Anton Arensky

Schooled in St Petersburg under Rimsky-Korsakov and appointed to the Moscow Conservatory at twenty-one, Anton Arensky taught Rachmaninoff, Scriabin and Glière while writing music influenced by Tchaikovsky. Operas, symphonies, a piano concerto and a great quantity of songs came out of the Moscow years, and his chamber works include the Piano Trio in D minor, and the Second String Quartet, scored for the dark combination of violin, viola and two cellos, whose central movement is a set of variations on Tchaikovsky's song Legend — also arranged for string orchestra. From 1895 he directed the Imperial Chapel in St Petersburg. He died in 1906, at forty-four. He was born at Novgorod in 1861 and had songs and piano pieces to his name by the age of nine; the family moved to St Petersburg, where he entered the conservatory in 1879, and after graduating in 1882 he rose to professor in Moscow, where Gretchaninov was also among his pupils. He gave up the Chapel post in 1901 and, with a substantial pension behind him, spent his remaining years composing and appearing as pianist and conductor. He wrote some of the early Russian textbooks on harmony and musical form, among them a collection of a thousand exercises long used in teaching.