no.1 in D minor, Op. 13, is a music piece he wrote from January to October, which he written in Ivanovka. The premiere in St. Petersburg was a complete failure from the lack of practice and from the poor conductor Alexander Glazunov.
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Isle of the Dead was a symphonic poem composed by Sergei which was inspired by Arnold Böcklin's painting, Isle of the Dead, which he saw in Paris in 1907. It is considered a classic example of Russian late-Romanticism of the beginning of the 20th century.
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On his first tour of the americas, Rachmaninoff publishes his concerto number 3, which was noticable to its different cadenza, which is an improvised or written-out ornamental passage played or sung by a soloist or soloists, usually in a "free" rhythmic style.
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On July 28th 1914, World War I broke out, which was mostly centered in Europe. World War I featured things like one of the worlds first tank battles, battleship warfare, and trench battles. World War I was also known to be "The War to end all Wars."
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During Rachmaninoff's life, there was the russian revolution, which was basically the beginning of the Soviet Union, which took the exact time of Rachmaninoff Rachmaninoff's 40's or 50's, Which was a vital time in Rachmaninoff's composing life.
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In result of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Rachmaninoff, with his wife and 2 kids moved from St. Petersburg to Helsinki in Finland, bringing only with him a couple notebooks with sketches of some of his compositions which included his unfinished opera Monna Vanna and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's opera The Golden Cockerel.
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On September 1st 1939, World War II Begun, which was a global war that included the Americans, The Germans, and the Japanese. This war featured many gruesome battles such as D-Day, Stalingrad, Battle of the Bulge, and The Battle for the Pacific.
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Symphonic Dances is an orchestral suite in three movements. Rachmaninoff completed this piece in 1940, and was his last composition. The work summarizes Rachmaninoff's compositional output.
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Sergei Rachmaninoff fell ill during a concert tour in late 1942, and was diagnosed with advanced melanoma. Rachmaninoff gave his last recital in february of 1943, which featured Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 2 in B flat Minor, which contains the famous funeral march. He died on March 28, 1943, in Beverly Hills, California, and was interred in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York.
