Mark Minkov was a Soviet and Russian composer, film composer, and theatre composer. Born in Moscow on 25 November 1944, he wrote songs, romances, operas, ballets, musicals, oratorios, piano concertos, string concertos, and music for stage and screen productions.
Minkov grew up in the family of Anatoly (Tevel) Minkov and Faina Ligorner, a German-language teacher. He loved singing from early childhood, and his grandmother initially guided his musical education. At about five he received a piano and began composing without knowing musical notation, devising his own symbols to write down music. After leaving his first music school, he studied privately and then entered the third year of the music school attached to the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied composition with Alexander Pirumov and later Nikolai Sidelnikov.
In 1960 he enrolled at the conservatory music college while continuing to study with Sidelnikov. After graduating in 1964, he entered the Moscow Conservatory in Aram Khachaturian's class. During his first two years there, he composed vocal cycles on poems by Robert Burns and Alexander Blok. His six-romance Blok cycle The Fairground Booth later became part of the required repertoire in Glinka competitions, while its romance “Willow Branches” was performed in concert by Ivan Kozlovsky and was later adapted into a popular song by Kristina Orbakaite.
After graduating from the conservatory in 1969, Minkov joined the Union of Composers the following year. In 1970 he was invited to write music for the serial television film Investigation Led by Experts. Its principal theme, with lyrics by Anatoly Gorokhov, became widely popular. Minkov ultimately composed music for more than sixty films and television films, including In the Special Attention Zone, Dunno from Our Yard, The Adventures of Little Muck, and the animated film At the Port.
In the early 1970s, Minkov wrote the vocal cycle The Guitar's Lament to poems by Federico García Lorca, performed by Zara Dolukhanova; it was included in the required repertoire for singers at several Tchaikovsky competitions. For Natalia Sats's theatre he composed the children's New Year opera Magic Music, or Let Us Make an Opera (1974), which enjoyed a long stage life, received the Grand Prix at the Hamburg Festival of Musical Theatres in 1982, and later toured the United States. In 1975 he wrote the oratorio The Bell.
His theatre and popular-song work included music for the Pushkin Theatre production Men, Wear Men's Hats, from which came “They Do Not Renounce Love,” a song to poems by Veronika Tushnova that became popular in Alla Pugacheva's performance. Pugacheva also performed Minkov songs including “These Summer Rains,” “You Exist in This World,” “Monologue,” “On the Road of Expectation,” and “And You Know, Everything Is Still to Come.” Other notable songs included “If There Had Been No War,” performed popularly by Valentina Tolkunova, and songs written for Tolkunova such as “Wooden Horses” and “Where Are You, Melodious Accordion?”
Minkov also composed the musicals Robin Hood (1980), Mustafa (1983), and the popular 1985 musical Deadly Encounter. His ballet The Robbers, based on Friedrich Schiller's play, was completed in 1982 and staged at the Leningrad Small Opera Theatre by Nikolai Boyarchikov. In the late 1980s he wrote another opera for Natalia Sats's theatre, I Will Not Ask Forgiveness. His 1992 opera The White Guard, created with poet Yuri Rybchinsky, was not staged.
He later collaborated with the Anton Chekhov Theatre, composing music for Leonid Trushkin's productions A Pose for an Emigrant, Dinner with a Fool, Rascals, or Kean IV, Mixed Feelings, and A Carrot for the Emperor. His final film-composer projects were The Domino Effect and Delusion. A laureate of All-Union and international composers' competitions, he served as president of the Guild of Film Composers, was a full member of the Nika Russian Film Academy, and received the title Honored Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1989 and People's Artist of the Russian Federation in 2003.
Minkov died of a heart attack at his country house in Moscow Oblast on 29 May 2012. Following cremation, he was buried at Vostryakovskoye Cemetery in Moscow.