Rachmaninoff

Coke was measured against Rachmaninoff from his first concerto to his last notice, and it was a comparison he had done a good deal to invite and rather more to earn.

Coke may have met Rachmaninoff several times. The Western Daily Press reported in 1935 that "recently at Lucerne Mr Coke had an interview with Sergei Rachmaninov", and the Sheffield Telegraph recorded a "lengthy interview" in March 1936. In a letter of 25 March that year, quoted by Coke's friend Clive Jones, Rachmaninoff told him: "I have looked through your songs you sent me with much interest and would like to tell you I notice a definite advance in your work." Natalia Rachmaninoff invited him to tea with her husband at Lucerne, and long after the composer's death she was still writing to thank Coke for performing rare works of his so that "the English audience is getting a chance to hear them". Coke dedicated his Second Symphony to him. Most of the correspondence between them is lost.

They were also, for five years, in the same county at intervals. Rachmaninoff's touring diary puts him at Sheffield on 12 March 1935, at Sheffield again on 19 March 1936 and 21 October 1936, at Derby on 11 March 1937, at Nottingham on 21 March 1938 and at Sheffield once more on 21 February 1939. All six halls are within twenty miles of Brookhill. The Sheffield Telegraph's "lengthy interview" of March 1936 falls on the Sheffield concert of the 19th, and the letter Rachmaninoff wrote to Coke about his songs on the 25th of that month was written in the middle of the same tour, between Leeds and Newcastle. He never came back to England after March 1939, so everything after that was by post.

What survives is Coke's advocacy, which was substantial and unfashionable. British critical opinion of the day regarded Rachmaninoff as something of an embarrassment; the 1954 Grove would dismiss his "artificial and gushing tunes". Coke wrote letters to the musical press, arranged performances, and paid for private recordings. He told a Derby columnist in 1937 that Rachmaninoff was "as expressive as Delius, with far greater range; as important as Strauss, without Strauss's megalomania; as noble as Elgar without his lapses into vulgarity, and with ideals as unswerving as Wagner's." Writing to Musical Opinion from Brookhill in March 1941, in the middle of a war, he was prepared to go further: compared to Rachmaninoff's E minor Symphony, "even Brahms's Second Symphony seems, in its fumbling and laboured developments, heavy-footed and manufactured." The following month he closed the quarrel with some condescension, hoping his opponent would not "again commit himself to a letter about a composer in which he flatly contradicts specialists on the subject."

He could be combative on his own account. Answering critics of an article he had written against jazz, in July 1936: "I am glad my article annoyed the manufacturers of jazz, because to be made angry is to be made to think, and thinking is not the strong point of the jazz hacks." The same letter contains the closest thing to a creed he ever set down, and a sentence that only a man who never had to earn could have written: "music is not written to make money, but to express oneself, and in the hope of influencing others for good. However poor I was, I should not go on to the musical streets and prostitute talents that were given me for another purpose."

Rachmaninoff died at Beverly Hills on 28 March 1943. A memorial service was held a week later at the Russian church in Buckingham Palace Road, and The Times printed the names of those who came. There were fifteen, most of them from the Russian colony in London. The seventh is "Mr. Roger Coke". He had travelled down from Derbyshire in the fourth spring of the war to stand at the back of a Russian church for a man he had met perhaps three times. Six weeks later he put on a memorial concert for him in the music room at Brookhill, and played the First Piano Sonata.

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© Simon Callaghan 2026. This account was written from my own research archive on Roger Sacheverell Coke, with AI assistance in drafting. Every statement in it rests on a document listed on the sources page.