Biography (read more)
Sergei Mikhailovich Lyapunov was born in Yaroslavl on 30 November 1859. His father died when he was about eight, and his mother took him and his two brothers — one of them the future mathematician Aleksandr Lyapunov — to Nizhny Novgorod, where he attended the grammar school and the classes of the new local branch of the Russian Musical Society. On Nikolai Rubinstein’s recommendation he entered the Moscow Conservatory in 1878, studying piano with Karl Klindworth, a former pupil of Liszt, and composition with Taneyev. He graduated in 1883 drawn more to the nationalism of the New Russian School than to Tchaikovsky’s and Taneyev’s cosmopolitanism, and in 1885 went to Saint Petersburg to find Balakirev, who like him had grown up in Nizhny Novgorod, took him in hand, and oversaw his early work as closely as he had once overseen The Five. He emigrated to Paris in 1923 and died of a heart attack there on 8 November 1924.
Balakirev remained the dominant influence on his music. In 1893 the Imperial Geographical Society commissioned him, with Balakirev and Lyadov, to collect folk songs in the Vologda, Vyatka and Kostroma regions; they gathered nearly three hundred, published in 1897, and he arranged thirty for voice and piano and drew on authentic material in his own works of that decade. He conducted from 1904, appearing in Berlin and Leipzig in 1907, toured Germany and Austria in 1910–11, and recorded several of his own pieces for the Welte-Mignon reproducing piano in the spring of 1910. He succeeded Rimsky-Korsakov as assistant director of music at the Imperial Chapel, headed the Free Music School, and became a professor at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1911. For many years the Soviet account held that he had died on a concert tour of Paris, with no mention of his emigration.
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