The Joy of Rachmaninoff

PIANO MUSIC PLAYS

A lugubrious countenance, a life beset by tragedy,

the general consensus is that there's little joy

about the life and music of Sergei Rachmaninoff.

This is a classic tale of right man, wrong time.

Born in Russia in 1873 and dying in America in 1943,

not only did Rachmaninoff weather the false accusation that he was an anachronism,

someone writing gushing sentimental romantic music in a firmly modern age,

he also lived through one of the most abject periods in recorded history.

So why on earth is this called The Joy Of Rachmaninoff?

Well, despite the critical brickbats and a pervasive sense of Slavic gloom in his live,

there remains above all the time-transcending triumph of his music.

In his own words,

"Even with the disaster that has befallen the Russia where I was happiest,

"I always felt that my music remained essentially and spiritually the same,

"unending and obedient, trying to create beauty."

HE TOASTS IN RUSSIAN

Every classical music documentary

ought to have a preposterous statue in it and this will pretty well do the trick.

This purports to be Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff.

Now, in real life, he doesn't really look like this.

He had a kind of Savile Row dapperness and aloofness,

and there's more than the whiff of a Hollywood cowboy about this.

Kind of appropriate, given how much of Rachmaninoff's music ended up on the big screen,

but his life began here in Novgorod in Imperial pre-revolutionary Russia.

CHURCH BELL RESOUNDS DEEPLY

This is one of the defining sounds of Russia,

the bells of the Orthodox Church.

In this case, the astonishing St Sophia's Cathedral in Novgorod.

Rachmaninoff's grandmother took the young boy here

and this very sound had a deep, resounding impact.

BELLS CHIME

Rachmaninoff later wrote,

"The sound of bells dominated all the cities of Russia I used to know.

"They accompanied every Russian from childhood to grave,

"and no composer could escape their influence."

MAN SINGS IN RUSSIAN

An aristocratic child prodigy,

Rachmaninoff entered the Moscow Conservatory at the age of 12 to study piano.

There his focus shifted to composition,

and in 1892 he won the Great Gold Medal with his final work, Aleko,

a one-act opera based on Pushkin.

How does a precocious teenager

follow up the success of winning a prestigious Gold Medal

with his final student composition?

Well, by writing a worldwide, blockbuster, smash hit of course.

In the summer of 1892, having just graduated from the Moscow Conservatory,

Rachmaninoff moved in with the Satin family in Moscow.

And one of the first pieces he wrote there

was A Prelude For Solo Piano In C-sharp Minor.

"I heard the endless tolling of the church bells,"

Rachmaninoff wrote, "and it just came out of me with such force.

"And I was still a teenager."

20th-century music... I've struggled with a lot.

And, you know, it was at a time, I guess, as you'd know,

when you're looking at Stravinsky and Schoenberg and these extraordinary phrases,

you know, like, "the emancipation of the dissonance"

and "the tyranny of the bar line".

This kind of activism in music pushing and exploding boundaries.

And then you have Rachmaninoff at the same time, who's just, like,

"I'm just going to write these immense, heroic,

fantastic, lush, romantic melodies."

And that, I just...

I worship him for that. I love him for that.

This is a teenage boy who writes the most extraordinary, visceral,

dark kind of punishing piece of music.

I mean, think about that,

a teenage kid writes something that dark today,

he'd be on Ritalin and in front of a shrink within two hours.

I have a tattoo that says Sergei Rachmaninoff in Russian.

I'm assuming, I don't speak Russian, it looks a bit like Jeremy Paxman.

It's in Cyrillic and it says Sergei Rachmaninoff.

I just... A part of me, I know it sounds pretentious,

but always just wants to carry him around with me a little bit

and just remember just what... what a dude he was.

Geoffrey, we have three amazing artefacts from Rachmaninoff's compositional life in front of us.

The first is the Prelude In C-sharp Minor,

the single most famous piece that he wrote, certainly in this lifetime.

What does it tell us about the teenage Rachmaninoff in 1892 writing this?

Well, in fact, he could have almost retired on the basis of this,

I think, if they'd thought to take out international copyright

at the time, but they didn't.

It just completely took fire,

I suppose because in it people recognised a sort of Slavic mystery.

It's a very dark piece with a lot of sort of ceremony and glitter to it.

And I think probably people saw this

representing the Russian characteristics that they loved to explore.

