Dobri Hristov

After studying in Prague, Dobri Hristov worked in Varna and Sofia as a conductor and teacher, and wrote choral music. His output includes secular choruses, school songs, arrangements, and settings of the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom and the All-Night Vigil. He published analyses of asymmetrical rhythm and metre in Bulgarian folk music. Born in Varna in 1875, he died in 1941. He finished the gymnasium and worked as a primary teacher in Varna, co-founded and conducted the Gusla music society there in 1899, went to Prague in 1900 and graduated from its conservatory in 1903 as a pupil of Dvořák, Suk, Novák and Nedbal, and after his return taught music in the primary and secondary schools of Varna in 1904–05 and Sofia from 1907 to 1918 and in 1922, taught at the State Music School from 1912 and was its director from 1918 to 1920. He had been a chorister at the Varna cathedral of St Mary from the age of fourteen and had written his first church pieces by sixteen, and after the move to Sofia he directed the choir of the St Sedmochislenitsi church from 1913 to 1928. Elected a corresponding member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, he took over the choir of the patriarchal cathedral of St Alexander Nevsky in 1935 and conducted it until his death; he also held a professorship at the Music Academy.