Parashkev Hadjiev

No Bulgarian composer gave more to the country's lyric stage than Parashkev Hadjiev, and more than twenty operas stand under his name. Born in Sofia in 1912 — his father, Todor Hadjiev, was a conductor and an early advocate of Bulgarian opera — he studied at the State Academy of Music and continued in Vienna and Berlin. Albena, The Masters, Maria Desislava, Ioannis Rex and the one-act triptych Paradoxes form the core of the operatic catalogue, and beside them sit operettas, ballets and a large body of incidental and film music. What holds the theatre works together is a practical vocal instinct: the lines are cut for dramatic characterisation, the ensembles move without clogging, and the orchestra supports the stage without swallowing the words. He taught harmony and composition at the Bulgarian State Conservatory over many years and held senior office in the Union of Bulgarian Composers. He died in 1992. He graduated from the State Academy of Music in piano with Andrey Stoyanov and composition with Pancho Vladigerov in 1936, in 1937 specialised in composition with Joseph Marx in Vienna and studied composition with Heinz Tiessen at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik from 1938 to 1940, and after his return taught harmony at the Academy; the son of Todor Hadjiev, he is among the names that formed the professional character of Bulgarian music and musical culture in the middle of the twentieth century, and he died on 28 April 1992. He was born on 14 April 1912 to the conductor and pianist Todor Hadjiev, who founded the Sofia Opera, and the opera singer Doychina Hadjieva; after Vienna and Berlin he also studied in Prague, and from 1947 he held a professorship in harmony and composition for more than four decades. His harmony and elementary theory textbooks taught generations of Bulgarian musicians, and Alexander Raichev, Konstantin Iliev, Ivan Marinov, Zdravko Manolov, Simeon Pironkov and Pencho Stoyanov were among his pupils. He chaired the Union of Bulgarian Composers from 1990, received the Dimitrov Prize in 1962 and the title of People's Artist in 1982, and left more than five thousand harmonisations of folk songs.