Yulia Weisberg

Yulia Weisberg, later known by marriage as Rimsky-Korsakova, was a Russian composer, musicologist, and translator. She was born in Orenburg on January 6, 1880. She came from the family of lawyer Lazar Weisberg, a titular councillor and member of the Orenburg Chamber of Criminal and Civil Court, and Maria Weisberg.

In 1903 she graduated from the Higher Women's Courses in St. Petersburg. From the same year she studied composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov, and in 1912 she completed the conservatory as an external student. Between 1907 and 1912 she lived in Germany, in Leipzig and Dresden, where she studied with Max Reger and Engelbert Humperdinck.

Weisberg began composing in 1908, and her last opus is dated 1941. Her output included songs, orchestral works, operas, children's operas, chamber pieces, and vocal-orchestral compositions. Among her better documented works are the symphonic fantasy-cantata The Twelve after Alexander Blok, the opera The Little Mermaid, the children's opera The Geese-Swans, the lyric-comic opera Gulnara, the orchestral piece At Night, and numerous vocal cycles and children's songs. She also arranged Moldavian folk songs.

Alongside composition, she was active in music journalism and scholarship. In 1915-1917 she took part in editing and publishing the journal Musical Contemporary. She was a contributor to the journal Musical Newness in 1923-1924, published music criticism in Russian Rumor, and from 1925 wrote journalism and memoirs about the musical life of St. Petersburg in Life of Art and other periodicals. She also translated prose and poetry from German, French, Yiddish, and Romanian, and translated musicological works by Romain Rolland into Russian.

In 1921-1923 Weisberg taught choral singing at a music school for working youth. From 1925 to 1928 she headed the Leningrad Association for Contemporary Music. She also worked in the leadership and artistic council of the Circle of Friends of Chamber Music. She participated in the first concert of the association on May 12, 1926, in the Grand Hall of the Philharmonic, where her symphonic fantasy-cantata The Twelve was performed alongside Dmitri Shostakovich's First Symphony.

Her personal life included three marriages: first to Grigory Landau, then from 1907 to the pianist and music theorist Leonid Kreutzer, and from 1914 to the musicologist Andrei Rimsky-Korsakov, son of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. She had sons Viktor Kreutzer, later a scientist in television technology, and Vsevolod Rimsky-Korsakov, a philology graduate and translator of poetry and drama.

During the Siege of Leningrad she was in a depressed state and underwent treatment in a psychiatric hospital. She died in Leningrad on March 1, 1942, killed together with her son Vsevolod during an artillery bombardment of the city.

Connections

This figure has 1 connection in the Music Lineage catalog.