What I really mean is a sense of fatalism,

a very powerful seam of fatalism

that runs through Rachmaninoff's music and which all Russians recognise.

Rachmaninoff exudes Russianness

in the same way that Elgar exudes Englishness.

We know what it is, but we can't quite put our finger on it.

Young Rachmaninoff's most important musical influence

was a romantic mainline that can be boiled down to Rimsky-Korsakov and to this guy,

the Russian giant of giants, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

MUSIC: Piano Concerto No.1 by Tchaikovsky

Not only was Tchaikovsky a musical catalyst,

he was a personal mentor who went out of his way to champion the teenage Rachmaninoff.

At the premiere of his opera, Aleko,

Tchaikovsky conspicuously leaned out of his box to applaud with all of his might,

aware of the power of such a public endorsement.

And whenever he could, he pulled strings on behalf of "the kid".

And Rachmaninoff was both enamoured and flattered by the attentions of this eminence grise.

It was here at the miraculous St Petersburg Philharmonia,

hardly changed since back in the day,

that Rachmaninoff debuted his most ambitious orchestral work so far,

his Symphony No.1 In D Minor on 15th March, 1897,

at a Russian symphony concert conducted by Alexander Glazunov.

The world, or at least Russia, was watching.

FANFARE

Rachmaninoff must've been nervous about the reaction,

because this is where he watched the performance from,

a staircase behind the stage.

So he saw Glazunov give the first downbeat.

And from the outset it was clear that something was terribly wrong.

He didn't recognise the cacophony he heard.

The orchestra couldn't play his symphony, it was too new and too hard.

Glazunov was making a hash of it

and there was even a rumour that he was drunk.

Rachmaninoff's only consolation was at least from this position,

he could make a quick and low-key getaway.

Up until that time, he could do no wrong.

He was the golden boy of the Moscow Conservatory in piano playing and in composition.

Everything he did was a great success.

And suddenly, 1897 - wallop! - there's a great failure

with the Premier of the First Symphony.

The critics had a field day.

The eminent composer Cesar Cui led the pack.

He wrote, "If there was a conservatory in hell

and if one of the composers was asked to write a symphony on the ten plagues of Egypt,

"if it sounded like Mr Rachmaninoff, he would have fulfilled his task brilliantly."

Rachmaninoff never allowed the First Symphony to be heard again in his lifetime.

And the full score has never even been found,

but I think it's a work of fierce imagination.

It's full of varying harmonies and experimental treatment of melodies

that are inspired by Russian Orthodox chant.

It's simply because it was so advanced in its ideas

that the First Symphony went beyond the audience and the orchestra that night and the critics too.

Who needs them?

If you listen carefully to the last movement of the First Symphony...

in all this carnivalesque celebration...

you will hear the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

The final page of the Symphony

seemed to pre-echo the end of the Fifth Symphony by Shostakovich,

which was yet to be written 40 years later.

I don't know how he knew all that.

He must have had some prophetic...

Like some people who have manic depressive inclinations,

and Rachmaninoff was partly manic depressive, I believe,

they can feel things before they happen.

Working as a conductor in Moscow,

Rachmaninoff met the great Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin

and the pair became firm friends.

An incident involving the duo

would lead the singer to a compositional crisis.

FEODOR SINGS IN RUSSIAN

By 1900, Rachmaninoff and his mate Chaliapin were the toast of Moscow.

Both aged 26, they were young bucks about town,

and every part of Muscovite society wanted a piece of the duo.

And on January 9th, 1900,

they received the ultimate invitation to come here.

This is the house of Leo Tolstoy,

who was and is the great man of Russian literature.

And the writer of epics like Anna Karenina and War And Peace

was a hero for both Rachmaninoff and Chaliapin.

And the person that they met on that cold evening in January, 1900,

would have looked like this.

Possibly the first ever colour photograph in Russia.

By 1900, Tolstoy had the status of a secular god in Russia.

He had followers, he had the whole of educated society

not just reading him but following him.

And after Anna Karenina,

Tolstoy gets all moralistic and serious

and rejects the whole of civilisation

to become a sort of pseudo-peasant.

Chaliapin later recalled,

"Tolstoy was then living with his family in the Khamovniki district of Moscow.

"Rachmaninoff and I climbed the wooden staircase of a very charming house.

"Up till then, I had seen only portraits of Tolstoy

"and now he himself appeared standing by a small chess table.

