Sergei Wolfenzon was a Soviet musician, composer, and teacher. He was born in Odessa on July 13 (Old Style), or July 26, 1903, and died on May 16, 1992.
He studied at the Odessa Conservatory from 1921 to 1924 with V. A. Lintvareva, then studied composition at the Leningrad Music College with Joseph Schillinger and Vladimir Karatygin in 1925–1926. He graduated from the Leningrad Conservatory in 1931, where Maximilian Steinberg was his teacher.
Wolfenzon taught composition and music theory at a music school from 1927 to 1941, and at a music college from 1937. In 1942–1944, he organized and led a music lecture program, where he also lectured and performed as a pianist, first in Gorno-Altaysk and later in Leningrad. From 1945 into the 1970s, he taught at the ten-year music school attached to the Leningrad Conservatory. He organized Music Weeks for Children and Youth through the Leningrad Composers' Union and joined the USSR Composers' Union in 1933. His students included Andrei Petrov, Valery Gavrilin, Sergei Slonimsky, Gennady Banshchikov, Vladimir Tsytovich, and Pavel Kantorov.
His works include symphonic, instrumental, chamber, vocal, and choral music, as well as music for children and the theater. Among them are a symphony, a piano concerto, a string quartet in memory of Dmitri Shostakovich, a fantasy on Ukrainian themes, a suite for two pianos, and the vocal cycle Book of Trains, to words by Gianni Rodari in Samuil Marshak's translation. He also wrote songs and romances setting poems by Alexander Pushkin, Robert Burns, Heinrich Heine, Alexander Prokofiev, Alexander Blok, and Anna Akhmatova.
His wife, Natalia Polonskaya, was an operatic soprano who sang at the Maly Theatre.