Pancho Vladigerov

Twice a winner of Berlin's Mendelssohn Prize, in 1918 and 1920, Pancho Vladigerov laid the foundations on which twentieth-century Bulgarian art music stands. Born in Zurich in 1899 and raised in Shumen, he studied in Sofia with Dobri Hristov and then at the Staatliche Akademische Hochschule für Musik in Berlin — composition with Friedrich Gernsheim and Georg Schumann, piano with Heinrich Barth. Through the 1920s he wrote for Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater, and the discipline of a working playhouse left its mark on his sense of pacing. The Bulgarian Rhapsody Vardar, the First Violin Concerto and the piano concertos set out the language he made his own: late-Romantic harmony and virtuoso keyboard writing in which Bulgarian melody and asymmetrical metre are structural rather than decorative. He came back to Sofia for good in 1932 and taught composition at the State Academy of Music for more than four decades, forming much of the next two generations of Bulgarian composers and pianists. He died in 1978. His Sofia house is now a museum, and the National Academy of Music carries his name. He was one of the founders of the Contemporary Music society of Bulgarian composers in 1933 and the founder of a number of genres in Bulgarian music and of the Bulgarian school of composition teaching, which brought up some of the most prominent contemporary Bulgarian composers, the pianist Alexis Weissenberg among his pupils; his parents lived in Shumen, but he was born with his twin brother, the violinist Lyuben Vladigerov, in Switzerland, and he played the piano and composed from earliest childhood. Leonid Kreutzer taught him piano for the diploma he took with distinction in Berlin in 1922, and Paul Juon composition in his first years there; the post at Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater lasted from 1920 to 1932. Among his pupils were Lazar Nikolov, Konstantin Iliev, Alexander Raychev, Vassil Kazandzhiev, Ivan Spassov, Krassimir Kyurkchiysky and Milcho Leviev, and his catalogue includes two symphonies, the opera Tsar Kaloyan and the ballet A Legend of the Lake. The Herder Award came to him in 1968, the family house in Shumen is a museum as well, and a competition in his name has been held there since 1986.