"Rachmaninoff whispered, 'If I'm asked to play, I don't see how I can, my hands are ice cold!'"

Of course, the duo were begged to perform.

And Rachmaninoff chose a song that he'd recently completed called Fate,

based on the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony

with lyrics inspired by Pushkin's The Gypsies.

VOCALIST SINGS IN RUSSIAN

-So a song about fate as an old woman?

-Yes.

-It's kind of a striking image?

-Well, it is very Russian.

In Russia you imagine death as an old woman with the...

-What do you...?

-Scythe for cutting the corn?

-Yeah, for cutting the corn.

-This is it.

-Yeah.

-That's the image, so it's...

-And we are the corn?

-Yeah, we are.

-Yeah.

ALEX SINGS IN RUSSIAN

And Rachmaninoff himself tells us what happened next.

"To describe the way Feodor sang is impossible.

"He sang the way Tolstoy wrote,

"and when we finished we felt that all were delighted.

"Suddenly the enthusiastic applause was hushed and everyone fell silent.

"Tolstoy, sitting in an armchair a little apart from the others,

"was gloomy and cross.

"'Is such music needed by anybody?

"'What music is most necessary for men, scholarly or folk music?'"

"And just to make the point completely clear, he said,

"'I must tell you how I dislike all of it.

"'Beethoven is nonsense, Pushkin also.'"

TOM LAUGHS

ALEX SINGS IN RUSSIAN

An hour later, a somewhat cooler Leo approached Sergei

to ask for forgiveness for his earlier outburst.

"How can I be hurt on my account," Sergei replied,

"if I wasn't on Beethoven's?"

Rachmaninoff never came back.

How would you have reacted if you'd been singing to Tolstoy?

-"Thank you very much for your opinion."

-IAN LAUGHS

This was a pivotal encounter for the composer.

You know, even the choice of song, Fate,

was significant for a man whose oeuvre and whose whole approach to life

was characterised by a sense of fatalism.

And, in fact, Tolstoy's rejection of Rachmaninoff pushed him towards a new depth of doubt.

His self-criticism became so severe

that the completion or even initiation of a composition became impossible.

It was time for drastic action.

WOMAN HARMONISES

The turn of the century was a time of pioneering new approaches in medicine.

And Dr Nikolai Dahl specialised in the therapeutic value of hypnosis.

And Rachmaninoff was so desperate that instead of his usual stubbornness,

he quickly agreed to see the good doctor,

and together they embarked upon a course of what we now call therapy.

Look into my eyes. You'll feel sleepy. Go on, look into my eyes.

TOM'S VOICE FADES

Little is actually known about what happened between Dahl and Rachmaninoff,

but one thing is for certain,

the therapy had a dramatic effect on the happiness of the young composer.

"Although it may seem incredible," he said, "this cure really helped me,

"and by the beginning of the summer I began to compose,

"the material grew in bulk and new musical ideas began to stir in me,

"more than enough for my concerto."

-This is the Second Piano Concerto?

-Yes.

What an amazing thing to be able to handle this score and look at it,

but before we even get to the notes, Geoffrey,

I just want to ask you quickly about the title page,

because the piece is dedicated to...

-There we are to... BOTH:

-Monsieur N Dahl.

To Dr Dahl, who he said basically brought him back to compositional life.

-Here it is.

-Yes.

Is there a more famous introduction to a piano concerto

than these semibreves and minims?

MUSIC: Second Piano Concerto by Sergei Rachmaninoff

-This surely is bells?

-It must be, mustn't it?

-It seems the most obvious.

-Yes, the great, deep bass bell

and the chords in the right hand.

The opening of the Second Piano Concerto,

the melody and the piano score is eight pages long, it never stops.

Just when you think... No, it goes on and takes..

And I think as humans we love that, we love melody.

What we love of Schubert, what we love the Beatles, whatever it is,

we love something that is in our head.

And when it's sad melody, it's particularly...

It gets to our heart. I mean, it just permeates our being.

And I think we all... We love to be sad.

BOTH LAUGH

And even in the second movement,

the short introduction of eight chords from...

Really that he's taken from the beginning of the first movement in C-minor and then...

Which is this key. And then the piano comes in a very different key, E-major.

Very simple, no melody.

Over which the flute and the clarinet weave this exquisite...

And so on. And then the piano talks to them. It's like chamber music.

