Paul Juon

Paul Juon (Paul Juon; 1872-1940) was a Russian-German composer, a follower of Johannes Brahms, a representative of the post-romantic trend in chamber music of the Belle Époque, as well as a music pedagogue and translator. He was a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts from 1919 and the elder brother of the painter Konstantin Yuon.

He was born on 6 March 1872 in Moscow in the family of an insurance company employee. His grandfather, a baker, had moved to Russia from the Swiss village of Masein. According to Juon's own recollections, his mother was fond of art, sang a little, and made music. Owing to his German-Swiss background, he received his secondary education at a German school.

Juon studied at the Moscow Conservatory with Ivan Grzhimali in violin and with Anton Arensky and Sergei Taneyev in composition. He then continued his training as a composer in Berlin under Woldemar Bargiel. In 1896-1897 he taught music theory and violin at the Baku Conservatory.

After that he returned to Berlin, where he lived and worked from 1898 to 1934. In 1906 he succeeded Joseph Joachim as professor of composition at the Berlin Higher School of Music. His students included Stefan Wolpe, Heinrich Kaminski, Philipp Jarnach, and Serge Kagen. After the October Revolution of 1917, he did not return to Russia.

In 1934 Juon emigrated from Nazi Germany to Switzerland. He died on 21 August 1940 in Vevey. In 1998 the International Juon Society was founded in Zurich to study and promote his work.

Juon's compositional legacy includes the opera Aleko (1896), four symphonies, three violin concertos, a triple concerto for piano, violin and cello with orchestra, and a wide range of ensemble, chamber, theatrical music and songs, amounting to about 90 works in total. He also made various arrangements and transcriptions, mainly for piano, and translated into German the harmony textbooks of Arensky and Pyotr Tchaikovsky, as well as Modest Tchaikovsky's essay on the life and work of Pyotr Tchaikovsky. He also compiled the German-language textbook Praktische Harmonielehre in two parts and a collection of exercises for Tchaikovsky's textbook.

Connections

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