German Galynin was a Soviet composer. The peak of his creative work came in the second half of the 1940s and the beginning of the 1950s.
He was born in Tula into a worker's family. He lost his parents early, spent some time homeless, and from 1934 was brought up in an orphanage in Tula. There he learned to play several folk instruments and the piano. In the summer of 1937, the orphanage orchestra's musical director, Ivan Maltsev, took him to an audition at the music school attached to the Moscow Conservatory. Most members of the panel did not appreciate the boy's abilities, but Professor Igor Sposobin recognized his musical talent and recommended that he be admitted to the preparatory department. After a year there, Galynin entered the music school attached to the Moscow Conservatory in 1938, studying with Sposobin and Georgy Litinsky.
In 1941, already a student of the Moscow Conservatory, he volunteered for the army. There he directed amateur artistic activities, wrote mass songs, and composed music for dramatic productions. In 1944 he resumed his studies at the conservatory and graduated in 1950 from the composition class of Nikolai Myaskovsky; during Myaskovsky's illness he also studied with Dmitri Shostakovich.
According to the recollections of Rudolf Barshai, Galynin arrived to study at the conservatory straight from the front after demobilization, wearing soldier's leg wrappings and an army greatcoat, and soon the conservatory regarded him as a new genius. Barshai also remembered him as an outstanding pianist whose compositions left no one indifferent. At one time they lived together in a dormitory near Riga Rail Terminal in Moscow and played Haydn trios in the evenings for fellow students who gathered outside the room to listen.
After the 1948 party resolution concerning the opera The Great Friendship, Tikhon Khrennikov criticized Galynin's First Piano Concerto, although he later, in 1957, withdrew that judgment. Despite this criticism, Galynin received the Stalin Prize in 1951 for his Epic Poem on Russian Themes for orchestra. In the same year he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and because of his illness his creative activity steadily declined in the years that followed. Even so, by the end of the 1950s his music had secured a firm place in the repertoire of leading Soviet performers, including the conductors Alexander Gauk, Yevgeny Svetlanov, Rudolf Barshai, and Gennady Rozhdestvensky, the pianists Anatoly Vedernikov, Yevgeny Malinin, and Dmitri Bashkirov, while the Borodin Quartet actively performed and recorded his chamber music.
His last composition was Scherzo for Violin and String Orchestra, written in 1966. Among his principal works are Piano Concerto No. 1, String Quartet No. 1, Piano Trio, Suite for String Orchestra, Epic Poem on Russian Themes, the oratorio The Girl and Death, String Quartet No. 2, Aria for Violin and String Orchestra, three piano sonatas, and Piano Concerto No. 2, as well as music for the dramatic theater.
Galynin's work is regarded in the article as a significant yet still underestimated phenomenon in Soviet music. His early works are noted for the careful shaping of musical language and form, while his style and compositional technique show him as an heir to the Russian classical school, largely indifferent to Western avant-garde trends such as twelve-tone technique, serialism, and atonality. His later music shows a stronger tendency toward dissonance and darker moods, apparently connected with his mental condition. He is also remembered in the system of children's music schools in Russia and other former Soviet countries for his short and accessible piano pieces for beginners.
He died in Moscow and was buried at Vagankovo Cemetery. During his lifetime and posthumously his music continued to be recognized: he received the second-class Stalin Prize in 1951, and in 1968 he was awarded the Mikhail Glinka State Prize of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic posthumously. His name was also given to a children's school of arts in Tula, and a memorial plaque was installed on the building of his former orphanage there.