Semyon Bogatyrev

Semyon Semyonovich Bogatyrev was a Soviet musicologist, composer, Doctor of Art Studies, professor, and pro-rector. He was honored as a Merited Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1946. His career combined scholarship, composition, and pedagogy, and he became especially known for his work in the theory of counterpoint and for his reconstruction of Pyotr Tchaikovsky's Symphony in E-flat major.

From 1907 to 1912 he studied law at the Faculty of Law of Kharkiv University. He then continued his musical education at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, where he studied with Jazeps Vitols, Vasily Kalafati, and Maximilian Steinberg. After graduating from the conservatory in 1915, he worked there as a teacher of music theory.

Afterward Bogatyrev worked at the Kharkiv Conservatory until 1941, with an interruption from 1919 to 1922. From May to October 1941 he served as rector. During the war he worked at the Kyiv Conservatory, from which he was evacuated to Sverdlovsk. From 1943 he was a professor of composition and counterpoint and also pro-rector of the Moscow Conservatory.

In 1947 he received the degree of Doctor of Art Studies for a dissertation on the double canon. His scholarly interests were connected with the theory of counterpoint, in which he followed Sergei Taneyev in the idea of a mathematical foundation for contrapuntal combinations. In his large-scale study Invertible Counterpoint (Moscow, 1960), Bogatyrev examined inversion and reversal in counterpoint, as well as partly its retrograde form, areas that had previously been scarcely studied. The work proposed ways of solving contrapuntal problems in modern European music, although Bogatyrev himself did not feel much sympathy for that music, even while actively studying the works of Arnold Schoenberg and Paul Hindemith.

As a composer, Bogatyrev's style was close to late nineteenth-century Russian academicism. He wrote symphonic and chamber works, including the orchestral pieces Overture-Ballad (1926) and Scherzo-Overture (1927), two string quartets (1916, 1924), a suite for string quartet (1955), two piano sonatas (1913, 1925), as well as songs and choral compositions. He is best known, however, for reconstructing Tchaikovsky's Symphony in E-flat major between 1951 and 1955. Bogatyrev's reconstruction became widely known and was performed by major Russian and foreign conductors.

Bogatyrev was also an influential teacher whose exact number of students is impossible to determine. Many musicians who studied with him in the 1920s and 1930s later carried out major creative and administrative work, especially in Ukraine, since more than two decades of his teaching activity were connected with that Soviet republic. Among his students were composers, musicologists, and conductors, and six of them later received state prizes.

He was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor on December 28, 1946. After his death he was buried at Vagankovo Cemetery in Moscow.

Connections

This figure has 2 connections in the Music Lineage catalog.