And it's terribly simple and very unsentimental.

And it's something like a very still lake or something very beautiful and calm.

And that's another human emotion when we're, you know,

exhausted with passion and you find a stillness that's not overly passionate,

but still very beautiful with a great simplicity.

There is a kind of... You know, he's channelling something.

It's the human condition, isn't it?

I think he...he writes what we feel.

I mean, that's such genius to be able to take what's in all of our hearts

at certain times of our life and put it into music,

not in a schmaltzy way, but in a very real and tangible way

that leaves us with something that we want to go back

and have repeated listening to it.

But where did the ideas, the melodies of the Second Concerto come from?

Are they really the result of some hypnotic trance?

Or are they rather the bells, the chants,

the emotional trauma of Rachmaninoff's life transmuted into musical gold

through his compositional alchemy of melancholy?

We do know at least where the tunes end up,

in films like Brief Encounter or The Seven Year Itch

and so many other places in popular culture.

-Rachmaninoff!

-The Second Piano Concerto.

And, more importantly, the Second Piano Concerto,

maybe more than any other orchestral work by anyone,

has become a feeling, a place of psychic and expressive release

that Rachmaninoff created but that we all share.

In the early 1900s, there was a drive to find new languages

of dissonant harmonies and complex rhythms.

Modernism wouldn't interest Rachmaninoff,

but it would make him feel out of favour.

"I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien.

"I cannot cast out the old way of writing and nor can I acquire the new.

"I can't throw out my musical gods in a moment

"and bend the knee to new ones."

Grove's Dictionary from Mr Eric Bloom,

who probably was a very knowledgeable...

-A very knowledgeable critic, a very great critic.

-Yes.

-What did he say?

He said, "Rachmaninoff's music, well constructed and effective

"but monotonous in texture."

How could it be monotonous? Very interesting.

"Which consists of many artificial gushing tunes

"accompanying a variety of figures derived from arpeggios."

"Enormous popular success,

some admirers he had in his lifetime, not likely to last."

And it's still lasting, eh? Where are we, in 2015?

And not only the general audiences like the nice tunes,

great orchestras, great musicians, great vocalists love this music,

because they think in essence

it conveys something extremely important, something of our existence.

Well, the Rachmaninoff Cello Sonata was written in the same year

as his famous, very famous Second Piano Concerto.

And it inhabits something of the same world.

It's after he came out of his big depression.

It's not only a great romantic work, it's also a very religious work,

and there's a lot of bells.

And I think it's a mistake just to approach it as a romantic sonata,

it's more than that.

It's deeply spiritual.

Like all the best classical music documentaries,

I'm pushing myself close to the edge, dear viewer, and possibly beyond.

I've absolutely no idea where we are.

We're been driving for hours.

I think I'm a bit hypnotised

by the beauty but monotony of this landscape.

I do know at least that we're travelling about 500km south-east of Moscow

to a place of huge personal significance for Rachmaninoff.

If we get there.

RUSSIAN FOLK MUSIC PLAYS

WOMEN CHANT IN RUSSIAN

WOMEN CHANT IN RUSSIAN

TOM LAUGHS

Russians adore Rachmaninoff,

none more so than in the region of Tambov,

where disciples have lovingly recreated

Rachmaninoff's aristocratic summer residence on the original site.

CHANTING CONTINUES

PIANO PLAYS

When he wasn't performing,

Rachmaninoff would spend his summers here at his cousins' estate of Ivanovka,

far from the hectic swirl of Moscow deep in the region of Tambov.

And in 1902, he would marry one of those cousins, Natalia Satina,

and just a few years later he had inherited the whole place.

This was inspirational therapy,

just the tonic for a self-doubting young man.

The landed estate, or the favoured landed estate, the ancestral home,

was very important to the landed gentry.

And they might have several estates,

but there would likely be one which was home.

And Ivanovka was that for Rachmaninoff and his extended family.

And it would be a place where they might spend every summer.

So country pursuits, everything from hunting to picnics,

mushroom gathering, were part of that lifestyle.

WOMAN HARMONISES

I mean, we see it every time we look at a Chekhov play,

it's that we're talking about in Ivanovka.

"Ivanovka, 20 years of my life I spent here.

"Every Russian feels strong ties with the soil,

"the endless fields of wheat stretching as far as the eye can see,

"the smell of the earth and everything that grows and blossoms.

"I felt so good here, I could work and work hard.

