Lev Knipper (full name Lev Konstantinovich Knipper; 3 December 1898 – 30 July 1974) was a Soviet composer and pianist. He was born in Tiflis, now Tbilisi, into the family of a railway engineer. He was the nephew of actress Olga Knipper-Chekhova and tenor Vladimir Nardov, and the brother of the German actress Olga Chekhova.
Knipper had been living in Moscow from 1922 and joined the Association for Contemporary Music in 1923. He continued his musical education in Berlin in the early 1920s. From 1933 he also appeared as a conductor, and from 1936 he headed the musical department of the Theatre of the Peoples of the East.
His output included more than twenty symphonies, operas, ballets, orchestral suites, concertos, chamber music, songs, and music for films and theatrical productions. His Fourth Symphony, Poem of a Komsomol Fighter (1933–34), incorporated his best-known song, Meadowland. His operas included North Wind (1930), On Lake Baikal (1948), and The Little Prince (1965); he wrote the ballet Beauty Angara with Baw Yampilov, first staged in 1959. He also composed music for Alexander Tairov’s production of An Optimistic Tragedy at the Chamber Theatre.
Knipper studied folk music in Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, recording approximately 150 Tajik songs as well as Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Kurdish, Assyrian, and Buryat melodies. He received two second-class Stalin Prizes, in 1946 for his Serenade for String Orchestra and in 1949 for the orchestral suite Soldiers’ Songs, as well as the Mikhail Glinka State Prize of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1972. He was named People’s Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1974. Knipper died in Moscow and was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery.