Sergei Rachmaninov View Sheet Music for this Artist
Rachmaninoff was born in Semyonovo, near Novgorod in north-western Russia, into an aristocratic family with strong musical and military leanings. His parents were both amateur pianists, and he had his first piano lessons with his mother on their family estate at Oneg. Due to financial troubles, the family moved to Saint Petersburg, where Rachmaninoff studied at the Conservatory before moving to Moscow alone to study piano under Nikolai Zverev and Alexander Siloti (who was his cousin and a former student of Franz Liszt). He also studied harmony under Anton Arensky, and counterpoint under Sergei Taneyev. Rachmaninoff was found to be quite lazy, failing most of his classes, and it was the strict regime of the Zverev home that instilled discipline in the boy.[citation needed]
In his early years, he showed great skill in composition. While still a student, he wrote the one-act opera, Aleko, for which he was awarded a gold medal in composition, his first piano concerto, and a set of piano pieces, Morceaux de Fantaisie (Op. 3, 1892), which includes the popular and famous Prelude in C-sharp minor. The composer later became annoyed by the public’s fascination with this piece, composed when he was just nineteen years old. He would often tease an expectant audience in the days when it was traditional for the audience to request particular compositions, by asking, "Oh, must I?" or claiming inability to remember anything else. In Moscow, he met the prominent composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky, who became an important mentor and commissioned the teenage Rachmaninoff to arrange a piano transcription of the suite from his ballet, Sleeping Beauty. Rachmaninoff confided in Zverev his desire to compose more, requesting a private room where he could compose in silence, but Zverev saw him only as a pianist and severed his links with the boy. He moved out and continued to compose.
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