Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff in Exile — a lament for a lost homeland

It was a 1930s version of trolling. Disgruntled by his neighbour tediously practising the piano in the next-door cottage of their Hollywood hotel, the comedian Harpo Marx responded by playing the opening bars of the famous Rachmaninoff Prelude in C sharp minor for more than two hours to drive him out.

The practising neighbour was actually Sergei Rachmaninoff himself. And it stands as testament to the composer’s hatred of his early work — written in 1892 during a bucolic and privileged youth in tsarist Russia — that the mere sound of it, decades later, made him pack his bags and flee the hotel.

Just as Charlie Chaplin was a pair of baggy trousers, so Rachmaninoff was, as one distinguished critic later remarked, “that Prelude”. A piece of music that orbits a doleful, three-note theme played in the bass, followed by a virtuosic run of triplets, the Prelude haunted Rachmaninoff throughout his life in exile. It was an exile that began, like for many who opposed the Bolsheviks, with the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Against the backdrop of revolutionary violence, the Rachmaninoffs, part of Russia’s twilight aristocracy, left behind their estate in Ivanovka, southern Russia. They embarked on a journey that would, over the course of a life, trace a distorted mirror image of the road that brought Lenin from Switzerland to Russia to start the revolution. Rachmaninoff, an exceptional piano virtuoso of his generation, was 44 when he left Russia and would never again set foot in his homeland.

With Russians again fleeing their country since the invasion of Ukraine, Russian art, then as now, is almost entirely the domain of exile

It is these years outside the country that form the arc of Goodbye Russia, a “set of impressions and excursions” rather than a conventional biography, that fills in the many ellipses of a life that remained homesick in the shadow of its youth. Through letters, diaries, press interviews and concert reviews, music critic Fiona Maddocks refocuses attention on a period of Rachmaninoff’s life, fallow of composition, that is seldom written about.

With Russians again fleeing their country since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian art, then as now, is almost entirely the domain of exile. It is a modern context that haunts the reading of Maddocks’ book, along with the question of what this new rupture in Russian history might make of its artists.

With most of the composer’s oeuvre composed while in Russia (he wrote only six works after arriving in the US in 1918) the Rachmaninoff of America we meet is no longer a titan of composition but a performer; wealthy, magnanimous, vulnerable to criticism and striving to reconstruct the Russified cultured milieu of home. His staid performance repertoire — Chopin, Beethoven, Liszt, Schumann — reflected a taste for the established musical styles of his upbringing and a resistance to a new artistic modernity that catapulted rival composers such as Stravinsky and Prokofiev to stardom.

“[I am] a ghost wandering in a world made alien,” he told a journalist in 1939. “Unlike Madame Butterfly, with her quick religious conversion, I cannot cast out my musical gods in a moment and bend the knee to new ones.”

Orbiting Rachmaninoff is a motley cast of characters, both celebrated and unknown. It is one of the triumphs of the author’s meticulous research that she brings them to life with such vitality, from the heights of Prokofiev’s rivalrous ambition to the loyal piano technician from the Bronx who followed “Rocky” from performance to performance. (The same magnifying detail, however, can become tedious when turned to anecdotes of Rachmaninoff’s love of cars.) Never far from Rachmaninoff were fellow exiles, each with their own stories of tumbling status and loss, including writer Vladimir Nabokov, who was one of many benefiting from Rachmaninoff’s generosity.

Through them, Maddocks creates a picture of the first tumultuous decades of the 20th century, a time whose uncertainty and upheaval gave rise to a new artistic period. Those like Stravinsky, “the voice of the new, the fashionable and radical torchbearer”, drew on a vision and artistry that shaped the aesthetic of this new world. Rachmaninoff, clinging to the old one, was left behind.

Three years before he died in 1943, Rachmaninoff wrote the Symphonic Dances, his final work, replete with the Russian folk melodies and ecclesiastical chants that made him, to the end, such a national composer. Rachmaninoff the exile courted fame and enormous wealth, but Rachmaninoff the artist never found reinvention, only a quiet kind of reconciliation.

Nearly a century later, many of Rachmaninoff’s cultural descendants are again fleeing a barbarous cabal in the Kremlin. It will be down to the most courageous among them to imagine a new vision for the Russia that comes next, and a new artistic language to describe it.

Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff in Exile, by Fiona Maddocks, Faber £25, 384 pages

Nadia Beard is a pianist and journalist based in Tbilisi, Georgia

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