"Here, at last, I found blessed happiness."

This photograph shows Rachmaninoff in his late 30s here at Ivanovka

working on proofs, on copies of his Third Piano Concerto,

I think one of his absolute masterpieces.

Now, he wrote this piece in 1909 for his first tour to America

and for himself to play too as a kind of calling card. What a calling card.

Rach 3!

It's monumental!

It's a mountain. It's the hardest piece you could Everest play.

Well, no-one's ever been mad enough to attempt the Rach 3!

The Rach 3, obviously. I mean, Shine, totally worth the hype.

My God, that piece!

Think of it as two separate melodies jousting for supremacy.

Your hands, giants, ten fingers each.

Performing is a risk, you know. No safety net.

Make no mistake, David, it's dangerous.

You could get hurt.

And it gets harder even in the slow movement, "OK, slow movement, you've got time to breathe."

And you do for, like, 30 seconds and then it's just even harder than the first movement.

And it doesn't stop. And I would see, you know, the things he would ask you to do

with octaves and the speed and the accuracy.

People who can do things like that, it should be illegal in a way, it's...it's inhuman.

There's a moment in the first movement in the solo bit, the cadenza,

Rachmaninoff writes an alternative, a so-called ossia,

and it is one of those moments where he's asking his interpreters,

"Are you Rachmaninoff?"

No! It's not good.

Ivanovka may have inspired Rachmaninoff,

but his melancholy and fatalism never left.

This is Arnold Bocklin's painting The Isle Of The Dead

and it inspired one of Rachmaninoff's finest orchestral pieces.

He composed it in 1909, but he originally saw this painting in 1907

in a black-and-white reproduction in Paris.

And when he finally saw it in its vaguely Technicolor original,

he was a bit shocked and said, "I'm not sure I'd have been able to write the music I did,"

because he preferred in fact the gloominess of that black-and-white version that he first saw.

The music opens with the churn,

the push-pull of the boatman rowing the dead to this mysterious dark maw

of the cypress grove from which there is no return.

And Rachmaninoff writes in the centre of the piece

music that symbolises the soul crying out memories of life and love,

how wonderful existence was.

But by the end of the piece,

death returns and claims whoever the hero of this piece is.

And as so often in Rachmaninoff's music,

that final fatalistic victory is symbolised

by his quotation of the terrifying ancient and arcane Dies Irae chant.

The day of anger taking all of us to death.

I think that...

Rachmaninoff, like a lot of people of his time,

was obsessed with this eschatological awareness

of the end of the world coming soon.

It created this incredible angst

and sense of the expectation of a great tragedy.

It's...

It's a...permanent purgatorium.

What does Rachmaninoff prophesise for us today?

Well, I don't want to be a false prophet myself,

back then they were obviously prophesying world wars,

the First and the Second and more bloodshed.

CHOIR SINGS IN RUSSIAN

In 1915, Rachmaninoff wrote his choral masterpiece, his All-Night Vigil,

better known as his Vespers,

based on the chants of the Russian Orthodox Church.

It was first performed on March 10th that year

by the Moscow Synodal Choir,

but behind the liturgical beauty of this work lies a great sadness.

CHOIR SINGS IN RUSSIAN

It's a work of great... transcendental power.

And a work which...

has the power and intent of consolation,

to console people in grief.

But at the same time, you can feel

that the one who is giving this consolation

is actually desperate himself.

No composition represents the end of an era

as clearly as the All-Night Vigil.

Written as Bolshevism swept the land,

within three years of its composition the Soviet Union had banned all religious composition.

And that was that. The lights went out

on a mind-boggling half a millennium of Russian church music

and the last act was Rachmaninoff.

CHOIR SINGS IN RUSSIAN

Rachmaninoff's masterpiece of sacred music, the Vespers,

that was a piece that was not allowed to be performed in Soviet times in Russia.

But you did hear a performance of Rachmaninoff's Vespers in Soviet Russia?

One day a friend of mine comes to me and says,

"Are you free this evening?" I said, "Why?"

"Because in one of the churches

"I know that the chorus master decided to have Rachmaninoff's Vespers tonight.

"Would you like to come to hear it?" And, of course, I ran there.

All musicians in Moscow came there,

because at that time in the Soviet Union,

religious music was practically never played in the concert halls,

but a church had the right to do it.

Since Rachmaninoff's birth, Russia had been in turmoil.

