Nikolai Myaskovsky (1881-1950)

Nikolai Yakovlevich Myaskovsky was born in the military frontier town of Novo Georgiyevsk (present day Lomze), near Warsaw, Poland on 20th April 1881. He was the son of an engineer officer in the Russian army. After the death of his mother in 1890 the family was brought up by his father's sister, Yelikonida Konstantinovna Myaskovskaya, who had been a singer at the Saint Petersburg Opera.

Though Myaskovsky learned piano and violin he was discouraged from a musical career, and in 1891 he was enrolled in a Cadet College, the beginning of a military engineering career. He took some private music lessons with Reinhold Glière and when he was posted to St Petersburg he studied with Ivan Krizhanovsky as preparation for entry into the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, where he enrolled in 1906 and became a student of Lyadov and Rimsky-Korsakov. Myaskovsky was the oldest student in his class but soon became firm friends with the youngest, Sergei Prokofiev, and they remained friends throughout their lives.  In the winter of 1908, he began writing his First Symphony, and he quickly determined that composition was his main focus at the Conservatory.

He was called back into the army during World War I, was wounded and suffered shell-shock on the Austrian front, then he worked on the naval fortifications at Talinn. Myaskovsky returned to St. Petersburg in early 1918 for convalescence, nevertheless he wrote his fourth symphony while recovering, and after the navy transferred him to Moscow in 1919 he wrote the fifth symphony.

By the 1920s and 30s Myaskovsky was the leading composer in the USSR dedicated to developing basically traditional, sonata-based forms. He wrote a total of 27 symphonies (plus three sinfoniettas, three concertos and works in other orchestral genres), 13 string quartets, 9 piano sonatas as well as many miniatures and vocal works. Through his devotion to these forms, and the fact that he always maintained a high standard of craftsmanship, he was sometimes referred to as 'the musical conscience of Moscow'.