Sergey Lyapunov
Sergey Lyapunov was a Russian composer, pianist, conductor and music teacher. He was born in Yaroslavl on 18/30 November 1859 and died in Paris on 8 November 1924. After his father, an astronomer, died in 1868, Lyapunov moved with his mother and two brothers to Nizhny Novgorod, where he attended school. Although he was interested in music from childhood, he began formal study after a branch of the Russian Musical Society opened there in 1874.
In 1878, on Nikolai Rubinstein’s recommendation, Lyapunov entered the Moscow Conservatory, studying piano with Karl Klindworth and composition with Sergei Taneyev. After graduating in 1883, he met Mily Balakirev, who encouraged him to move to St. Petersburg. With Balakirev’s guidance, Lyapunov wrote his first major works and became associated with the Mighty Handful.
From 1894 to 1902, he was assistant director of the Court Chapel. He was elected director of the Free Music School in 1908 and served as a professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory from 1910 to 1923. In 1923, he moved to Paris, where he led a music school for Russian émigrés and worked as a conductor.
Lyapunov is associated with late Russian Romanticism. His early works show Balakirev’s influence, while his later music developed a distinctive style that often drew on folk music. A highly accomplished pianist, he wrote demanding piano music, including two piano concertos and Twelve Études of the Highest Mastery, dedicated to the memory of Franz Liszt. His other works include two symphonies, a violin concerto, a rhapsody on Ukrainian themes, and arrangements of sixty Russian folk songs. In 1910, he recorded several of his own compositions on a Welte-Mignon player piano.