Anton Stepanovich Arensky was born on 12 July 1861 in Novgorod, into an affluent musical household — his father a doctor and amateur cellist, his mother a pianist — and was writing songs and piano pieces by nine. The family moved to Saint Petersburg in 1879, where he studied privately with Karl Zikke and then entered the conservatory, taking composition and theory with Rimsky-Korsakov and graduating in 1882 with a gold medal. He was immediately appointed to the Moscow Conservatory to teach harmony, counterpoint and composition, and there came into the orbit of Tchaikovsky and Taneyev. On Balakirev’s recommendation he returned to Saint Petersburg in 1895 as director of the Imperial Chapel Choir, holding the post until 1901 and then living on the pension. He died of tuberculosis at Perkjärvi in Finland on 25 February 1906, at forty-four, and was buried in the Tikhvin Cemetery.

His pupils in Moscow included Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Glière, Goldenweiser, Igumnov, Konyus and Koreshchenko. His own catalogue runs to three operas, a ballet, two symphonies, concertos, orchestral suites, chamber works, choral music, songs and more than a hundred piano pieces. The Variations on a Theme by Tchaikovsky, Op. 35a, began as the slow movement of the Second String Quartet, written in 1894 in Tchaikovsky’s memory on a theme from his Sixteen Songs for Children, and was arranged separately for string orchestra once it proved popular. Rimsky-Korsakov’s verdict — that Arensky had first taken his influence, then Tchaikovsky’s, and “will quickly be forgotten” — did much to keep the rest of the catalogue out of view, though the chamber music has held its place.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Arensky
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q313970