Mikael Tariverdiev
Mikael Tariverdiev was a Soviet and Russian composer and film composer of Armenian origin. He was born on 15 August 1931 in Tbilisi and died in Sochi on 25 July 1996. He became especially known for his music for the films Seventeen Moments of Spring and The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath!.
Tariverdiev was the only child in an Armenian family. He attended Tbilisi Secondary School No. 43, studied piano at the ten-year music school affiliated with the Tbilisi Conservatory, and studied composition at the Tbilisi Music College with Professor Shalva Mshvelidze. At his mother's insistence, he then spent a year and a half at the Yerevan Conservatory, where he learned Armenian. From 1953 to 1957 he studied composition with Aram Khachaturian at the Gnesin State Musical-Pedagogical Institute in Moscow.
His debut as a composer came in Moscow, where the singer Zara Dolukhanova performed his romances. He entered cinema in 1958 with The Youth of Our Fathers. Tariverdiev regarded his score for Mikhail Kalik's A Man Follows the Sun (1961) as his first mature work and the point at which he found his distinctive style.
He wrote music for 132 films and more than 100 songs and romances. His screen scores also included My Younger Brother, Farewell, Boys!, The Deer King, To Love, Old-Fashioned Comedy, and Adam Marries Eve. In the 1970s he also appeared on television as a vocalist, performing some of his own songs. For several years he worked as a composer and music teacher with the Meridian Trio from Ivanovo.
Tariverdiev's output extended far beyond film. It included operas such as Who Are You?, Count Cagliostro, Expectation, and The Marriage of Figarenko; ballets including Guernica and The Girl and Death; vocal cycles to poems by Leonid Martynov, Andrei Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina, Marina Tsvetaeva, and other named poets; piano music; and concert works. In his later years he devoted much attention to instrumental music, writing three organ concertos, the organ symphony Chernobyl, two violin concertos, and a Concerto in Romantic Style for Viola and String Orchestra, commissioned by Yuri Bashmet.
He received the USSR State Prize in 1977 for the music to The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath!, becoming the first Soviet composer to receive the prize for film music. He was named People's Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1986 and received three Nika awards for the scores to The Endhouse Mystery, Russian Ragtime, and Summer People. From 1993 to 1996 he served as artistic director and chaired the expert council of the international charitable programme New Names; he was also the founding president of the Film Composers Guild of the Russian Cinematographers' Union.
In 1990, Tariverdiev underwent surgery in London to receive an artificial aortic valve. He died of an acute heart attack in a Sochi sanatorium six years later, during a holiday with his wife. He was buried beside his parents at the Armenian Cemetery in Moscow. His name is carried by the Mikael Tariverdiev International Organ Competition, held in Kaliningrad every two years since 1999, and by the award for best music at the Kinotavr festival.