Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff was born in Russia in 1873 and died in the United States in 1943. Composer, conductor, virtuoso pianist, he was another of those gifts the great tyrants of Europe Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler bestowed on America. An aristocrat, an artist, a man of spiritual depth, Rachmaninoff was in every way a man of the kind that the Russian revolution wished to snuff out. Sensing this early in the revolution, he fled at the first possible moment.
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The train from Zurich to Lucerne tips you out right by the lakeside, practically on the steamboat piers. A white paddle-steamer takes you out of the city, past leafy slopes and expensive-looking mansions. Tribschen, where Wagner wrote the ‘Siegfried Idyll’, slides away to the right as you head out across the main arm of the