After decades of poverty and famine,

the proletariat and peasantry seized power from the ruling class in 1917.

The Russian Revolution was a decisive moment for the composer.

The whole future of Russia changed in just two days,

on the 24th and 25th of October, 1917,

when the Bolshevik party, led by this guy, Vladimir Lenin,

overthrew the provisional government here in St Petersburg

and replaced it with what would become the Soviet Union.

Rachmaninoff, who had toughed it out when many Russian aristocrats had already scarpered,

knew that now he really did have to get out of Russia and pronto.

An invitation to perform in Sweden provided the perfect excuse to get exit permits,

and the Rachmaninoffs left by train on 23rd December, 1917,

from right here, Finlyandsky Station,

ironically the scene of Lenin's triumphant return from exile just a few months earlier.

And Sergei left in such a hurry that he took with him

just one small suitcase containing a handful of compositions.

And as the train pulled away, he would have hoped otherwise,

but Sergei Rachmaninoff would never see Russia again.

Well, the sort of area of Tambov, Penza,

was really at the centre of the agrarian revolution in 1905,

and then again even more violently in 1917,

when peasants marched on the manors and declared rent strikes

and, you know, later as in Ivanovka,

smoked out the gentry by literally intimidating them

and then burning down their manor houses.

After Rachmaninoff fled Russia,

he never saw his beloved Ivanovka again.

The entire state was razed to the ground by the Bolsheviks in 1918

and Rachmaninoff would spend the rest of his life in exile,

for ever trying to recreate the spirit of Ivanovka.

Rachmaninoff would come to settle in America where his fame preceded him

and where he built a comfortable existence for himself

thanks to a lucrative if exhausting career as a concert pianist.

Now, he bought his first American home

on the West Side, New York City, in 1921.

So this was the New York of the roaring '20s -

fast, loud, brash, jazzy -

a total culture shock for an aristocratic Russian.

And whether it was his homesickness,

or the fact that he was away touring so much,

Rachmaninoff, who'd been a major prolific composer,

would only write half a dozen large compositions in the rest of his life.

On a number of occasions in America,

Rachmaninoff would commit his fingers to shellac,

bequeathing the world stunning recordings of one of its greatest pianists.

We spoke earlier a little bit about the third concerto

and it's incredible to hear him play that.

One, two, one, two.

There's no sense of...

It's cold.

It's like a distant snowscape of something - very...

and there's a coldness to Rachmaninoff as well as the heat.

He was an introvert. He was a very shy person.

He didn't have any of what today's virtuosos have -

this outgoing nature.

There's more of a... You could compare him with Glenn Gould.

He plays without any affectation.

Very straightforward.

He knew that music is music and that it's not showbiz.

He had such huge hands. I mean, if you look at his hands,

the span, just on his left hand,

using all five fingers, he could do C, E-flat, G -

this is where I have to stop.

C and then, with the thumb...

Bloody G as well!

-That was a single...

-That was one hand.

-..on his left hand.

In 1931, Rachmaninoff designed

and built a refuge from his hectic American touring schedule,

here on the banks of Lake Lucerne in Switzerland.

Villa Senar, so-called because it's a combination of the names

of the Lord and Lady of the manor -

Sergei and Natalia Rachmaninoff.

And this is a no-expense-spared attempt to recreate

the sense of spiritual happiness that Rachmaninoff at Ivanovka

and it proved to be a place where he really could

gather his creative forces and compose meaningfully once again.

It's a very modern Bauhaus design for a supposedly romantic composer.

Senar is also the only of Rachmaninoff's homes

to be preserved essentially as the composer knew it and I'm told inside

are artefacts relating to the great man,

so here I hope to commune with the spirit of Rachmaninoff.

This suit, this is a three-piece suit here.

Here we are. Sorry, Sergei.

Waistcoat, jacket, plus fours and flat cap.

I mean, this belongs to an English country gentleman rather than

a Russian aristocrat living in Switzerland, you would have thought.

Well, it's... It's a sign, again, of the elegance of Sergei Rachmaninoff.

There are several picture of Sergei here, in the house,

even working, cutting wood...

-In this suit?

-In this suit.

There's also something I wanted to show you

because this is pretty impressive. This shows you how big the man was.

HE LAUGHS

-So that's only coming down to his knees and...

-Yes, exactly.

I mean, of course, it was taken apart,

but you see he was a big man.

