A life long romance

A life long romance

You will find a flower with five petals on a lilac branch - wait for happiness ... All of us since childhood believe in this sign and the miraculous ability of lilac to work wonders. It was about this that Sergey Rachmaninoff wrote his most gentle and heartfelt romance "Lilac". Creating it, the composer had no idea that this particular flower would become a constant companion of his life and not only ...

Once after the concert, Rachmaninov received a large bouquet of white lilac. No signatures, no postcards, nothing that says about the donor, only fragrant fresh flowers. From that time, wherever he spoke, in whatever country he was, someone still gave him lilacs. She invariably graced his concerts and hotel rooms. Each birthday he was brought home the same snow-white bouquet.

At the premiere of the poem "The Bells", held in February 1914, Rakhmaninov was presented with a conductor's console, generously decorated with white lilac and a conductor stick made of ivory, on which the same lilac was cut. And even when 4 years later Rachmaninov left Russia forever, in his compartment miraculously turned out to be an aromatic branch of grapes ...

The admirer of Rachmaninov, who constantly gave him lilacs, remained a mysterious stranger for a long time. The composer's friends called her “White Lilac”. And only a few years later one of them revealed to him a great secret - The White Lilac Thekla Yakovlevna Rousseau turned out to be. This modest teacher from the Kiev province, having fallen in love with his music, embodied her confession into a snow-white fragrant flower - a pure, innocent, spring symbol, intoxicating with a sweet aroma. The composer wrote to her, and spiritual friendship developed between them.

And so, unwillingly, white lilac became a kind of guardian angel Rachmaninoff, who had always accompanied him all his life: from the time of his youth, when he first felt her scent in the village of Ivanovka until the last days. A few years after the composer's death, pianist Van Cliburn planted a white lilac sapling on his grave, presented to him in Moscow by Soviet students. And let Rachmaninov rest far beyond the ocean, in New York, but the living and fragrant bush of Russian lilac forever tied him to his native side. Today, the name of this flower still sounds consistently next to the name of the composer - and not only when performing the famous romance: for several years now a festival called “White Lilac” has been held in Kazan, dedicated to the composer.