Sergei Rachmaninoff1 April 1873 – 28 March 1943
Sergei Rachmaninoff was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor. He was one of the finest pianists of his day and was known for this as much as he was as a composer. Many believed his skill was due in part by his very large hands. However, he is very important to musical history as a composer because of his style which was very different than the other composers in Russia. Because he was such a great pianist, most of his music was written for the piano, either as a solo instrument or as part of an ensemble. However he also developed a talent painting pictures in the imagination of his audiences using his music. He also found he wrote well for voice. Rachmaninoff's masterpiece, however, is his choral symphony The Bells, in which all of his talents are fused and unified. 
He was born in Semyonovo in north-western Russia into a wealthy and important family with strong musical and military leanings. His parents were both amateur pianists. When he was four, his mother gave him casual piano lessons, but it was his grandfather who brought a teacher from Saint Petersburg to teach Sergei in 1882. The Rachmaninoffs moved to Moscow two or three years later, where Sergei continued his piano studies. He was usually found to be quite lazy, failing most of his classes, but while studying piano at the strict home of one of his teachers he finally developed self discipline.
In his early years, he showed great skill in composition. In Moscow, he met the prominent composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who became an important mentor and hired the teenager to arrange a piano version of the suite from his ballet The Sleeping Beauty. Also to earn money Sergei became a conductor for an opera company in Moscow.
His last recital was given in 1943 in Knoxville, Tennessee. He became so ill after this recital that he had to return to his home in Los Angeles. As his illness grew worse he realized he would never be able to return to his beloved Russia. Most people who knew him later in life described him as the saddest man they had ever known. He died of melanoma on 28 March 1943, in Beverly Hills, California, just four days before his 70th birthday.
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