It says something - as well as his stature - that says something

about the way that the elegance is part of the personality

and indeed possibly part of the music.

I mean, this really is a Savile Row...

This is a made in London suit.

This is literally made for an English gentleman.

It just so happens that here, Davies & Son, 1920,

Hannover Street in London, it's made for Sergei Rachmaninoff.

Those pieces, the two major pieces from Senar, the Third Symphony

and the Rhapsody On A Theme of Paganini,

what, for you, is the relationship between those pieces and this place?

Well, I think variations number 18

and the beginning of the second movement of the Symphony,

they have such a serene approach...

To the world, to life.

It's like somebody who has found the solution,

how to deal with all troubles, all problems,

all disasters you can have in life

and finally said, in any case, "Life is still something good to live."

The 18th variation from the Rhapsody On A Theme Of Paganini -

the anthem of Senar -

played on the piano on which it was written in 1934

and performed by Dmitri,

the last pupil of Rachmaninoff's grandson.

This is as close as it's possible to be today to Sergei Rachmaninoff.

That precise variation from the Paganini Rhapsody, I mean,

that tune that's so moving,

-it's an inversion...

-Yes.

-..of the melody...

-It is.

It's actually quite a geometric approach to it, isn't it?

It's so powerful. It's so brilliant.

You have the melody...

In A-minor and you turn it around on its head, in D-flat major.

And, suddenly, the sun comes out.

And the sun comes out so rarely in Rachmaninoff's music

that this moment is very, very special.

Hearing this now, here, in this space, in this light,

with these photos of Rachmaninoff here,

his hands as a sort of spectral presence as well,

a plaster bust,

what strikes me most about this music is its generosity.

These cascades of emotion that I'm feeling,

and that you're feeling,

are given with such complete direct generosity by this man.

I think it's... It's one of the great miracles of music, this.

You know, of everywhere I've been,

it's this place that feels like the joy of Rachmaninoff.

In 1939, war would return to both Russian and Europe,

forcing Rachmaninoff to forgo these Senar vacations,

leaving him permanently marooned on the west coast of the USA.

Like so many immigrants,

Rachmaninoff's nostalgia for his homeland increased as the situation

there became more and more desperate.

Revolution, civil war, the World Wars, but Rachmaninoff's Russia

was lost for ever.

And he felt that pain of longing when he heard music by other

Russian composers too.

Listening to a broadcast of Stravinsky's The Firebird,

he said, "Lord, how much greater than genius this is.

"It is real Russia."

In 1942, at the age of 69, and in the middle of what

he planned to be his last ever North American tour,

Rachmaninoff fell seriously ill and, confined to his bed in Los Angeles,

his wife Natalia read him Pushkin and the news from war-torn Russia.

And as the Red Army began to turn the tide on the Eastern Front,

the ailing Rachmaninoff uttered, "Praise the Lord.

"May God grant them strength."

But before Russia was liberated, on the 18th of March 1943,

Sergei Rachmaninoff died.

The composer was buried in Valhalla, New York.

Rachmaninoff requested that the fifth of his Vespers be

performed at his funeral,

his most cherished moment in his favourite work.

HE SINGS

Towards the very end of his life,

a cable came from Moscow detailing plans for an upcoming concert

to celebrate Rachmaninoff's 70th birthday but,

by the time it arrived, he was already in a coma,

so he would never read these words.

"Dear Sergei Vasilievich, on the occasion of your 70th anniversary,

"the Union of Soviet Composers sends you warm congratulations

"and hearty wishes in good spirits in health for many years to come."

THEY SING

"We greet you as a composer of whom Russian culture is proud,

"as the greatest pianist of our time.

"And as a brilliant conductor and public man, who, in these times,

"has shown patriotic feelings that have found

"a response in the heart of every Russian."

I think, in his heart, that the real man is very deep-thinking,

a very solitary person,

and one with a huge amount of expression

and not afraid of expressing really sad, deep emotions.

You know Spinal Tap, when it goes up to 11?

He takes it up to 11 and he does it unapologetically.

He just takes his romantic machine guns

and he just nukes the entire audience.

It's so wonderful that we can talk now about this as great music

because, really, 50/60 years ago,

it would have been unthinkable for someone with any musicological

background even to admit to listening to Rachmaninoff,

never mind admiring him.

But I think we can see him

as one of the great 20th-century master composers.