Leonid Leonidowitsch Sabanejew

Leonid Sabanejew, Alexander Scriabin and Tatjana Schlözer (1912)

Leonid Leonidovich Sabaneyev ( Russian Леонид Леонидович Сабанеев ; born September 19 ^jul. / 1. October  1881 ^greg. In Moscow , † 3. May 1968 in Antibes ) was a Russian music critic, musicologist and composer who emigrated to the West 1926th

life and work

Leonid Sabanejew, son of the landowner and zoologist Leonid Pawlowitsch Sabanejew (1844–1898), showed musical talent at an early age and was a. a. Taught by Taneyev and Rimsky-Korsakov . Nevertheless, he studied mathematics and natural sciences at Moscow University . After graduating in 1906 (dissertation in mathematics), however, he devoted himself to music, composed and worked as a music critic in Moscow and St. Petersburg . As an advocate of progressive currents in Russian music, he contributed, for example, to a contribution on Alexander Scriabin's Prométhée to the 1912 almanac Der Blaue Reiter , which Kandinsky and Hartmann translated. He saw the future of music in ultra-chromaticism and advocated a division of the octave into 53 tones. After 1917 he held high positions in the USSR . a. as founder and president of the scientific committee of the State Institute for Musicology (GIMN), president of the music department at the Academy of Fine Arts and worked as a music editor for the newspapers Pravda and Izvestia . In 1919 he married the pianist Tamara Kuznetsova, a graduate of the St. Petersburg Conservatory . A daughter was born in the marriage.

For political reasons (and henceforth hushed up in his homeland), Sabanejew emigrated to the West in 1926 and settled in France after stops in Germany, Great Britain and the USA. In Paris he taught at the "Conservatoire russe de Paris Serge Rachmaninoff". There were u. a. Dag Wirén and Gösta Nystroem among his students. In 1933 he moved with his family to Nice , wrote music for a film company and wrote articles on music a. a. for the Russian émigré newspaper "Russkaja mysl" ("La Pensée Russe") published in Paris. Leonid Sabaneev is buried in the Russian Orthodox cemetery in Nice.

Sabaneev wrote a. a. Books about Alexander Scriabin, with whom he was on friendly terms ( memories of Scriabin , 1925) and contemporary Russian music ( History of Russian Music , 1924; German 1926).

Some of Leonid Sabaneev's compositions (such as piano sonatas and songs), which refer to the influence of Alexander Scriabin, were published by MP Belaieff during his time in Russia .

literature

• Friedrich Blume (Ed.): Music in the past and present , 1st edition, 1949–1986
• Rita McAllister, Iosif Genrikhovich Rayskin:  Sabaneyev, Leonid. In: Grove Music Online (English; subscription required).
• Larry Sitsky: Music of the repressed Russian avant-garde, 1900-1929 , Greenwood Press, 1994. ISBN 9780313267093

Web links

• Literature by and about Leonid Leonidowitsch Sabanejew in the catalog of the German National Library
• Sheet music and audio files by Leonid L. Sabanejew in the International Music Score Library Project