Petko Staynov

Educated through Braille at the Institute for the Blind in Sofia and then at the Dresden Conservatory, Petko Staynov came home a trained pianist and became one of the architects of a modern Bulgarian style. Born in Kazanlak in 1896, he set late-Romantic orchestral construction against the asymmetrical metres and communal drive of Bulgarian folk music, most famously in the suite Thracian Dances, whose Rachenitsa long ago outgrew the work it came from. The symphonic poems A Legend, Thrace and Balkan followed, and his choral writing — much of it on Bulgarian poetry — carries a strong charge of historical memory. He was more than a composer: he directed the National Opera, sat in the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, and worked persistently for the musical institutions of a small country and for the cultural participation of blind people. He died in 1977. He was one of the founders of the Contemporary Music society of Bulgarian composers in 1933 and its chairman until 1944; blinded completely at eleven, he entered the Institute for the Blind in Sofia, opened in 1905, where he studied flute with Dimitar Hadzhigeorgiev and Nikola Stefanov, violin with Schwertner and harmony with Kraus, studied piano with M. Bachvarova and from 1912 with Andrey Stoyanov and took an active part in the choir and orchestra of the Institute under Mihail Shekerdzhiev and Nikola Stefanov, mastering Braille notation. His training in Germany also took in Braunschweig, and in Dresden he worked with the pianist Ernst Münch and the composition teacher Alexander Wolf, graduating in 1923. He taught piano at the Institute for the Blind from 1927 to 1941, headed the National Opera from 1941 to 1944, and in 1948 founded the Institute of Music at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, which he led for the rest of his life and under which more than a hundred thousand folk songs and three thousand dances were collected. Two symphonies followed in 1945 and 1949.