MYASKOVSKY Life&times

1906

LIFE: He enters the St Petersburg Conservatory, where he studies composition with Lyadov and orchestration with Rimsky-korsakov, and befriends the young Prokofiev.

TIMES: Finland, an autonomous principality of the Russian Empire, is the world’s second country to introduce universal suffrage. The following year, 19 women are elected to parliament.

1941

LIFE: He wins the Stalin Prize for his Symphony No. 21. He goes on to win the prize on four further occasions over the next decade, more than any other Soviet composer.

TIMES: As horses struggle in Arctic conditions on the Karelian Front, three deer transportation units, each numbering 1,000 animals, are formed to assist the

14th Soviet Army against the invading Axis forces.

1881

LIFE: Nikolai Myaskovsky is born in the fortress town of Novo-georgiyevsk (now Modlin, Poland), where his father is a military engineer. He learns the piano, but follows his father into the military. TIMES: Alexander II of Russia is assassinated when a terrorist, Ignacy Hryniewiecki, throws a bomb at him near his palace in St Petersburg.

1918

LIFE: While waiting for a train, his father is attacked and brutally ripped apart by a revolutionary mob, an event that Myaskovsky later alludes to in his Symphony No. 6.

TIMES: To commemorate the first anniversary of the October Revolution, a statue of Robespierre is unveiled in central Moscow. Within a few days, however, it collapses.

1936

LIFE: Said to have been inspired by the crash of the Tupolev ANT20 ‘Maksim Gorky’ plane, his Symphony No. 16 is premiered. Nicknamed the ‘Aviation’ Symphony, it quotes his own song ‘The Aeroplanes are Flying’. TIMES: In the first of the ‘Moscow Trials’, former Communist party leaders including Zinoviev and Kamenev confess to plotting to kill Stalin and are sentenced to death.

1950

LIFE: Suffering from cancer, he dies in Moscow aged 69, leaving several works unfinished. His 27th Symphony and String Quartet No. 13 are awarded posthumous Stalin Prizes.

TIMES: The great Russian ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky dies in London, aged 61. After retiring in 1917, he has spent much of his final three decades struggling with schizophrenia.