Lew Konstantinowitsch Knipper

Lev Konstantinovich Knipper , Russian Лев Константинович Книппер (* November 21 ^{. Jul} / 3. December  1898 ^greg. In Tbilisi ; † thirtieth July 1974 in Moscow ) was a Soviet composer .

Life

Lew Knipper came from a respected family. His aunt was the actress Olga Leonardowna Knipper , and his older sister Olga Chekhova was also a well-known actress. Knipper taught himself to play the piano as a child with the help of a music book. After five years of military service in the Far East, he studied in Moscow with Elena Gnessina , Reinhold Glière and Nikolai Schiljajew . For a while he also studied with Julius Weismann in Freiburg im Breisgau and Philipp Jarnach in Berlin . 1921/22 he was assistant director at the Moscow Art Theater , 1929/30 musical advisor at the Nemirovič-Dančenko Music Theater. He then went on musical ethnographic study trips through the North Caucasus (1930) and the Pamir (1931). In 1932 he became a musical instructor, first in the Far East Special Army , then in the Soviet Army . From 1933 he worked as a conductor and was later again in the army (1942 and 1944 in Iran, 1945 in Ukraine, from 1946 in the Buryat-Mongolian Autonomous Republic ). In 1948, he was from the formalism allegations Zhdanov and Chrennikows also affected, and was one of the few composers who sat with its own criticism of the military.

Works

Knipper composed among other things 5 ​​operas, ballets, film music and 20 symphonies (1927–1973). In the 1920s he was influenced by the western musical avant-garde. In the 1930s he swung largely to the goals of Socialist Realism and became one of the outstanding representatives of the so-called "Lied Symphony", which tried to integrate catchy "mass songs" ( popular music ) into the instrumental structure. The 4th symphony (1933/34) with the title Das Lied vom Kämter-Komsomolzen contains the song Wiesenland ( Poljuschko Polje ), which became very popular and was often considered an original folk song, while the symphony itself (like his other symphonies) could not hold in the repertoire.

Knipper's research in the field of folk music (including Turkmen , Kyrgyz and Tajik folklore) was also reflected in his music. From the 1960s onwards, he adopted more progressive means of expression in his work, albeit in a much more moderate way, including in the concert poem for cello and chamber orchestra (1971), which uses different percussion as a coloristic means.

Web links

• Works by and about Lew Konstantinowitsch Knipper in the catalog of the German National Library
• Catalog raisonné Lev Knipper. Internet Edition compiled by Onno van Rijen. September 23, 2007, archived from the original on November 15, 2013 . 
• Life and Work (English) ( Memento from October 5, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on May 16, 2018