Pulled this from the Bertensson & Leyda book ‘Rachmaninoff: A Liftetime in Music’, which I’ve read so many times I will soon need a new copy.
haha that is great. email has really killed the art of letter writing, or will in the future if it already hasn’t.
and it’s good to see the replies. When you read compilations of composer letters you only get one side.
I thought I was the only person in my old college to borrow that particular book. Yeah I remember that paragraph. Legendary!
nicely put.
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Masters both of the piano and of good humour.
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hahaha da 88ztreet
da art ov lettah writin iz MO prevalant now zinz email cummah
tiz eaziah zo mo ppl do it, juz electronically n mo zwiftly 
n more shittily
what you probably mean to say is that the art of letter writing (like the art of piano playing) has become rarer since the proliferation of their respective media.
haha pozz
i bazically think dat dere iz alot ov perzonal correzpondenz out dere dat iz alzo well written
but it wont b found due 2 da privacy ov email sheeyatz
if da rach died juz recently we cud check hiz emailz n c sheeyat lyk diz but alongzide random enlargement emailz , porn, n correzpondenz wiz kinky chix 
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As a performer, Rachmaninov felt that his American audiences had a short attention span and advised against playing anything longer than 17 minutes in duration. The following letter to Nicholai Medtner reveals his wry sense of humor.
“I’ve played (the Op. 42 variations) about fifteen times, but of these fifteen performances, only one was good. The others were sloppy. I can’t play my own compositions! And it’s so boring! Not once have I played these all in continuity. I was guided by the coughing of the audience. Whenever the coughing would increase, I would skip the next variation. Whenever there was no coughing, I would play them in proper order. In one concert, I don’t remember where, some small town, the coughing was so violent that I played only ten variations (out of twenty). My best record was set in New York, where I played 8 variations. However, I hope that you will play all of them, and won’t ‘cough’.”
“Mr. Rachmaninoff! How did you like the acoustics?”
“If the the check is good, the acoustics are good.”
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