My Birthday Hero (2)

People usually regard April 1st as a day of practical jokes and wild merriment, known as April Fools Day. But what not many people know that on this same day of laughter and merriment, Russian composer , pianist and conductor Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff was born.  Rachmaninoff is widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, one of the last great representatives of romanticism in Russian classical music. 


When he was at the tender age of four his parents were amateur pianists, his mother decided to give he casual piano lessons but it was his grandfather, Arkady Alexandrovich Rachmaninoff, who brought Anna Ornatskaya, a teacher from Saint Petersburg, to teach the 9 year old Sergei in 1882. His parents arranged for him to live in the home of his piano teacher, the severe Nikolai Zverev. The young Rachmaninoff showed great skill in both piano and composition which he studied with Anton Arensky, and while still a student he wrote the one-act opera, Aleko, for which he was awarded a gold medal in composition. Through the following years, he produced many other compositions such as The Sleeping Beauty which won him yet another gold medal.


Of course, Rachmanioff's life wasn't all peachy keen, he suffered several setbacks after the death of his idol Tchaikovsky, criticism about his composition The First Symphony he then fell into a long deep depression that lasted three years. After an autosuggestive therapy which cured his writer's block he produced the symphony Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor Op. 18 which till today is the most popular and most frequently played concerto in the his repertoire. He moved to America but suffered homesickness, he produced a few more pieces there such as Symphony Dances.His last concert performed in the University Of Tennessee, He finally died on 28 March 1943, due to melanoma.


To me Rachmanioff was in certain cases considered a hero to me, even though he suffered a very deep depression, he still had the willpower to recover and continue producing wonderful compositions for the world to hear also even though he had received criticism for his First Symphony, he still was determined to produce more compositions, to prove to the world that he was a good composer and pianist. What we can learn from him is that failure is the mother of success, that we must have encountered failure before we can achieve success.