Anna Artobolevskaya

Anna Danilovna Artobolevskaya (1905–1988), née Karpeka, was a Soviet pianist and one of the most prominent teachers of the Soviet piano school, whose work had a major influence on piano pedagogy and teaching methodology in music schools. She taught at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory and at the Central Music School affiliated with the conservatory, and she was awarded the title of Honored Teacher of the RSFSR.

She was born in Kyiv on October 4, 1905. She graduated from the Kyiv Conservatory in 1924, where she studied with V. V. Pukhalsky, and in February 1925 entered the second year of the Petrograd Conservatory to study with the celebrated pianist Maria Yudina. She later completed her studies at the Leningrad Conservatory in 1930. In the following years she maintained a warm friendship with Yudina.

In the 1930s Artobolevskaya taught piano in Leningrad music schools and also appeared widely as a solo concert pianist in Leningrad and other cities of the USSR. Her repertoire included works by Liszt, Chopin, Schumann, and Schubert, as well as music by contemporary composers such as Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

From 1944 to 1953 she taught at the military faculty attached to the Moscow Conservatory, now the Military Institute of Military Conductors of the Military University of the Russian Ministry of Defense, and also at the Gnessin ten-year music school. After the Second World War she devoted herself fully to music pedagogy. From 1944 she taught at the Central Music School at the Moscow Conservatory, where from 1945 and for four decades she trained generations of pianists.

Her students included Alexei Lyubimov, Alexei Nasedkin, Alexei Golovin, Vladimir Ovchinnikov, Yuri Rozum, Evgeny Korolyov, Vadim Rudenko, Valery Pyasetsky, Lyubov Timofeeva, Yuri Bogdanov, Tatyana Fedkina, Lyudmila Baslavskaya, Dmitry Galynin, Natalia Deeva, Ruben Muradyan, Tatyana Lazareva, and composer Sergei Slonimsky. Nearly thirty of her pupils became prize-winners at international competitions, and many later taught at leading educational institutions in Russia and abroad.

Artobolevskaya was known as the author of many works on teaching methodology, and her tutorial First Encounter with Music was reissued six times. She wrote that music, perhaps more than any other art, helps make a person kinder and ennobles life; its language needs no translation, yet it can convey the subtlest and deepest feelings, sometimes impossible to express in words. To kindle in a child the desire to master the language of music, she believed, was one of the teacher’s primary tasks. Her published works include Children and Music. Little Ones and the Muses (1972), Maria Veniaminovna Yudina. Articles. Memoirs. Materials (1979), and Your Children, You, and Music. Dialogues on Upbringing (1979).

Artobolevskaya died in Moscow on May 2, 1988, and was buried at Vagankovo Cemetery. In her memory, Moscow Children’s Music School No. 43 was named after her in 1993, and the Artobolevskaya Music Foundation was created in 1999; a prestigious Russian competition for young pianists also bears her name.

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