1873 – 1943

The Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff was born in 1873 into a musical family and learnt piano from the age of 4. By the time he graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1892, he had already composed a large number of piano and orchestral pieces, and was becoming well-known as a performer and conductor. He emigrated to the US in 1918, where he continued a busy career of conducting and performing, before retiring to Beverly Hills, California in 1942 due to ill health. He was granted US citizenship one month before his death from melanoma in 1943.