Alexander Melik-Pashayev was a Soviet conductor, composer, pianist, and teacher. He was born on October 23, 1905, in Tiflis, Russian Empire, now Tbilisi, Georgia; according to other sources, he was born in the settlement of Shulavery, now Shaumiani, Georgia. He came from the family of an Armenian from Shusha and received his first musical education at home, where he studied piano.
From 1921 he worked as a pianist and répétiteur at the Tbilisi Opera and Ballet Theater, now the Georgian Paliashvili Opera and Ballet Theater. In 1923–1931, with an interruption, he served there as a conductor. In 1930 he graduated from the Rimsky-Korsakov Leningrad Conservatory, where he studied symphonic conducting with Aleksandr Gauk and theoretical subjects with Kristofer Kushnaryov and Vladimir Shcherbachyov.
From 1931 Melik-Pashayev was a conductor at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, and from 1953 to 1962 he was its chief conductor. Among the productions considered his best were Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila, Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades and Cherevichki, Prokofiev's War and Peace, and Rossini's William Tell. In 1933–1934 he was also music director of the Opera Studio at the Tchaikovsky Moscow Conservatory.
In symphonic concerts he usually conducted monumental works by Beethoven, Verdi, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Shostakovich, and others. In the 1950s and early 1960s he toured outside the Soviet Union. Under his direction there were performances of Prince Igor and Carmen in Prague in 1958, The Queen of Spades in London and Ostrava in 1961, Faust in Budapest in 1961, and Aida in London in 1963.
Melik-Pashayev was also the author of musical works. His compositions included the operas Pechorin, based on works by Mikhail Lermontov, and Twelfth Night, based on Shakespeare's comedy of the same name, as well as a Symphony in C minor and romances on poems by Alexander Pushkin and Ilya Ehrenburg. In 1943, while the Bolshoi Theatre company was evacuated to Kuibyshev, now Samara, he and the ensemble transferred their Stalin Prize to the Defense Fund.
He received wide official recognition, including the title People's Artist of the USSR in 1951. He was also awarded prizes for his conducting, among them Stalin Prizes for productions of Tchaikovsky's Cherevichki and Rossini's William Tell, and French and American awards for recordings of operas including Prince Igor, War and Peace, and Boris Godunov. He died in Moscow on June 18, 1964, and was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery. A memorial plaque to him was later installed on Tverskaya Street in Moscow.
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