Sergei Lyapunov

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Lyapunov 1910 recording for Welte-Mignon

Sergei Mikhailovich Lyapunov (Russian: Сергей Михайлович Ляпунов, Yaroslavl, November 30, 1859 - Paris, November 8, 1924) was a Russian composer.

After the death of his father, Mikhail Lyapunov, in Yaroslavl when he was about eight, Sergei, his mother, and his two brothers went to live in the greater town of Nizhny Novgorod. There the lads were taught at the grammar school, and the musically gifted Sergei joined the classes of the newly formed local branch of the Russian Musical Socicty. On the recommendation of Nikolai Rubinstein, the Director of the Moscow Conservatory of Music, he enrolled in that institution in 1878, his main teachers being Liszt's former pupil Karl Klindworth (piano), and Tchaikovsky's former pupil and successor at the Conservatory, Sergei Taneyev (composition).

Graduating in 1883, he first met Mily Balakirev, and later went to St Petersburg to be with that well-known composer in 1885, becoming the most important member of Balakirev's latter-day circle. Balakirev, who had himself been born and bred in Nizhny Novgorod, took the self-effacing young pianist-composer under his wing and oversaw his early compositions as closely as he had done with the members of his circle of the 1860s, nowadays known as The Five. Lyapunov was involved in the gathering of folksongs for the Imperial Geographical Society, followed Rimsky-Korsakov as assistant director of music at the Imperial Chapel, and later became a professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1911. After living through the Revolution, he emigrated to Paris in 1923 and directed a school of music for Russian emigres there, but died of a heart attack the following year.

Lyapunov was born between, on the one hand, The Five and Tchaikovsky (who was their contemporary but was not of their number), and on the other, the radical composers of the later period, including Scriabin, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. This interim period produced composers some of whom, such as Glazunov, followed a rather bland path, and others, such as Rachmaninoff, a style of very ripe late Romanticism. Lyapunov, though undoubtedly a late-Romantic composer, having chosen Balakirev as his mentor was not in either of these camps. Balakirev put him to work on a symphony, just as he had done with his pupils a couple of decades earlier, and as was the case with their first symphonies (especially Rimsky-Korsakov's) Lyapunov's work, attractive though it is, shows the considerable influence of the older man both in harmonic and melodic structures and in orchestration; it is also indebted to Borodin. Other shorter orchestral works of this early period are also to some extent derivative, but the Solemn Overture on Russian Themes demonstrates his ability to incorporate folksongs and their intonations into his music in an individual way.

Being almost as fine a pianist as Balakirev himself, it is in his works for solo piano, piano and orchestra and songs with piano accompaniment that Lyapunov's excellence as a composer is best demonstrated. His most famous work is his Duoze études d'exécution transcendante written in memory of Liszt. This is undoubtedly his magnum opus, containing as it does studies of a very high order covering a wide field of emotions and requiring supreme technical sinuosity.

In spring 1910 Lyapunov recorded 6 pieces from his own work for the reproducing piano Welte-Mignon (Op. 11, Nrs. 1, 5, 12; Op. 35).