Rachmaninoff family tree

Sergei Rachmaninov’s music is characterised by sweeping melodies, virtuosic pianism and heady orchestration. His Moscow training equipped him first and foremost to be a concert pianist but as a young composer he showed prodigious gifts, stunning his mentor Tchaikovsky with the C sharp minor Prelude and the one-act opera Aleko he composed while still in his teens. Tchaikovsky’s influence is reflected in the opera, based on Pushkin’s tale of an urban man seduced by a Carmen of the Steppes. The grand man of Russian music died prematurely in 1893, leaving Rachmaninov bereft. The next few years of late adolescence were painful. An unhappy 1897 premiere for his First Symphony, conducted by an unstable Alexander Glazunov, is supposed to have triggered a deep depression cured only by the hypnosis of Dr Nikolai Dahl, though more recent research suggests that Dahl’s pretty daughter was more likely to have been the reason for Rachmaninov’s convalescence. Yet during that time, he worked hard at nurturing another talent as an opera conductor. Rachmaninov left behind only three much

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