Yevgenia Gnesina

Yevgenia Fabianovna Savina-Gnesina was a Russian pianist, music teacher, and musical public figure. She was born in Rostov-on-Don in the Russian Empire on 11 March 1870, although different documents give varying birth dates from 1866 to 1871, with 1869 or 1870 considered the most likely. She was one of the Gnesin sisters.

She was born into the family of the city state rabbi, Fabian Osipovich Gnesin, a native of Ivenets and a graduate of the Vilnius Rabbinical School. Her mother, Beila Isaevna Fleitzinger-Gnesina, was a singer and a pupil of Stanislaw Moniuszko. When Yevgenia turned fourteen, her parents sent her to enter the Moscow Conservatory.

Gnesina graduated in 1889 from the piano department of the conservatory, completing the pedagogical course in the class of Vasily Safonov. She also studied composition with Anton Arensky and Sergei Taneyev. Upon graduation she was awarded a small silver medal.

From 1889 to 1891 she taught musical subjects at the school of the Society of Friends of Literature and Art, where the young merchant's son Konstantin Alekseyev, later known as Konstantin Stanislavsky, staged his performances. In 1895, together with her sisters Elena and Maria, she founded the Music School of the E. and M. Gnesin Sisters, which later developed into a three-stage educational system of school, college, and institute.

At the school, Gnesina taught piano, children's solfeggio, elementary music theory, and a children's choir, the latter for the first time in Moscow's musical educational institutions. She headed the piano department and, together with her sister Elena Fabianovna, provided the school's general artistic direction. In 1911 she mounted the first production of Alexander Grechaninov's children's opera The Fir Tree's Dream. Later, productions of operas performed by children and adult students under her direction continued.

In 1901 she married Alexander Nikolaevich Savin, a historian, professor at Moscow State University, and major specialist in the history of England. Savina-Gnesina received the title Honored Artist of the Republic in 1925 and Honored Art Worker of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1935. She died in Moscow in the Soviet Union on 6 April 1940 and was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery.