“I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien. I cannot cast out the old way of writing and I cannot acquire the new.”
— Sergei Rachmaninoff
From an interview in the 1930s, reflecting on his exile from Russia and his struggle to compose in a musical world that had moved toward modernism while he remained rooted in Romanticism.
I said this in America, decades after leaving Russia. I had money, fame, sold-out halls. But inside I was a man out of time. The music I heard in my head belonged to birch forests and church bells that no longer existed. I could not write like Stravinsky. I could not pretend to be modern. So I played what I was, a ghost of a country that had vanished, and somehow people still wept. You do not need to fit your era. You need to be so completely yourself that the era has no choice but to make room.