Veselin Stoyanov

Shumen-born and Vienna-trained, Veselin Stoyanov learned the piano from his brother Andrey before entering the State Academy of Music in Sofia, and later studied piano with Franz Schmidt and composition with Joseph Marx. His catalogue covers operas, a ballet, three piano concertos, concertos for violin and cello, two symphonies, chamber music, songs and choral works; the comic Women's Kingdom, Cunning Peter and Salammbô show the theatrical instinct most plainly, while the orchestral Bai Ganyo turns the least comfortable figure in Bulgarian literature into character drawn in sound. Folk material reaches his music through rhythm, modal inflection and melodic contour rather than direct quotation. From 1937 he taught music theory at the academy in Sofia, becoming professor and later its rector, and raised the standard of theoretical training in the country; Stefan Remenkov and Ivan Marinov were among his pupils. He died in Sofia in 1969. The son of Anastas Stoyanov and the brother of Andrey Stoyanov, he was one of the founders of the Contemporary Music society of Bulgarian composers in 1933, graduated in piano from the State Academy of Music as his brother's pupil in 1926 and the same year entered the Vienna Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in the piano class of Viktor Ebenstein and composition with Franz Schmidt, studying the piano privately with Paul de Conne and orchestration with Wunderer, and after his return worked as a private teacher of piano and theory and played and conducted from 1931 to 1937. The chair in composition and musical forms came to him in 1945, and he was rector of the academy from 1956 to 1962. Beside the stage works stand the ballet The Papess Joanne, a Rhapsody for Orchestra, a Festive Overture, three string quartets and the symphonic poems Let There be Day and Song of Blood, written on verses by Hristo Smirnenski and Pencho Slaveykov.