Georgy Catoire

Georgy Catoire was a Russian music theorist and composer of French origin. He was born in Moscow on 27 April 1861 into the prominent Catoire family of the French colony in Moscow, whose ancestors had moved to Russia from Lorraine at the beginning of the 19th century. His father, Lev Ivanovich Catoire, was a major merchant and public figure, and the family belonged to the most respected members of the local French Catholic community. Catoire showed an early interest in music, with his first attempts at composition dating from the age of six.

In 1871 he entered Kreyman's Gymnasium. As a young man he studied piano with Karl Klindworth, who was living in Moscow and was a friend of Wagner; in 1879 Catoire joined the Wagner Society. In 1884 he graduated from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Moscow University. He tried for a time to take part in the family business, but his interest in music prevailed, and he left for Berlin to continue his studies with Klindworth. At the Klindworth and Scharwenka Conservatory he also studied with Philipp Rüfer.

During one of his visits to Moscow in 1886, Catoire was introduced to Pyotr Tchaikovsky, who valued his abilities highly. In Moscow he also associated with Sergey Taneyev, Anton Arensky, Nikolai Medtner, Lev Conus, and Georgy Conus. On Tchaikovsky's recommendation, Catoire went to Saint Petersburg in 1888 to see Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who then directed him to Anatoly Lyadov. Contact with these two composers completed his compositional education.

From 1917 to 1926 Catoire was a professor at the Moscow Conservatory, where he taught a special course in harmony, musical form, and composition. Among his students were Dmitry Kabalevsky, Leonid Polovinkin, Dmitry Tsyganov, Sergei Evseyev, Lev Mazel, and Lev Ginzburg. Memoirs by Alexander Goldenweiser describe him as a man of rare charm, refined culture, and exceptional modesty, who felt his lack of recognition painfully and at times suffered from severe nervous strain that made work and even leaving home difficult. On 25 October 1919 he was arrested, but in November of the same year he was released on surety arranged through the legal department of the Moscow Political Red Cross and the rector of the Conservatory.

Catoire's principal compositions include a Symphony in C minor, the symphonic poem Mtsyri, the cantata Rusalka for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, a piano trio, and many songs on poems by Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Tyutchev, Aleksey K. Tolstoy, Apukhtin, Vladimir Solovyov, and Konstantin Balmont. His catalogue also includes chamber works, a piano concerto, piano pieces, violin sonatas, a string quartet, and a piano quartet. His music was performed by such musicians as David Oistrakh, Alexander Goldenweiser, Mark-André Hamelin, Anna Zassimova, Leonid Kogan, and Mstislav Rostropovich.

An important result of Catoire's teaching and scholarly work was his book Theoretical Course of Harmony, published in two parts in 1924 and 1925. It was the first attempt in the history of Russian musicology to provide a theoretical understanding of harmony on the basis of Hugo Riemann's functional theory and François-Auguste Gevaert's teachings on harmony. Among the innovations associated with the book are his development of the concept of modulation by deviation, his distinction between chromatic intervals "by position" and "by essence," a systematic Russian-language survey of non-chord tones, and discussion of ultrachromatic intervals and chords. His textbook Musical Form, edited by his students and published posthumously in 1934 and 1936, also became an important milestone in the study of form.

Catoire died in Moscow on 21 May 1926 and was buried at Vvedenskoye Cemetery. He left a legacy both as a composer and as a foundational teacher and theorist at the Moscow Conservatory, where his influence continued through his students and through his writings on harmony and form.

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