Maestros and motor cars (3): Rachmaninoff’s Loreley
UncategorizedThis is the jalopy he drove round the family estates in Russia.
Later, he went for designer models.
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“To Finland, and step on it!”
Puccini was seriously injured in a car crash.
Abram Chasins was an eyewitness to SR’s love affair with cars. He wrote in his book about pianists that when Rachmaninoff was “at the wheel, he displayed from the first moment the same precisional coordination and rythmic rightness of his piano mastery.”
Wow, it is unusual for my auto-history passion to intersect with the postings of Slippedisc.com. Loreley was the pre-WWI name of the automobiles made by the Rudolf Ley Maschinenfabrik AG in Arnstadt. They had a pretty good reputation at the time: not Mercedes, but solid. My guess is that the photo is of a car from about 1910. After the war, they continued under the Ley name with automobiles and trucks until about 1928.
Mercedes? Back in the day when they were quality cars and not the mass-market over-rates which pervade the market today. Entry level through to $250K: they have computer screens instead of ergonomic dashboard design and thin doors and tinny construction a la China.
The last decent cars were back in 2016; now they’re rubbish.
I deliberately used the Mercedes name alone because the merger with the Karl Benz firm wouldn’t happen for about another ten years. For a brief period at the turn of the twentieth century, the Steinway piano firm had a license to manufacture Mercedes automobiles, until a factory fire put the auto business out of commission. Steinway was a good fit because of their industrial capability to work with large-scale metal and wood construction.