In 1940, Sergei Rachmaninoff, living in exile in America, broke his creative silence and composed a swan song to his Russian homeland—his iconic “Symphonic Dances.” What happened in those final haunted years and how did he come to write his farewell masterpiece?

Rachmaninoff left Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) in 1917 during the throes of the Russian Revolution. He was forty-four years old, at the peak of his powers as composer-conductor-performer, moving in elite Tsarist circles, as well as running the family estate, his refuge and solace. Reeling from the trauma of a life in upheaval, he wrote almost no music and quickly had to reinvent himself as a fêted virtuoso pianist, building up untold wealth and meeting the stars.

Using a wide range of sources, including important newly translated texts, Fiona Maddocks’s book conjures impressions of this enigmatic figure, his friends, and the world he encountered. It explores his life as an emigré artist and how he clung to an Old Russia which no longer existed. That forging of past and present meets in his Symphonic Dances (1940), his last composition, written on Long Island shortly before his death in Beverly Hills, surrounded by a close-knit circle of exiles. Goodbye Russia is a moving and prismatic look at Rachmaninoff and his iconic final work.