Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov

Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov was born in 1859 in Gatchina, a town south of St Petersburg with a royal palace. His name then was simply Mikhail Ivanov. His grandfather and his father ran the workshop that kept the palace equipment in order. The first music that shook him was a march by Beethoven, played by a mechanical organ in the palace. At nine he was sent to St Petersburg to live with his married elder sister. From the age of ten, he wrote later, all his thoughts were on conducting.

His sister's husband, a man called Ippolitov, loved music and held musical evenings at home. One evening the soprano who was to sing in a quartet from Glinka's opera A Life for the Tsar did not come. The ten-year-old Mikhail sang her part himself, and the guests saw that he had to be a musician. They helped him into the choir school of St Isaac's Cathedral, and at 15 he entered the St Petersburg Conservatory. In his final two years there he learned the Russian style of composing from Rimsky-Korsakov. In 1881, at 21, he put the name Ippolitov in front of his own. There was already a composer called Mikhail Ivanov in St Petersburg, and he wanted to thank the man who had made him a musician.

In 1882, at 22, just after finishing the Conservatory, he went to Tiflis, now Tbilisi in Georgia, to start a music school for the Russian Musical Society. There was almost nothing there. He built a school, an orchestra and a choir, gave the city its first real symphony concerts, and from 1884 conducted the opera, where he replaced the Italian operas the rich liked with Russian ones. He wrote later that for his first six years there his day ran like this: school from nine to eleven, rehearsal in the theatre until three, lessons again at five, and the performance at seven. In 1883 he married Varvara Zarudnaya, a soprano who had finished the Conservatory with him. She sang in his operas and taught singing in his school. That same year he went into the Georgian villages and wrote down their folk songs. They were busy but satisfying years. He later called the Caucasus his beloved land, and he used its music for the rest of his life.

In 1885 he staged Tchaikovsky's opera Mazepa in the Tiflis theatre with his small company. Tchaikovsky, who was 19 years older and the most famous composer in Russia, wrote to thank him. The next spring he came to Tiflis for a month. In his diary he wrote that he went to Ippolitov-Ivanov's house almost every evening. There he listened to Ippolitov-Ivanov's new songs, and Varvara sang for him. Ippolitov-Ivanov conducted a whole concert of Tchaikovsky's music in his honour, and Tchaikovsky wrote afterwards that the month in Tiflis was among the brightest memories of his life.

They had no children of their own. It is said that one night Varvara came home from the theatre, where she had sung Tatyana in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, and found a baby girl in a basket on the doorstep. They kept her and named her Tatyana, after the opera.

After eleven years in Tiflis he felt cut off from the musical world. It was Tchaikovsky who suggested that he come to the Moscow Conservatory, and in 1893, at 33, both he and Varvara were made professors there. Tchaikovsky died a few weeks after they arrived in Moscow, so the two friends had almost no time together there. The next year Ippolitov-Ivanov finished his Caucasian Sketches, a set of orchestral pieces on Georgian and Armenian tunes, and his best-known work.

In 1905 revolution broke out in Russia, and the Moscow Conservatory fell into disorder. Its director left, and for the first time the professors chose their own head. In March 1906 a group of them came to the opera house where Ippolitov-Ivanov was rehearsing and told him, in the middle of the rehearsal, that they had elected him. He was 46. He did not want to leave the opera house, which he loved, but he accepted, and he led the Conservatory for sixteen years, through the war and the revolution of 1917.

After he stepped down as head of the Conservatory in 1922, at 62, his busy life went on. He went back to Tiflis for half a year to reorganise the Georgian conservatory, formerly the music school he had founded there. Then the Bolshoi Theatre asked him to conduct, an offer, he wrote, of which he had dreamed since his youth. He sat for days as a judge at a competition for factory workers who played the accordion, and sent them home encouraged. In 1928, at 68, he set five old Japanese poems in new Russian translations, among them No. 2, Five Japanese Poems and No. 5, Five Japanese Poems. In 1934 he published his memoirs, Fifty Years of Russian Music, and dedicated them to Varvara, "with whom all this was lived through and felt."

After 70 he was often ill in bed, but he kept writing to the end. He died in his sleep at home in Moscow on 28 January 1935, at 75. On his desk lay a children's opera, half finished.

Ippolitov-Ivanov was a solid, broad man with a big dark beard and a calm look. People who worked with him remembered that he never raised his voice, and that he liked to say, "If you love music, love the musician too." He built the first music school in the Caucasus and kept the Moscow Conservatory alive through two revolutions. His own music joins the Russian style he learned from Rimsky-Korsakov with the folk tunes of Georgia and the lands around it. Near the end of his memoirs he wrote that his whole life had been one long hymn to work.