Music by exiled composers is still a vital part of our creative culture

When I was a music student my tutors were scathing about Rachmaninov. To that generation of academics, obsessed by Schoenberg, Webern, Boulez and all the other serialists, Rachmaninov was not just an anomaly – a full-blooded Romantic composer marooned, like a beached whale, in the anti-romantic 20th century – but an irrelevance. What could that lusciously scored, melody-saturated music possibly say about the modern age?

Today, older if not wiser, I realise that Rachmaninov not only belonged in the 20th century but was emblematic of it. A depressive and increasingly morbid man, he fell foul of the Communist regime in his native Russia almost as soon as the Revolution happened, and spent the next 26 years leading a nomadic existence in western Europe and America until his death in 1943. In other words, he was one of the tens of millions of people displaced from their homelands – for reasons of political and religious persecution or sheer starvation – between about

1880 (when a wave of anti-semitic pogroms ignited across the Russian Empire) and the fall of the Nazis in 1945. And the experience of being uprooted profoundly affected his music. What he could no longer access geographically – the Russian landscape and culture

– he visited spiritually, referencing the modes of the Russian Orthodox church in his music, and infusing it with an overwhelming sadness and loss.

Rachmaninov was just one of thousands of composers, performers and conductors forced to become émigrés in those decades, and this mass upheaval had a huge effect on music. Imagine, for instance, what popular American song would be like without the Gershwin brothers, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern and Leonard Bernstein – all sons of first-generation immigrants from eastern Europe. Imagine what ballet would be like if Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Fokine and Nijinsky, all Russian émigrés plying their trade in Paris, hadn’t created that convention-shattering trio of masterpieces – The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring – between 1910 and ’13. And imagine what British musical life would be like without Glyndebourne, the London

Imagine what American song would be like without the Gershwin brothers or Bernstein

Symphony Orchestra and the Edinburgh International Festival – none of which would have got off the ground without the inspiration of exiled foreigners.

Tragically, mass exile and the repercussions it has on music is not something that has happened only up to the semi-distant past. To take just two obvious cases, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has forced around eight million people to leave the country in the past year, while an estimated 2.6 million Afghans are now living outside their homeland – refugees from the brutal Taliban regime that is now back in power after the withdrawal of British and American troops in August 2021.

Among those huge groups of displaced people are many musicians, often with heart-breaking life-stories and, of course, hugely uncertain futures. I have been privileged to talk to several Afghan musicians who, though forced out of their homeland by the music-hating Taliban, are determined that their nation’s cultural heritage, its unique musical voice and their own creativity will not be stamped out.

Symbolic of that resolve is the rescue of the pioneering Afghan National Institute of Music, which for 11 years offered a musical and general education to boys and girls equally before being shut down immediately when the Taliban retook Kabul. Thanks to efforts by the international musical community, with Yo-yo Ma and Simon Rattle prominent champions, more than a hundred of its staff and pupils have been relocated to Portugal, where they can keep the flame of Afghan musical life alive.

And that is their intention, expressed with a burning determination that shames those of us in the comfortable free world who take music so much for granted that we became blasé about it. ‘If I had a choice of not playing music or not being alive, I would rather not be alive,’ the young Afghan composer Arson Fahim told me. ‘I think that goes for a lot of Afghan musicians.’

Rachmaninov and every other musical exile would have understood that sentiment. If you have lost your home, passport, possessions and often contact with family and friends, the ability to make music may be the sole remaining impetus that sustains you as a creative human being – and the result is often both astonishing and inspiring. Exile is a terrible thing – but how musicians respond to it can be truly wondrous. Richard Morrison is chief music critic and a columnist of The Times