We are raising funds for "Rachmaninoff: The Lost Suite", a documentary film about Sergei Rachmaninoff’s lost Suite in D minor — a work that disappeared for more than a century and whose extraordinary story is only now beginning to be uncovered.

In January 1891, the seventeen-year-old Sergei Rachmaninoff sends his new orchestral suite to the composer he worships, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, and waits for his verdict. It never comes: a servant's mistake sends the score to the wrong address, and the score disappears without trace. That same spring Tchaikovsky conducts at the opening of Carnegie Hall. For more than a century the Suite is silent, until in 2002 the musicologist Valentin Antipov recognises its surviving piano version. Now the composer Teodor Doré has orchestrated it, and 135 years later the Suite in D minor begins its second life at Carnegie Hall, where Tchaikovsky once stood, revealing the emerging Rachmaninoff, before the world knew his name.

But important parts of this story are still missing.

We are raising funds for a critical phase of the documentary: an international archival investigation to uncover what happened to Rachmaninoff’s original orchestral manuscript and reconstruct the extraordinary journey of this forgotten work.

Your support will help us work with musicologists, researchers and archivists; investigate historical correspondence and documents; and access archives and collections around the world in search of the missing pieces of a mystery that began more than a century ago.

Help us uncover the story that history left unfinished.