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.