Kirill Molchanov was a Soviet composer. He was born on September 7, 1922, in Moscow, in a musical family, and was later awarded the title Honored Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1963.
In 1949 he graduated from the Moscow Conservatory named after Pyotr Tchaikovsky, where he studied composition in the class of Anatoly Alexandrov. From 1951 to 1956 he served as secretary of the board of the Union of Composers of the USSR. From 1973 to 1975 he was director of the Bolshoi Theatre.
Molchanov worked primarily in opera, while also composing musicals, cantata-poems, piano works, vocal cycles, ballet music, incidental music for dramatic productions, and film scores. His operas include The Stone Flower (1950), Dawn (1956), Via del Corno (1960), Romeo, Juliet and Darkness (1963), The Unknown Soldier (1967), Russian Woman (1969), and The Dawns Here Are Quiet (1973). He also wrote the musical Odysseus, Penelope and Others (1970).
Among his other concert works were the cantata-poem Song of Friendship (1954), the piano cycle Russian Pictures (1953), and a number of works for voice and piano, including cycles on texts by Nicolás Guillén, Langston Hughes, Soviet poets, Federico García Lorca, Sergei Yesenin, and Francesco Petrarch, as well as collections such as Songs of Hiroshima, Black Casket, Love, and Miniatures.
Molchanov also became known for many popular songs and for music written for dramatic theatre and cinema. He composed music for more than thirty stage productions, including Mary Stuart, Three Fat Men, and Colas Breugnon at the Moscow Art Theatre. His film work included scores for It Happened in Penkovo, Alyonka, At Seven Winds, We'll Live Till Monday, The Dawns Here Are Quiet, My Destiny, Young Russia, and other films released between 1955 and 1982.
He also wrote ballets including Macbeth (1980), Three Cards, and Angara. Molchanov died in Moscow on March 14, 1982, of a heart attack, and was buried at Kuntsevo Cemetery. Since 2011, a children's music school in Moscow has borne his name.
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