Towards the end of his life Sergei Rachmaninoff was interviewed for The Etude, and in the resulting article (which appeared in December 1941) he was reported as follows: ‘… to say what you have to say, and to say it briefly, lucidly, and without any circumlocution, is still the most difficult problem facing the creative artist’. Many who remain unconvinced by Rachmaninoff's larger-scale compositions recognize the precision of utterance of his songs and piano Preludes; all admirers of his work accept the latter collection as a convincing demonstration of his solution to this problem.