Gainetdin Mutalov was a conductor, born on December 18, 1929, in the village of Yantyshevo in the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. He died in Ufa on June 21, 2011.
After completing eight years of school, Mutalov began studying trumpet at the Sverdlovsk Music College in 1945 and later switched to flute. He studied with Nikolai Bakaleynikov, a professor at the Ural Conservatory. He then moved to Ufa, where he attended a military music school while completing his secondary education. In 1952, he graduated from the Moscow Institute of Military Conductors, where he studied with G. A. Stolyarov, and taught for two years at the Ufa military music school.
Mutalov worked as a conductor at the Bashkir State Opera and Ballet Theatre from 1954 to 1989 and again in 1993. He was its chief conductor from 1973 to 1980. From 1970 to 2003, he taught in the opera training department at the Ufa State Institute of Arts, now named after Zagir Ismagilov.
His repertoire included about 80 productions, among them Puccini’s La Bohème and Madama Butterfly, Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan, and Yuri Meitus’s The Young Guard, as well as ballets including Giselle, Don Quixote, The Blue Danube, and Shostakovich’s The Lady and the Hooligan. He conducted The Blue Danube 301 times. He also conducted the first productions of works by Bashkir composers, including the operas Salavat Yulaev and Waves of the Agidel, the musical comedy Kodasa, and the ballets On the Night of the Lunar Eclipse, The Black-Faced, and Song of the Cranes. He also performed with the USSR Symphony Orchestra.
Mutalov was named Honored Artist of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1963, People's Artist of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1969, and Honored Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1980. He received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour in 1955 and the Order of the Badge of Honor in 1967.