Rachmaninoff

The premiere of the First Symphony in 1897 was a disaster — Glazunov, who conducted, is said to have been drunk — and Rachmaninoff wrote nothing for three years afterwards. He recovered through hypnotherapy with Dr Nikolai Dahl, and dedicated the Second Piano Concerto to him. He left Russia with his family after the 1917 revolution and spent his remaining twenty-six years mostly as a touring pianist, composing far less.

He had enormous hands, spanning a twelfth comfortably, and that shaped his piano writing directly: it sounds thick, but every note sits inside what one palm can hold down at once. He returned all his life to the medieval Dies irae plainchant — the descending four notes in the seventh variation of the Paganini Rhapsody are it. He is the last composer to write in a nineteenth-century manner and live to see the Second World War.